Compared to the Incarnation, birthdays are unremarkable: the good ship Earth goes around the sun one more time and finds you’re still on board. But when God became a man, the Earth found its architect and shipbuilder on the passenger list. That’s worth commemorating in a way that commands more than a song and a cake with candles on it.

Like I said in my last post, the real meaning of Christmas is far weightier than we usually realize, and the chaos of the holiday season only obscures what it means to have Emmanuel—God with us. I can’t help but think that celebrating the arrival of the God-man in terms of party hats and kazoos tends to make it more trivial than transcendent.

Christmas Is About Who Jesus Is

This came up the other night at our dinner table. I asked my kids why they thought Jesus’ birth was attended by choirs of angels and shepherds and (much later) wise men bearing gifts. They said it was because Jesus did so many great things, like dying for our sins and performing miracles. But I pointed out to them that he was just a baby—when the shepherds came and the angels sang, Jesus hadn’t done anything yet; he was just a baby. Forgive me for bragging on my kids, but they figured it out: it wasn’t because of anything he had done—it was because of who he was: God, having arrived as a man in every sense of the word.

Christmas Is About What God Did

But at the same time, the second Person of the Trinity had done something wondrous in the very act of becoming a man. Let’s review a couple of things that happened when God came in the flesh:

• He signed up to be born. He would be an infant, dependent on human parents for his sustenance—who were themselves dependent on him for their existence.
• He signed up to die. The glorious author of life would suffer and experience death.
• He signed up to take on the sin of the world. The Holy One would be saddled with “the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:6).

Jesus—fully God alongside the Father and the Holy Spirit—knew exactly what he was getting into when he undertook the Incarnation. He did what he did for God’s glory and for our benefit. And knowing that he would pay dearly to do it, he did it just the same.

Christmas Is More Than A Birthday

Because of his identity and the costly grace he poured out, I just can’t think of Christmas as Jesus’ birthday except as a technicality. The gravity of God becoming a man and doing so at such a profound cost—and that I should profit from this without any merit of my own—overwhelms the fact that the word “birthday” happens to fit, in some small way, the event we’re commemorating.

It fixes my thoughts on something greater than a birthday, something greater than one more anniversary for a being who is without a beginning and without an end.

It fixes my thoughts on the most wonderful mystery ever announced to man: God became a man, and kept on being God.