Perhaps at no time in Advent is the distinction between the generic “spirit of Christmas” and the particular Christian Nativity more clear than when it comes to the definition of the theme of the fourth week: love.
If we look at the accounts in both GMatthew and GLuke, we will notice this contrast. No one in either gospel is just sitting around enjoying someone else's company. People’s feelings are occasionally described, but mostly feelings of fear or amazement, not warm affection.
In fact, GMatthew and GLuke show us mostly the interactions of strangers. Besides what we can assume between Mary and Joseph, where indeed is love as affection—the default definition of love in the social celebration of the season?
Maybe the shepherds were good buddies and maybe the magi were friendly colleagues, but the Bible doesn’t say so, maybe they weren’t, and it doesn’t matter anyway. Love as affection is not the love of the Biblical stories. The Nativity wouldn’t make it into The Hallmark Channel’s “Countdown to Christmas.”
In the Biblical stories, everyone is busy. They are busy doing God’s work. Angels bring messages. Mary believes, and bears Jesus. Joseph cares for Mary and her baby. The shepherds watch their sheep, go see the promised Saviour of Israel, tell everyone they know about it, and go back to watching their sheep. The magi travel over “moor and mountain” to see Jesus and worship him, before disappearing from history. No one becomes fast friends with anyone else making promises to get together again in the new year.
When the adult Jesus was asked to pick out of the more than 600 Biblical commands the one that was the greatest, he took everyone back to Sabbath School, reciting what every Jewish kid knew: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” No surprise there.
The surprise was that Jesus then said, “And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:39–40). Jesus welds together love for God with love for those around us, the “near ones,” our neighbours. In fact, Jesus says that everything else in the law of God—the directions that God gives his people for optimal living—hangs on these two instructions.
Jesus later tells his inner circle that loving one’s neighbour well—and particularly the circle of fellow believers—will mark out the Christian community as truly Christ-ian. By loving each other as he himself loved them, they would look like him—and conspicuously. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:39).
John himself bangs away on this theme throughout his major letter in the New Testament, such as with this very direct injunction: “We love because he first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister” (I John 4:19–21).
If we worship Jesus and then focus only on the family (so to speak)—especially those family members for whom we have “love as affection,” then we haven’t loved as Advent demands. The love God expects is the love Jesus himself modeled for us: the love of a domestic servant (John 13’s account of footwashing), the love of a slave who willingly gives himself up to suffering and death (Philippians 2:7–8).
To be sure, we must not now perpetuate a dark tradition in Christian teaching: that Jesus’ example of self-giving suffering requires us to suffer whatever some abusive person or situation visits upon us. Jesus both commanded and endured not just mild humiliation and discomfort (“turning the other cheek”) but disgrace, torture, and execution—which he prophesied would come to many of his followers as well, as it surely did.
Still, however, Christmas reminds us that Jesus’ humility was in the service of the will of God. Jesus took a low place not because taking a low place is somehow meritorious in itself but because taking that place is the way to get done what God wants done. Jesus did not merely submit himself to enemies—he escapes murderous intentions more than once in his public ministry—but does only what will further the will of God.
Love is about shalom-making, not sin-enabling, even as the former sometimes requires the latter—from turning that other cheek to acquiescing in martyrdom.
We are in deep waters here, so for now let’s just say this: Don’t feel obliged to remain in an abusive relationship no matter what. Acknowledge that we do sometimes have to remain in painful relationships for a while—if only because pain is part of every significant relationship we will ever have. Love costs some pain, always.
But we should remain in the cause of blessing, not mere acquiescence in sin, let alone in the name of some spiritually veiled masochism or self-pity. Make shalom: make things better. If suffering will make things better, then suffer. And do so in the strength and loving company of the great Suffering Servant. But if it won’t, then don’t.
Jesus did not submit to suffering and death until the time was right—when his Father said so. Indeed, the Nativity story itself shows God warning Joseph to take the Holy Family to Egypt out of harm’s way. No good would come from little Jesus being slaughtered alongside the rest of Bethlehem’s innocents.
This, then, is what love looks like in the Biblical stories of the Nativity: people praising God and looking after each other, however much they happened to like, or even know, each other. The tradition of charity to everyone around you at Christmastime goes back a long way, and it is an authentic implication of the original Christmas story. Charity at Christmas is indeed a good start to the church year—a whole year of loving God and our neighbours.
Wouldn't it be great if love became a distinguishing mark of Christians? It used to be.
The fourth-century pagan emperor Julian is famous for chiding his own administration for lack of charity (not a Roman strength) in the face of Christian kindness to others: "For it is disgraceful that . . . the impious Galileans support not only their own poor but ours as well."
Less famous, but equalling telling, is the sharp remark made by the notable atheist Bertrand Russell early in the twentieth century. When pressed by journalists why he and a rich friend of the same political persuasion didn't give away their considerable wealth, he replied: "I'm afraid you've got it wrong. Clough Williams-Ellis and I are socialists. We don't pretend to be Christians."
(As an exercise in humility, think of what Christian denominations are known for nowadays: the stereotypes about Roman Catholics, or Eastern Orthodox, or Baptists, or Pentecostals, or Mennonites, or Anglicans. Each of those groups has given much to the poor in the past. But what is the public impression today? Who among Christianity's 50,000 denominations have a widespread reputation for charity? One: the Salvation Army. Let's do better.)
As Advent gives way this week to Christmas, therefore, let us live the life of the age to come, the life made possible by the first coming of Jesus Christ and the life to be fulfilled by the second. Live toward that hope. Live enjoying God and his world. Live making peace. And live to love: to bless, to increase shalom.
Yes, hope, joy, peace, and love come to us as gifts of God. But they also come as commands. So let’s get hope-ing, joy-ing, peace-ing, and love-ing, in the name of the One who came at Christmas to show us how and why—and to make it possible for us truly to do so.
