Fröhliche Weihnachten! Naragsak a Pascua kadatayu amin. These two words are often painted in canvass of mixed colors, splashed with creativity, they hang almost everywhere in most shops and department stores. Some even glow at night with neon brightness. This happens not just in Europe but around the world where Christ is named and the

practice celebrated with assiduous religiosity. Sometime ago, I felt the pang of loneliness struck me as I saw how some people celebrate Christmas. Others have their families with them, adding joy to a somewhat gloomy cold and dark night if one doesn’t have those loveliness in sight.

Others have to grapple with reality, they are in the home for the aged, alone, though with other people of their age, their minds racing back in time when they were young and filled with glee as they lit up their candles, draw up the cut tree and placed them in their yards or in their living rooms. Forty years, fifty years, it seems those were just a while ago, though now they have the will to make it, yet their bodies weakened by their years of toil has finally give up on a white mattress bed. Some young men equate this season for a drinking spree, happiness means simply being out with your friends and drinking beer all night, going from shop to shop to spruce up what could be an actual loneliness inside. Christmas has come to mean many things to different people according to their own image, of what Christmas is.

You may have celebrated the previous Christmases with joy and love, you may have felt the surge of emotion coming from deep within your belly to give to others as you are motivated to do during this season. If it is so, then Christmas means an occasional event to you. Others religiously tell us and preach to us that Christmas must be year round, but often those who even preach this fail to practice it. Some even argues about the righteousness of celebrating such momentous events as we call the birth of Christ, but sooner or later the reality sets before us, it seems no one can really practice to be giving all year round. But the message has been sounded 2000 years ago in Calvary, it was a simple message, a blameless Man came to give His blood to purchase for Himself, a people, pure, spotless and blameless. Can we be that generation? Can we give love apart from Christmas?

The Man on the tree

Yet today many have forgotten the Man who was hung on the tree, they in fact changed the message to Christ having come to give His life as a ransom to many to Christ providing feasts! If this is your Christmas, then you are sure to miss the substance of this tradition. Traditions have their own places. Not all traditions are to be celebrated except those

that reinforce to us the truth of our doctrines and those memories of victory that have clearly dictated the course of our history. Regardless of the ancient traditions of the Roman world, it is true that Christmas was used to replace an evil practice of giving offerings and sacrifices to a god whose hands and feet are lame and whose eyes are blind. It was rededicated to the birth of the Savior and the meaning of His coming which was prophesied, as the outpouring of God’s mercy, the breaking of the morning light, the Day Spring that will “give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, and to guide us to the path of peace” (Luke 1:79). Initially, the celebration of Christmas was a means to redeem this pagan holiday of celebrating the dies solis invicti nati (“day of the birth of the unconquered sun”), a popular holiday in the Roman Empire that celebrated the winter solstice as a symbol of the resurgence of the sun and the casting away of winter and the heralding of the rebirth of spring and summer. Viewed in the context of redeeming the culture of the pagan world, since Christ Jesus is the Light of the World, the Savior who rescued us from the bondage of sin and darkness, He is the Son who came to save us and conquered death.

Various celebrations, one lasting message

In various parts of the world, the meaning of Christmas has become synonymous with giving, teaching the truth that the grandest deed of man is not to die for himself alone or even to live for his own. It is indeed that next gift for the orphan, the destitute, the widow and the fatherless that has all made Christmas more memorable and far more meaningful to us than the feasting on lechon or the roasted calf next door. Giving gifts is part of man, it is sharing oneself whether this is in the form of service or material endowment to others. The idealist thinks that giving alone must be in the form of the material donations but more than these, it is the motive of love that animates us, because he who loves is far greater than he who doesn’t even if he gives all that he owns or gives his body to the poor and needy.

The greatest gift one can give this Christmas is not the diamond studded ring but oneself in the service of the poor and needy, having compassion and love poured out for those who need our service and care. For James once said, how can one confess that he loves his brother when he knows that he is destitute running in the cold and yet he care not to give him any garb or food for the body? To him who knows how to do good and deliberately forgets it, it is sin indeed regardless of his previous confession. I’d rather believe a man who does not speak and yet do, than someone who greets us in the market place and turns his back when the dreary night comes to assault us. Again it is not confession that justifies a man but his deeds just as Abraham was justified by his deeds, even Rahab the harlot or Gideon the coward. For what does the Word say my brethren, “What use is it, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but he has no works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and be filled,” and yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that? Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself.

But someone may well say, “You have faith and I have works; show me your faith without the works, and I will show you my faith by my works.” You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder.  But are you willing to recognize, you foolish fellow, that faith without works is useless? Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up Isaac his son on the altar? You see that faith was working with his works, and as a result of the works, faith was perfected; and the Scripture was fulfilled which says, “And Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” and he was called the friend of God. You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:14-24).

Justified by works through faith

To sum up, Jesus came into this world, having left His own abode, shed His tears and deeds of love to show us the way that this is the truth and the life that we are to seek. Man does not live for his own, but for Him who died and loved him from the very beginning. As James elaborated above, those who have true faith manifests this through works or deeds that makes it hard to doubt their salvation or justification. It is not the other way around, because the phoney will be found out sooner or later for his commitment lasts only for the season. The true sons and daughters of God will love and give themselves gladly even in season or out of season. They have found bliss and consolation out of the sufferings they endure, out of their blood, toil and sweat, they found love incredible as it is as they follow the command of their Master and Commander, “love thy neighbor as thyself” and this is the epitome of Christmas, to find love and to give it wholly, undivided in its entirety.

The fear of the Lord maybe the start of wisdom but it is the love of the Lord, by loving others that we demonstrate its highest ideals. We need not to go far away and look towards the slums of Manila to find Jesus there but in every big Cathedral small garage like churches, or in palatial homes and drab houses, Jesus could be there waiting for us to visit Him for to the extent that we do things to His brethren, we have done it to Him, even the “least of them” (see Matthew 25:40). In this we will be judged, whether we have lightly taken the meaning of this, Jesus is non-sectarian, whether you are Catholic, Protestant, Baptist, Charismatic or Pentecostal. It is too small thing for Him to be put in a box. And when He visits us as a Baptist, we fail Him whenever we close our doors behind us and do not accept Him as He came in the cloth of a Baptist. Or when He came to us as a Pentecostal, we also fail Him when we close our doors because He is not Protestant or Catholic. Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega, the summation, the pinnacle of love and He could not be placed in one cozy box we have imagined Him to be, for God does not reside in man-made structures but in the heart of individuals whom He is building fitted to be part of His Body.

During this yuletide season, find Jesus among your brethren; find one whom you have not forgiven and release that needed healing in Jesus name. Giving definitely can lower one’s high blood pressure and forgiveness heals those arthritis, heart diseases and crumpled bones. If you want to be whole, keep the healthy habit of forgiving the slightest blight you see in others, for you know you too are not made perfect. When children knock on our doors and slap us with their gentle monotones, let us not regard their voices whom we may pity, but let us regard their joy and give them sumptuous value by providing them with food, candies or gifts. To that lonely gentleman, widow, or orphans indeed, let us give them the fellowship they need, provide them with the comfort of a family that cares. And to those whose husband or wife maybe away, let us never forget to call or send creative cards and let them know that we care. Rebuke is better than love because a concealed love cannot be love at all. To bind up the broken hearted, to comfort His people, these are just small ways of what we can do to find Jesus in this hurting world. A good deed you may do, a good thought you may share could save others from torment and hell.