And His Name Shall be called Emmanuel
On the Most Beautiful Name of Jesus.
This essay originally appeared on Medium.com on 12/25/21.
Today is Christmas and as we celebrate Christs’ birth amid round two of the Covid-19 era, I would like to briefly share my thoughts on the meaning of Christmas.
God has many names. Wonderful. Prince of Peace. Alpha. Omega. The Great I Am. But my favorite name for God, bar none, is Emmanuel. It means God with us. God with us. God choose to become a man and was born of the Virgin in a lowly manger. C.S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity that God could not surrender, suffer, and die in His own nature. God could only die by becoming a man and He did so perfectly because He was God.[1] And when God came to us and lived among us through His son Jesus, He did not come and rule like a king. He deliberately spent time with the contagious, the social outcasts, and the legally condemned. He was with the people that are the hardest to be with: The leper, the tax collector, and the adulterous woman. But Jesus also taught us to love our enemies and pray for their salvation. He loved his friends and was the Great Inviter.
I think today the greatest form of justice Christians can impose on the Christian Witness is emulating Christ in this manner. We can be most like Jesus when we know and love others like He did. But it also works in reverse: The greatest form of injustice is not emulating Christ in this manner. The world suffers when Christians do not know and love others like Christ does. I do not mean this as a platitude because it is not easy to do. There are three types of people that we all can know and love better in 2022: Our friends and family, the socially ostracized, and our political “enemies.”
I love the way Timothy Keller puts God’s greatest commandment in The Meaning of Marriage, “To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.”[2]
Knowing and loving our friends and family better should be the easiest. Start there and spend some time making a friend a close friend. Call that cousin and reconnect. Knowing and loving the socially outcasts and our political enemies is harder. But if we as Christians truly intend to be the salt of the earth, we must do exactly that. Yes, it is inconvenient and requires spending time with and loving people who are not popular and not the most fun to be around. I mean the left-winger, the right-winger, the guy with a funny accent, the gal that cannot afford nice shoes, the immigrants with terrible teeth, the widowed and the divorced, the orphans who cannot make eye contact, and the imprisoned man disowned by his family. The list is endless.
We also live in a fallen world, with broken, sinful people who spend far too much time breaking each other. So, I think I will consider 2022 successful if I can know and love as many people as possible as deeply as possible. I know that love is action, not a feeling. And everyone has a story. Simply being with someone and listening to their story is an act of love. Not doing so, is literally deadly. So-called “deaths of despair” — alcoholism, drug overdose, and suicides — have risen significantly since Covid-19 began. From 2005 to 2019, an average of 70,000 Americans died annually from these causes. The numbers are still being calculated, but local data on opioid overdoses support the hypothesis that the pandemic and 2019 recession were associated with a 10 to 60 percent increase in deaths of despair above pre-pandemic levels.[3] The point: There is someone in your community that desperately needs to be known, loved, and listened to.
So, I implore my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ to be with more people than you did in 2021. This starts with just being a better friend. And when are you ready, show up and go be with the people that Jesus has put on your heart to befriend. If God Himself could become man, humbling himself to the point of death, so He could be with us — we can emulate His likeness by loving others without pretense to social hierarchy or political bias. Merry Christmas friends.
And let us not forget…
While we celebrate Christs’ birth today, remember that 2021 was the year that Kabul fell to the Taliban and the dreams of millions of Afghans who believed they could grow up in a free society were ruined. Parents are so desperate for money that they are selling their own children.
Winter in Afghanistan is particularly brutal. Afghans are in desperate need of our prayers. For years they have been the victims of the battle between the United States and the Taliban. Today let us pray that their suffering ends and they can just stay warm this winter.
***
[1] C.S. Lewis. Mere Christianity. HarperSanFrancisco. Pg. 58.
[2] Timothy Keller. The Meaning of Marriage. Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God. Dutton. November 1, 2011.
[3] Casey B. Mulligan. Deaths of Despair and the Incidence of Excess Mortality in 2020. National Bureau of Economic Research. December 2020.