Somehow I missed #5

Why did  Christ come? #5

My wife was picking out songs for the Christmas Eve service at our church. She thought of using I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day but decide it is too heavy. It is heavy. It deals with weighty material. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the poem from a depth of grief that, thankfully, few of us ever experience. You can read the whole story here. Here is an excerpt:  On Christmas day, 1863, Longfellow—a 57-year-old widowed father of six children, the oldest of which had been nearly paralyzed as his country fought a war against itself—wrote a poem seeking to capture the dynamic and dissonance in his own heart and the world he observes around him. He heard the Christmas bells that December day and the singing of “peace on earth” (Luke 2:14), but he observed the world of injustice and violence that seemed to mock the truthfulness of this optimistic outlook. The theme of listening recurred throughout the poem, eventually leading to a settledness of confident hope even in the midst of bleak despair. In emotional darkness Longfellow listening to the bells. Instead of loudly and sweetly proclaiming peace, the grip of grief and the terror of war, distorted the ringing into a grotesque dissonance. Instead of the sweet ring of "peace on earth goodwill to men," the sound he heard came, ". . . from each black, accursed mouth, [as] the cannon thundered in the South." He spoke of a continent rent, and households made forlorn. I can feel the father's pain as he says, "[H]ate is strong, [it] mocks the song of peace on earth, good-will to men!” This time of year we are apt to suffer from the Hallmark distortion. Everything is softly lit. Just enough snow is falling. Little drummer boys play with perfect precision and even donkeys and sheep all behave themselves. It make a nice picture, but it's not the world into which Jesus was born, or the world in which we live. You know how cruel Herod seems in Matthew 2? He was all that and more. And this business of moving people around so Rome could collect tax? There are reasons why tax-collectors were hated. I figure "the decree was met with a resigned sigh. In case you haven't noticed, our world hasn't gotten better. Refugee camps are full, children are hungry, wars and terrorism rage on. The face of despair is not hard to find. Not only did Christ come to a world of darkness and pain, He entered fully into that condition. Isaiah tell us that He was a man of sorrows, acquainted wiith grief, and the writer of  Hebrews says, Jesus was made perfect through suffering, partook (became) human flesh, and that He was "tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin." (Isaiah 53:3, Hebrews2:10, 14, & 4:15) As surely as Christ came to a world of First-Century darkness, He continues to plead in our Twenty-first-Century world, where light is still hard to come by. He entered our world of sin, so He take us to His sinless home. That's worth ringing the bells for, and . . . It's STTA (Something To Think About).