What can we do to make good news actually good for us this Christmas?
What’s the best news you ever received?
For me, a couple of answers come quickly to mind.
• Late in my senior year of Bible college, I received an offer for an internship at Standard Publishing. An aspiring writer since I was a teenager, I never would have dreamed I could work at the place whose publications I’d been reading since middle school.
I had been undecided for months about what to do after I graduated. My experience there, as well as the graduate classes I took as part of the arrangement, opened a door that set the path for my whole life. Who knows what option I might have settled for if that dream opportunity hadn’t come to me!
• On a summer afternoon decades later, I received the doctor’s call confirming that my wife’s surgery had been completed successfully: no cancer, good prognosis. I had been waiting for hours with friends while the complicated procedure, actually two surgeries in one, was completed. I couldn’t help but weep with relief when he gave me the news.
I had been mulling over how to tell my kids and how to adjust our lives to cope with the difficult outcome I dreaded. Any report other than what the doctor told me would have been bad news, indeed.
News made good by the bad around it
That’s the thing about good news. It is always defined by the bad possibilities surrounding it.
But too often, soon after the initial thrill of receiving good news, we begin to take it for granted. I’m not sure I’ve ever stopped to thank God for that internship. It literally changed my life, but I’ve been too busy with my life to tell God I realize that.
Since my wife’s surgery, we’ve been consumed with solving other health problems. But not until this moment as I write this piece have I stopped to remember how profoundly more difficult our life would be if we’d received the results I feared.
News so good they could hardly believe it
I started thinking about this as I came upon a Scripture we always hear at Christmastime but typically take for granted. The angel told the shocked shepherds that he’d come to proclaim “good news of great joy. . . . unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”
These sheep tenders had dealt with bad news most of their lives. They held no status in society and were shunned because their work kept them from following the Jewish ceremonial requirements. Perhaps they were cynical about a system that labeled them as outcasts. Perhaps they only remembered but didn’t actually hope for the promise of a Messiah who would redeem his people. Harsh Roman rule and a self-absorbed religious hierarchy combined to confront them with a daily drumbeat of bad news. I doubt any of us reading this blog has a life as hard and hopeless as theirs.
But the angel’s announcement, accompanied by an uncountable choir of heavenly praise, was too magnificent to discount or deny. It sent the shepherds to Bethlehem, eager to see how this news had played out. And when they discovered that the truth was exactly as they had been told, “the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen.”
News forgotten because time has passed
But the Bible doesn’t tell us when that praise petered out. Did they continue to glorify God for the rest of their lives, WITH the rest of their lives? Were they different people because of what they’d seen and heard, and did they regularly explain to suspicious wives and skeptical friends the reason for the change?
Or did they, in a week or a year, settle back into their survival routine as the heavy duties of each new day overshadowed their memory of that child in a manger?
If their thrill at the good news was replaced by the weight of their daily lives, we can understand. We have sung Christmas carols, attended Christmas concerts, observed Christmas traditions, heard Christmas sermons, pulled out and put up Christmas decorations, planned Christmas meals, dealt with Christmas gifts, and experienced Christmas stress our whole lives. We’re glad Charles Schulz insisted that the Luke 2 text be read in the Charlie Brown Christmas special, but we already know what it’s going to say.
News to keep the bad from overwhelming
As the news media scramble to grab our attention, they make us increasingly aware of a world awash in bad news. This month we’re hearing about wars and rumors of war, supply chain snafus, rising prices, desperate immigrants, uncontrolled disease, fearful natural disasters, aggressive adversaries across the globe, and evil intrigue close to home.
It’s all bad news. But it need not overwhelm us. The reality that God himself came to earth can energize even our most mundane or difficult days.
This is our challenge at Christmastime, to step away from the demands of our lives and to tremble afresh at good news, the best news, the news that matters most. To somehow find a way to embrace the fact of God with us as if we’d never heard the news before. And then, like the shepherds, to share our wonder with someone else who also needs to be changed by what God has done.
Photos by Jon Tyson and Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash
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