Austerity Christmas

Christmas might still only come ‘but once a year’ but it seems to last longer and longer as shops and other businesses start putting up decorations and Christmas trees around October, some even as early as September! I hear some people put up their Christmas trees so early nowadays that they have to dust them a couple of times before Christmas actually arrives!

The mood seems to be – if my limited perception of the retail market is anything to go by – that people are spending less this year. In the middle of a recession, that’s not surprising. It’s also probably no bad thing. The last thing we need as a society is to plunge ourselves into more unmanageable debt.

I recently heard the phrase ‘austerity gospel’ as a kind of biblical counterpart to the false ‘prosperity gospel’ that goes around. (The prosperity gospel is ‘believe in Jesus and God will bless you with money, possessions, good fortune of every kind’). That got me thinking about the differences between the glitzy Christmas the world pushes more and more each year and the true Christmas – the austerity Christmas of Bethlehem 2000 years ago.

As Christians, we celebrate the birth of Jesus at Christmas of course with joy and merriment. But that first Christmas was no fairy lights and roast turkey dinner affair. It was as austere as you can get. Strip away the images off the Christmas cards, the idyllic scene of a strangely sanitised warm and welcoming stable, and you are left with raw life.

An unmarried mother forced to make a hazardous journey because of an unpopular poll tax. The birth in a dirty room where animals were housed, with the smell of manure in the air. None of Mary’s female family and friends around to help her. The only people to come and celebrate the birth were shepherds – social outcasts in their society. The wise men (astrologers most likely) come from far distant lands much later to see the child and would have been viewed with deep suspicion by religious Jews. Then the family are forced to become asylum seekers in Egypt, fleeing from the ruthless troops of King Herod. As John wrote in his gospel, ‘He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.’ (John 1:10-11). Those verses are about as austere as anything in the Bible.

The true ‘magic’ of Christmas is that it’s precisely in that way, to that reception, with a mission to save the world that had no time for him, that God’s Son came to earth. And out of those events, Jesus Christ fulfilled his role as God's anointed King and Saviour, all the way to Calvary – to the final rejection and through the mysteries of God's will – to his destiny of victory and triumph, for our good and his Father's glory.

As Paul wrote: ‘For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.’ (2 Corinthians 8:9)

Such is the grace and love of God: he made his own Son nothing that we might have everything.