Christmas brings the Gospel of grace and change

Bishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Prize winner said: “I preached my only sermonthat God loves us freely as an act of Grace.” Ideally, Christianity is the Gospel of Grace, God's unmerited loving kindness to sinful mankind. John wrote: “From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another. For the law was given thorough Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:16-17). This is the Christmas theme.
Grace is not just a positive attitude. It is a verb. It is an attitude incarnating into positive action. It speaks of the notion of God becoming one of us, completely taking our physical nature, sharing in the common aches and pains of humanity. It is God's unfathomable love in action. God is not something far off, or impossible to understand. William Barclay, a great Bible scholar said: “In Jesus we do not see abstract God of the theologians and the philosophers, but we see, perfectly and completely, in full revelation, the Father, the attitude of God to me, how God feels to me.” God became human so that we could better comprehend a transcendent reality. We worship a God, who became the human image of God himself.
At Christmas the eternal divine creator has entered into time and space. In the form of a human person God intimately revealed himself in his creation. God-incarnate Christ came to a lost world to redeem it from the bondage of sin. Sin pervades the whole human race: it is the self-will of man putting “I and Me” in the centre everywhere. The message of Christmas is the triumph of life over death, love over hatred, order over chaos and good over evil. But humanity still passes through a valley of death. This is the world into which the divine came to meet the mundane.
There is no greater good news to be found anywhere in the world than that in the Gospel of Jesus Christ as he preached exactly what he lived: the life of selfless divine love, holiness and justice. But why do evil and suffering still prevail? The answer to this question is that we teach and preach the doctrines of and about Christ, but do not strive enough to follow him. We need to accept the hard reality that our right doctrines do not help us unless they are vouched for by right attitude and action. We cling to our power, positions, status quoour comfort zones. We need to strive for a world which is more just and less violent and where mankind will live in love and peace and be ready to pay the price for it. We need to be able to separate good and bad. This requires us to internalise the moral values that enhance life.
The truth is that God does not do anything to better our situation if we neglect what he has given us the ability and will to do. We must create the environment where God's good can operate. We are his co-workers! Oswald Chambers, another Christian scholar, said: “The battle is won or lost in the secret places of the will before God, never first in the external world.”
In the helpless baby in the manger in Bethlehem Mary, Joseph, the shepherds and the magi saw a warrior, who was to wage the greatest war against evil. Christ teaches by his life that peace is something which needs to be paid for. It is not granted. True peace is always just peace. No justice, no peace. Unjust people need to be brought to repent for their evil actions, made to restitute and restore what they rob other people of. Otherwise, divine grace continues to a long process of license to please ourselves and continue sinning. When human dignity is trodden down by us or before us we make a mockery of God's grace. When brutish animalism perpetrates and life in society is forced to pass through the valley of deep darkness, and when the people in authority and entrusted with the sacred trust of protecting the innocent and weak hide their faces from their responsibility it is the heart of the Creator of all mankind that cries out first of all.
Today when we meditate the theme of God's giving greatest value to man by Himself coming to man as a human person we must learn from reading both what God says in the Scriptures and what the media has to inform us: we need to read both the good news and the bad ones. We cannot and must not ignore this world, and keep ourselves preoccupied with the vision for the other world.
None of our external decorations for celebration of Christmas add to our challenge of change unless we commit to the gentle Jesus and change our ways and decorate our hearts with love, gentleness and peace. The greatest miracle that he wants to effect is the transformation of the human heart. With this he wishes to transform his creation. We find ourselves living in a world marked by selfishness, greed and lust, a landslide loss of values.
Jesus did not care for cheap popularity. His gospel was not of cheap grace. It cost his life. He was serious and decisive and acted to effect change. Christ has two births, one is on December 25, when we traditionally celebrate his coming to this world; the other is timeless, and is whenever he is born into our hearts. Both need to be viewed together. One causes us to celebrate, the other causes us to take a challenge. We believe in a God who is full of grace, and his grace is dynamic and active. He showed us his grace by giving. We truly celebrate Christ if we are ready to give.

The writer is Principal of College of Christian Theology Bangladesh.