For something like a billion people on this planet, at the heart of Christmas is the birth of Jesus. But I suggest that if we are looking at this only historically, we are missing the point of the season.
The author of the second chapter of the New Testament letter to the Hebrews says that if you don’t know who you are, don’t know what your life is meant to mean, trying looking at Jesus. Says this author, Jesus is the embodiment of the origin and destiny of all humanity.
The birth of Jesus is about a potential in you and me. This potential—who we really are, and what we are becoming—is captured in perhaps the greatest of Christmas carols, O Come, All Ye Faithful.
Listening to the annual Christmas Eve service of lessons and carols live from King’s College,
God of God,
Light of Light.
Lo! He abhors not the virgin’s womb.
Very God,
Begotten not created.
If you check the lyrics used by many today, you’ll find this verse either missing or altered. But these are the words that were sung in the traditional pageant from King’s this Christmas Eve.
The hymn was originally penned in Latin by Englishman John Wade, with music written for it early in the 1700s by another Englishman, John Reading. Not until 1841 was it translated into English, by Frederick Oakley. The words are drawn from the Nicene Creed, which dates to 381 CE, although this was a revision of an earlier version from 325 CE.
The power of these lyrics is that they affirm that God and humanity are not separate but one. It’s this oneness that Jesus represents and seeks to reveal.
To hear the words “God of God, Light of Light, Very God, begotten not created,” and realize that you and I, like Jesus, participate in this reality, is a transcendent and transforming experience. We are the self-revelation of the Creator, emerging out of eternal Being—the very manifestation of God.
If these words don’t take root in us in a life-changing way—if they remain frozen in a single icy Christmas of the past—we belittle them. If they affect us only nostalgically, and don’t seep into our blood and bone as a life-giving experience, we are robbing them of their power.
Michael Brown shows us how the Presence of God that Jesus epitomized can become the most real experience of our lives. His book opens up a window to the heavens, so that angels may sing in our night skies here in our twenty-first century.
Enter into The Presence Process, and the divine Presence to which Christmas points will transfigure your humdrum existence until your life becomes a manifestation of the glory of God. In a war-torn, violent world, you will experience the “peace on earth” promised in the stories of that first Christmas. You will discover what “joy to the world” is really all about.
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