hard service

Life can be hard. That may be why so many people feel ambivalent about Christmas. There seems to be a disconnect between the life we know and the saccharine-sweet images and scenes that we see in Christmas cards and television ads. 

Few of us enjoy a Norman Rockwell or Currier and Ives Christmas. In our lives, people have cancer and debt and are unemployed. Relationships are sometimes bad. Many of us struggle to find peace on earth and goodwill towards others. Our politicians and political parties, as well as their advocates on social media, are still mean-spirited towards each other. Heartbreaking news continues to come from Syria and Afghanistan and Iraq. Bizarre acts of violence keep popping up all across America. People are still sleeping in cars and on sewer grates in every major city. Instead of the beautiful fluffy snowfalls in all the snow-globe wonderlands, our lives instead are full, metaphorically speaking, of miserable blizzards where snow driven sideways on a 30-mile-per-hour wind sucks the breath from our mouths and makes getting around impossible. 

I’m reminded today that the secular Christmas we see celebrated on Facebook and our TV screens is not the Christmas of the Bible. All those people want us to think that if we’re nice to each other in December, and buy a new car, the world will somehow become better. But a Biblical Christmas acknowledges what our lives are really like.

Take these famous first few verses of Isaiah 40:

“Comfort, comfort my people,

says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

and proclaim to her

that her hard service has been completed,

that her sin has been paid for,

that she has received from the Lord’s hand

double for all her sins.”

Hard service – is there a better way to describe what it’s like trying to live for Jesus in this world? Life is hard because the world opposes me, and then I make it harder with my own sin. There’s joy in life, to be sure, but there’s a lot of pain too. And even when there’s joy and peace in my life, there’s pain for people I love. 

But the prophesy of Christmas is a word of comfort. That’s coming to an end, Isaiah says. You’ve lived with the burdens and consequences of sin in your life and in the world, but God is going to take care of all that. You’re going to be fine.

Christmas isn’t a season to celebrate human goodness. It’s the time when we mark the divine antidote to human evil. Despite the ugliness of real life, God brings comfort. It’s coming.

Is there a message we need more right now than this? It can’t happen soon enough. Watch and wait.