Last night at church, we sang a new Christmas song about the King of Kings being born and now known to the world (well, this seems obvious since it was, after all, a song about Baby Jesus!–lols). But the song was also about rejoicing for the first arrival of the one who will defeat our enemy and how we wait for his second arrival. And oddly enough, as we sung the song, I felt sad! Not sad that we have to wait for Christ’s second-coming, but that we missed his first. I felt the sadness that is the absence of something we love, the void that remains after its departure. I felt like we missed the party, we came too late to see the action. We arrived after the main event, and now we wait for the next act.
Of course, we are not left alone1–the Spirit is with us here, comforting us, teaching us, convicting us of sin, revealing truth, giving us words to pray to God–but we are physically separated from our Savior. He was here on this earth, and now he’s not. Our lives happened in the same physical passage of time and space, but we came too late to see him with our own eyes.
And this is when I really feel his absence, remembering how I no longer want to cut myself because he was pierced for my own punishment2. The weight of guilt is so heavy, and no one else has the power to stop me from carrying out the mutilations I am wholeheartedly convinced I deserve. Jesus is the most physically influential person in my life, and yet how is it that we are separated by two thousand years? And unless his final arrival happens very soon, how is it that I won’t meet him in my current physical body?
The absence of an influential person is a strange thing, especially at Christmastime. You want to be joyful during the season, but you also have a void that you cannot touch. And whenever you cannot touch a thing, you find out just how influential it was. I’m reminded of how I never met either of my grandfathers. It’s strange that half of me is from them but I never dwelled much on my loss. I always had my parents and grandmothers, and the happiness I felt with those who I knew shielded me from the sadness for those who I missed.
But after my father died during the holidays three years ago, I felt like I could never be happy again at Christmas. I felt his loss in the cold weather, decorated trees, Christmas lights, and presents. Hopefully I won’t always despise those things, but for now I do. The only helpful thing has been Christmas songs–obviously not the ones about how merry it is to be with your family around a fire or going on a sleigh ride, but the songs that rejoice in the birth of our Savior. No one makes me happy like Christ, so singing about his birth is a joyful moment in this season.
Perhaps this is what caught me off-guard at church yesterday. I was looking to this Christmas song as an emotional refuge, a break in what is usually a hard time for me. Though I initially felt ok during the song, I realized how far I am from where Christ was on this earth. We’re separated by centuries and oceans and languages, and the distance between us seems so, so far. Irreconciably far. And then the yearning to be close to him became overwhelming and harrowing. How could he love me so much to be marred beyond recognizability as I should’ve been–and yet be so far away?
Never have these famous words sounded so kind to me:
“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written,
‘For your sake we are being killed all the day long;
we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.’
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”3
1 John 16:7, Romans 8:26
2 Isaiah 52:14, Isaiah 53:5
3 Romans 8:35-39