Description
WHY CHRIST CAME
A few weeks ago, one of my Facebook friends posted an image on her Facebook page.
She asked us all to share this image, so it would appear all over Facebook because apparently non-Christians were claiming that the picture offends them - so she wanted Christians to take a stand against this attack on a religious festival.
And as I looked at that picture of the nativity, I thought i have tried to follow Jesus for the past 20 years of my life and that picture really really really offends me!
Because that picture does not take a stand against the secularisation of Christmas - it joins with it! Because it takes the brutal reality of the incarnation and sprinkles glitter all over the top of it!
It is an offence to us that our Lord and King should be born into desperate poverty, his bed a borrowed pallet
It is an offence to us that his birth came not with cries of joy but of Rachel weeping as her own son is slain.
It is an offence to us that the first years of our lords life was that of a refugee. hiding in fear in a foreign land where he did not belong.
It is an offence to our white, western middle class sensibilities that the Lord of life never passed a degree or owned his own home, that he was dependant on handouts for his income and that he was sometimes so hungry that he would eat raw grain.
It is totally absurd to us that the mouths which he had created would spit at him, curse him and sentence him to death, the hands he made would nail him to a hard cruel cross and crucify him.
It is a thing most ridiculous that the God who held stars, curled his tiny fist around a peasants finger and cried to be comforted.
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