The Hidden Power of God at Christmas

Christmas is about the humility of God coming into human flesh, entering the world born in a stable. This is lowly and rustic and familiar, but lest we think God reducing Himself to our span is a lowering of standards, a making of Himself comfortable with the way things simply are with us and our world, we need to be reminded that this is a paradox, a mystery of mysteries. The Incarnation is humility, but it is a great and glorious humility because here is also the presence full-strength of the Power and Majesty and Holiness who framed the worlds in glory and perfection, who rules on high and commands the innumerable angelic host, who demands justice and righteousness from His creatures and will judge them accordingly, who is infinite and incomparable in every way. Indeed, the Incarnation does not gainsay God's almighty power but rather underscores it and shows that it is of one substance with His love and compassion, which He extends even and especially to this race that has fallen from Him and brought the whole Creation into ruin. This is a God beyond all limits. This is a God who is big enough to become small for the sake of love.

The fullness of this Deity came to dwell bodily in the Child Jesus. This means that though this Child was small, though He was born in the meanest of circumstances, poor, of a people oppressed, He was able to faithfully carry out the plan for which His Father had placed His hand to the plow, and He did it not in spite of this smallness but precisely through it. Of Him, St. Paul hymns:

6 Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, 7 but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death— even death on a cross! 9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, 10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:6-11)

And, of course, Jesus through His death and resurrection has raised fallen humanity so that those who believe in Him may sit with Him in the glory mentioned above both now in the Church and forever in the New Jerusalem. Great is the promise of Christmas. Christ and we His brothers and sisters are the firstfruits of the New Creation, with which all of heaven and nature are destined to be crowned.

The Office of Readings on Christmas Day bears beautiful witness to the glory the Kingdom that has arrived in the humble birth of Christ will bring to the whole Creation. But while I was feasting on these wonderful readings this Christmas, I was also mourning the deaths of the worshipers in Nigeria who had been killed earlier that morning in church bombings as they were glorying in the same Christmas mystery. It is confusing, senseless, and tragic that on the morning when they were celebrating peace on earth that at least two dozen of Christ's redeemed should die in such wanton acts of hatred and violence. The promise of Christmas is not yet fully realized. It is perhaps in recognition of such realities that many parts of the Church commemorate the Feast of St. Stephen the Martyr the day after Christmas and the Feast of the Martyrdom of the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem on December 28. It is one thing that during the Christmas season violence should come upon the Church unexpectedly, but in light of all that the Incarnation means for humanity and the world, why do we intentionally turn our gaze back to the predations the enemy has made against God, His Christ, and His redeemed children as we do in these commemorations?

Well, until God's Kingdom arrives in all its fullness at Christ's Second Coming, His reign will often be manifested among us in a hidden manner, as it was in the First Coming. God came to us in the fullness of His glory, hidden in the weakness of the Child born in Bethlehem. We remember the martyrs in the midst of the Christmas celebration because in their deaths they bear witness to this Child, who grew up to become the servant of all, pouring out His blood and giving His life for a world determined to reject Him. Resurrection, glory, and the New Creation came through the cross. He descended into the earth that he might rise to the heights of heaven and fill the whole universe, and He made himself the bondsman of His enemies, receiving death at their hands, that he might be the captain of their salvation. This is how Christ has triumphed, won brothers and sisters for himself from among His enemies, and how He is transforming the world that yet lies in wickedness.

In like manner, as the martyrs echo the sufferings of the Lord who bought them, laying hold of Him who unto the death laid hold of them, they plant their blood as the seed of the Church. People see the power that is in their testimony to the Lord Jesus and come to recognize something they cannot account for in the unbreakable hope these have in Him. This is Christ at work, hiding His glory in the suffering of the saints, overcoming His enemies and theirs, converting foes of the Gospel to children of God, and all of it through the death He shares with His martyrs.

In a less dramatic though still paradoxical manner, this is also the way it is with all Christians in the lesser martyrdoms we experience in our lives. Life in a fallen world is filled with small vexations that build up and gradually steal away our strength. Life doesn't quite go the way we plan, and we don't seem as victorious as we think we ought to be. Our jobs are unsatisfying, or we fail in our relationships. We spin our wheels. We seem to accomplish little of lasting worth. Whether they be these kinds of trials or the catastrophies that leave our lives in utter ruin, Jesus Christ is with us, hidden in our hearts with power and grace for us and for our world. What we shall be in Him we do not yet see, but the fullness of God hidden in the helpless Child and the unveiling of the glory residing there that came through His humble obedience to the Father bear the ultimate witness to what is ours even now and what shall be fully realized in us and in our world from our communion with Him. Keep the faith, humble Christian; Christ hidden in us is the power that overcomes the world.

Filling Up Christ's Afflictions

What does it mean to truly love one’s enemies? A look into the life and story of 20^th-century evangelical Romanian pastor Richard Wurmbrand is a good place to look for insight into the answer to this question. Wurmbrand, the founder of the international ministry Voice of The Martyrs, suffered profoundly for his faith and work as a Christian minister under the repressive communist regime of his Romanian homeland. Beginning in 1948, he was imprisoned for 14 years for his activities as a leader and evangelist in the Underground Church of Romania. In the hands of his captors, Wurmbrand suffered three solid years of solitary confinement and other unimaginable tortures. Released by the communist authorities in 1964, Wurmbrand left Romania and settled in the United States, traveling the world and speaking out on behalf of Christians persecuted in the Communist bloc of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He tells his story in the profound volume, Tortured for Christ.

Though it has no “literary value,” as Wurmbrand readily admits, Tortured for Christ has been an important book in bringing the plight of persecuted Christian communities to public light in the West, expressing the profound love for Christ, his people, and the world that motivates Christians to suffer for their faith, and mustering support for those suffering persecution.

I think Wurmbrand’s story is particularly pertinent considering that at the current time over 200 million Christians are suffering some form of discrimination or persecution worldwide and that during the century we have just come out of 50 million Christians died for their faith in Jesus Christ, a figure that accounts for 65% of the martyrs in the 2000 years of the Christian Church’s existence! At such a time in history, Christians need to have a strong sense of the message of love they have for those who hate them and the God they serve. For those of us who live in historically Christian cultures and societies, we must look to the experience and message of those who have suffered profoundly for their faith in order to express the depths of God’s love for humanity to our societies, where opposition to Christian claims is only growing.

I bring this anecdote from Tortured for Christ to show the power of Christ’s witness through his suffering Body to reach the enemies of God and humanity with his love. In the experience of Wurmbrand and fellow members of the Underground Church imprisoned for their work for the Gospel, suffering at the hands of the Communists became their most powerful means of reaching them with God’s love. Wurmbrand recounts the martyrdom of Grecu, beaten slowly to death over the course of two weeks under the leadership of an official named Reck, to illustrate the redemptive power of Christian suffering:

During the beatings, Reck said something to Grecu that the Communists often said to Christians, “You know, I am God. I have power of life and death over you. The one who is in heaven cannot decide to keep you in life. Everything depends on me. If I wish, you live. If I wish, you are killed. I am God!” So he mocked the Christian.

Brother Grecu, in his horrible situation, gave Reck a very interesting answer, which I heard afterward from Reck himself. He said, “You don’t know what a deep thing you’ve said. Every caterpillar is in reality a butterfly, if it develops rightly. You have not been created to be a torturer, a man who kills. You have been created to become like God, with the life of the Godhead in your heart. Many who have become persecutors like you, have come to realize—like the apostle Paul—that it is shameful for a man to commit atrocities, that they can do much better things. So they have become partakers of the divine nature. Jesus said to the Jews of His time, ’Ye are gods.’ Believe me, Mr. Reck, your real calling is to be Godlike—to have the character of God, not a torturer.”

At that moment Reck did not pay much attention to the words of his victim, as Saul of Tarsus did not pay attention to the beautiful witness of Stephen being killed in his presence. But those words worked in his heart. And Reck later understood that this was his real calling. (42)

To love one’s enemies is to return blessing for their cursing, to take their reviling and torture, and instead of following in their steps by deforming the image of God in humanity through hatred, to unite those sufferings to Christ and by them appeal to the tormentors to be reconciled to God. As Grecu’s story indicates, God uses such appeals to break the most hardened of hearts and renew the image of God in the most depraved of sinners.

Persecutions and sufferings will come, but Christ is redeeming the world through the sufferings of the persecuted. The sufferings of the saints are a massive signboard pointing back to the cross, where Christ’s suffering and death turned to blessing and life for the world. Pray for the persecuted Church. Their love, expressed in so costly a fashion, is our surest testimony that the sacrifice of Christ is healing the world. Indeed, their suffering love is itself a conduit by which that healing Christ has accomplished flows to others, including persecutors. Let us love our persecuted brothers and sisters and support them in their powerful witness to the Christ who is filling up his afflictions for the sake of the Church and the world through them.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

There's really just one great decision in life, and it must be made over and over again. That decision is the decision whether to take the road that is easiest, the road that seems the safest and most comfortable, or to take the right road. It's not that the safe and easy road is always the wrong one. No; sometimes it's easiest on us and safer too to do the right thing, but often it seems that doing the right thing is uncomfortable and dangerous. Sometimes it's even fatal. It's the best of both worlds when what is safe and easy and what is right coincide, but far too often, they are radically opposed.

For those brave souls like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Corrie Ten Boom, and Raoul Wallenberg who stood against the evils of the Nazi regime, the safe and easy decision would have been to say, like Cain, "Am I my brother's keeper?" and sit idly and apathetically by while millions went to their deaths. No; they chose to heed Jesus' words and say, "Yes, of course; I am my brother's keeper!" and fight the dark madness of the Holocaust.

Theirs was a difficult decision, for to speak out against injustice or to help, to rescue or shelter those the Nazis had targeted for extinction was to share in their awful fate. The courageous pastor-theologian Bonhoeffer died at the end of a hangman's noose for helping Jews escape, participating in a failed coup against Hitler, and boldly defending the Gospel of Christ while few in Germany would. The Dutch resister, Corrie Ten Boom, lost her father and endured the hells of Ravensbruck for loving her Jewish neighbors as herself by hiding them in her home. For imitating Jesus by leaving his luxurious life in Sweden to go to Nazi-occupied Hungary and help rescue 100,000 Hungarian Jews from certain death, the diplomat Wallenberg found himself in a war zone as the Red Army approached. A victim of Soviet paranoia about Western spies, he purportedly died in a Soviet prison two years after the war.

This was indeed The Cost of Discipleship for these three heroes of the Second World War. What about those heroes of the faith from Scripture who chose what was right instead of that which was comfortable, easy, and safe? Consider Abraham, Moses, Joshua and Caleb, the prophets, Mary and Joseph, the 12 Apostles, and Paul. All of these great players in salvation history sacrificed their ease, safety, and comfort, and some even sacrificed their lives, to do what God called them to do. Didn't Jesus suffer all this and more to do the will of the Father?