Christmas 2023

I was traveling in another town yesterday, on Christmas Eve, and so I visited an unfamiliar church’s Christmas Eve service. Sitting in a different context, as an outsider and thus more of an observer than usual, I started to think about the focus on declaring the Gospel as Good News. The fact that the Christian faith is centered on receiving a declarative statement of fact about an external, historical event, seems so encouraging to me. This fact, received and believed, liberates, but the liberation is not achieved or actualized by the hearer: it simply results from receiving the idea. Of course, this is where there is friction for me – I am torn between locating the liberation solely in the work of Christ as external fact, and centering the need for the hearer to respond and believe. There’s a nuance in there which is difficult for me and which causes me a great deal of pain, which I have to acknowledge. Setting that aside, however, I think this emphasis on the Gospel as news is significant. If the medium is the message, then the medium – by which I mean the fact that it is a message – is itself a metatextual signifier that the work of the Gospel is in what has already been done for us. That truth, received, becomes an idea about the factual reality of the world, which buoys the soul with hope. Merry Christmas.