Christmas Complexity

I am one who tends to look at the past with nostalgia and think things were better at some point in the past. Now, the era I think was better depends a lot on what I’ve been reading lately, what it is about the present that I’m currently bemoaning, and other influences.

For example, if I’m seeing the damaging effect of the internet on the mental health of young people today, I might think the 1950s or the 1970s were better: all the modern conveniences and some connectedness via technology, but more civil and in smaller quantities.

If I’m feeling the crush of our fast-paced life, I might think the late 1800s were better, when steam engines made distances fairly quick to travel, but day to day life was still paced at the steady clomp of the horse’s hooves.

If I’ve been reading about the insular, reflective life of medieval monasteries, with their routines and community and meaningful work of benevolence and scripture copying, I might think the Middle Ages look pretty good.

If I’ve been reading about the Roman era or looking at photos of Pompeii, I might think the Roman era, with its beautiful sunlit villas, open gardens, and safe, solid road network, was a grand time to live.

The trouble is, it’s easy to look at the past and see only what we want to see, our imaginations constructing places and realities and lifestyles that never existed. The truth is, every age and era has its difficulties. In each era I’ve mentioned here, and every era before, between, and since, there have been wars, civil strife, corruption, crime, danger, hardship, poverty, and struggle. In each age and era there have been people who looked back with nostalgia or forward with optimism. In the present where we live, we see the complexities and challenges most clearly, and can’t gloss over the difficulties because they’re part of the reality affecting our days and moments.

If we tend to look backward wistfully, we can see difficulties, but know the resolutions that will come to remove them. If we tend to look forward to some looked-for paradise from this or that solution, we can have optimism because we imagine that this time, it will work and we’ll all find that thing we’re looking for to make things right.

The world Jesus was born into experienced the same longing. The ruling power controlling Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa was Rome: strong, effective, keeping order and peace between peoples, bringing law and education and innovation to every town in its territory. It was also brutal in its efforts at keeping order, decadent and cruel in its tastes and entertainments, and insatiable in its appetite, creating a constant demand for slaves, goods, animals, and control.

Some in Jesus’s subculture of the time, the little province of Judea, on the edge of the Roman world, looked back with longing to the glory days of Israel, or to the time when God spoke regularly through his prophets. Others looked forward with anticipation to a violent overthrow of Roman control.

Jesus stepped into this world, into a specific time, the Creator into his creation, to redeem all of it. He didn’t come to start a cozy tradition that we can look back on, or to fuel optimism for a better day brought by improved efforts or ideas. He understood better than any the broken state of the world across the ages and continents, and came to bring real hope.

This Christmas, I hope you will make time to reflect. I hope as you look backward, it will be to read and consider the story of Jesus’s birth, his incarnation, his life, death, and resurrection. I hope as you look forward, it will be in eager expectation for the full and final redemption when Christ returns, death is dead, and all things are made new. In the meantime, in our complex, broken, divided world, I pray you will carry the light of hope within you, fueled by the Holy Spirit,  and share it with the people around so they too might live in hope.