Christmas: Merry or Messy?
By Ps David Wong
From time to time, some horrific tragedy takes place around Christmas to remind us that not all is well in our world.
In 1988, on 21 Dec, a Pan American flight leaving London for New York carrying passengers going home for Christmas, was bombed in midair, killing all 243 passengers on board, together with 16 crew members and 11 people on the ground when the plane crashed into a little Scottish town Lockerbie.
In 2004, 26 Dec, an undersea earthquake, measuring 9.3 on the Richter scale, hit near Aceh in Indonesia, and sent a massive tsunami, with waves up to 30 metres, across the Indian Ocean, devastating cities in Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, all the way to Africa, killing 230,000 people in 14 countries.
In 2012, 14 Dec, a lone gunman entered a Primary School in Connecticut, USA, and shot dead in cold blood, 20 children aged 5 and 6, together with 6 of the teaching staff.
The Lockerbie Bombing, the Indian Ocean Tsunami and the Sandy Hook School Massacre—all remind us that while we sing of “peace on earth and goodwill towards all men”—we are far from finding peace and goodwill. Our world, despite all the festivity of the season, is a broken one.
We think of the families and friends waiting at the New York airport to receive their loved ones coming home for Christmas—who never came home.
We think of those who lost their entire homes and families in the tsunami when they had just celebrated Christmas the day before.
We think of the parents who buried their young children and who will not have them around to open their Christmas presents or sing with them their Christmas carols or laugh with them around the Christmas dinner.
No wonder one of the carols describe Christmas as follows:
And in despair I bow my head
There is no peace on earth I said
For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of “peace on earth, goodwill to men”
Indeed, what is Christmas but a brief escape from the real world—the real world of terrorist bombings, natural disasters, and senseless killing? Christmas is merry only when we see it on the surface.
But peel back the layers of our merry Christmas and look beneath. We will see a messy Christmas, the first and original Christmas—beginning with the scandal of the pregnancy of an unwed mother, through the massacre of young children by a ruthless king, and ending with the flight of refugees to a foreign land.
Christmas then was far from peaceful and joyful. The moment Jesus was born, his life was threatened. From the very start, Christmas provoked evil. Jesus escaped death as his parents took him and fled to another country. But the infants in Bethlehem perished at the hands of an evil king.
As we celebrate Christmas again, the world is still messy, if not messier. Yet the coming of Jesus into the world took place precisely because the messy world needs someone to deal with its mess.
And what could be messier than what happened at the cross where Jesus, beaten and broken, hanged to redeem us from the curse by becoming a curse for us (Galatians 3.13)? As one born to die to pay for all the mess we have made, Christ is indeed the good news of Christmas!
You may access the blog at davidwong.sg for more reflections.
