During our pastorate at Lansing, Illinois in the Chicago vicinity we regularly read The Chicago Daily News, one of the attractions of which was the interesting cartoons by the well-known Vaughn Shoemaker. Year after year in the Christmas issue one of Shoemaker’s early cartoons would be repeated regularly. It depicted a plain little cattle shed, stark and lonely in the night but illumined by the rays of a bright star directly overhead.
Whether that familiar Christmas cartoon still appears every year, I have no way of knowing, but I do recall the story about it which, to the best of my recollection, went as follows. As a newcomer on the job, Shoemaker submitted this cartoon for the Christmas issue to his superior who promptly rejected it as something that would not do. But apparently Shoemaker was not easily dissuaded and it was decided to submit it to the editor for his decision. The chief looked at it carefully and finally replied: “Shoemaker is right. That’s what Christmas is all about.”
Now regardless of whether the cartoonist was accurate in having the miraculous star appearing while Jesus was still in the cattle shed, we nevertheless do not question his recognition of and his insistence upon Who’s Who at Christmas as being of the essence also for a daily newspaper serving a metropolitan area. Obviously, Shoemaker knew the “good news of great joy . . . to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior Who is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:10, 11).
“Christ is all” – At Christmas, as well as at any other time, Christ is to be recognized and magnified as the summum bonum or the highest good. As we read in Colossians 3:1, “Christ is all, and in all.” Inspired by the Holy Spirit, Paul certainly had his Who’s Who at Christmas clearly in focus.
It is told of the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci that when he asked a friend to criticize his masterpiece the “Last Supper,” the friend exclaimed, “The most striking thing in the picture is the cup!” whereupon the artist promptly took his brush and wiped out the beautiful cup. “Nothing in my painting,” said he, “shall attract more attention than the face of my Master!”
It is always disconcerting and frustrating when at a Christmas service a minister fails to preach Christ. For that special occasion the preacher can do no better than stick with Luke 2 for his text. That is what the people want and that is what they are entitled to hear. It matters little if there may be some repetition from year to year. Even as Handel’s great oratorio, “The Messiah,” is heard year after year with unflagging appreciation and ardor when rendered by a trained chorus and orchestra, so believers may be thrilled each year anew by a carefully prepared sermon with the timeless Christ at the beginning, the middle, and the end of it.
To be sure, there are also others associated with the birth of Christ, but they are and must remain subsidiary to the great central event and to Him who is Christ the Lord. Joseph and Mary, Caesar Augustus, angels, the shepherds, Herod, Simeon, Anna, the Wise men, and others—all had their place in this sublime event that is at the very hub of human history. However, all these are no more than supplementary, belonging only to the frame of the picture and never to be allowed to divert attention from Him who is at the center.
To preach on any of these subsidiary participants without giving Christ the first place is to come with a sermon that has gone awry.
Even as all the planets in our solar system revolve about the sun, so we must always have Christ at the center of our Christmas preaching as well as of all our observance and celebration of the Christmas season. To allow that impostor, Santa Claus, ever to usurp His place in our lives and those of our children is treachery, as bad as selling our Lord for a mess of pottage or thirty pieces of silver. That we and our children may see clearly Who’s Who at Christmas is a matter of the first magnitude.
Christ the Lord – That there might be no mistake about the identity of the child at Bethlehem about the Who‘s Who—the angel spoke with unmistakable clarity. “Today,” the angel said, “in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11).
He is Christ the Lord!
So often things are not what they seem. How true this was also in the little town of Bethlehem when Mary of “low estate” gave birth to her child, not in a house—to say nothing of a palace—but in a lowly cattle barn or shed where she laid him in a manger “because there was no room for them in the inn.”
How poor He had become in order that we through His poverty might become rich. Talk about being at the bottom of the totem pole, this was it. His deep and abysmal humiliation began there in that lowly shelter for the cattle. He became incarnate there to become “despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their face he was despised; and we esteemed him not” (Isaiah 53:3).
Today’s gaudy and ornamented reproductions of our Lord‘s birthplace with all the annual flimflam give the lie to the poverty and the stench amid which He first saw the light of day as if He were just another nobody. It was ridiculous even to think that the name of this lowly little one born in such circumstances would ever appear in any Who’s Who compiled by those who knew.
How blind all but a few blessed exceptions were to the true greatness and awesome majesty of that lowly Child on a bed of straw in a manger. And who of us would dare to claim that we would have recognized Him for what He really was.
They had gone to Bethlehem and elsewhere to be enrolled by order of a Roman emperor Caesar Augustus. They also knew and feared the ruthless and brutal exercise of power by a bloodthirsty tyrant at Jerusalem, Herod the Great. But when the King of kings and the Lord of lords “came unto his own . . . they that were his own received him not” (John 1:11). Their Who’s Who, compiled by those who did not believe, was as wrongheaded as could be.
It is told of Julian the Apostate, Roman emperor A.D. 331–363, that he once taunted a Christian named Agathon by saying: “Tell me, Agathon, what has become of the Carpenter of Nazareth? Is he still around? Has he any work at all these days, your Carpenter? Are there still some little jobs coming his way at least?” To which the Christian Agathon is said to have replied: “Yes, Julian, the Carpenter of Nazareth is very busy these days . . . . He is nailing together a coffin for your empire.” Shortly thereafter Julian was killed in battle and, if Theodoret is correct, he cried out while dying, “Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!” It takes a long time for some people to get their Who’s Who in order and to bow before Christ as the only Lord. The rise and fall of the Roman empire is history; and, as the poet once said:
“O, where are kings and empires now,
Of old that went and came?
But Lord, Thy church is praying yet,
A thousand years the same.”
Lord of all – Charles Spurgeon once said it so well: “Christ is the great central fact of the world’s history. All lines of history converge upon Him. All the great purposes of God culminate in Him.”
For that reason it is as it should be that we say of each year since His birth A.D. or Anno Domini meaning “In the year of our Lord.” The birth of Christ may well be called “the hinge of history.” He came not only to be our Savior but also to be our Lord. We cannot have Him as the one without the other. He is the Lord of His people because He rules in their hearts and lives. He is also the Lord over all men, even over the demons, and throughout the whole universe as well. He is the one to whom all authority has been given in heaven and on earth.
Every day and at times every hour on the hour we may be listening with bated breath to the bad news of the world while we listen so little to the good news of the Word. Is it any wonder that our hearts grow faint with fear and that with the troubled multitude we too exclaim, “Who will show us any good?” (Psalm 4:4)
What will godless Russia be doing next? What will China do? And Ayatollah Khomeini? And what about the growing number of wanton killers and perpetrators of crime that stalk our streets and strike terror into our hearts? And what can we expect from those who are in position to press the button and set off a nuclear holocaust?
The answer is that they and all the powers of hell can do absolutely nothing apart from the control of Him who was born at Bethlehem to become the King of kings and Lord of lords. The secret of our only assurance and peace even at such a time as this is that we have clearly in mind Who’s Who no matter what comes to pass.
Lord of our lives – To all who pretend to be Christians while their lives and all their Christmas hustle and bustle are secular with little or no room for Him, our Lord has this to say: “Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord’, and do not do what I say?” (Luke 6:46).
Once again, Christ is not willing to be our Savior unless we at the same time honor and serve Him as our Lord. That we believe that Christ is the sovereign Lord and that His authority is absolute is all good and well; but in this too, faith without works is dead. The demons also believe this and they tremble. Unless this doctrine is dynamic for us—as all our theology must be—and unless we mean business about making this manifest in our lives, it would be better for us too if we had never been born.
We love to speak of a Reformed world–and–life view –and this is as it should be. But how far we fall short in our implementation of this view that we profess to cherish. Let it never be said that this view has been tried and that it has failed but rather let us admit that it is too often not being tried.
At one of the entrances to Rockefeller Center in New York City one finds this inscription: “Man’s ultimate destiny depends not on whether he can learn new lessons or make new discoveries and conquests, but on his acceptance of the lesson taught him close upon two thousand years ago.”
Our Lord requires nothing less than that we serve and obey Him in every area of our lives –in home, church, school, business, labor, politics, science, art, and whatever else there may be. As Abraham Kuyper once said: Christ claims every inch as belonging to Him. Not only on the Lord’s day but also throughout t he workaday week we are to let it be known that Christ is not only our Savior but also the Lord of our lives.
Who’s Who at Christmas?
Christ the Lord!
And He is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
“O come, let us adore Him,
Christ the Lord.”