The Little Child Who Brings a Rod
What I learned about Christ during a Christmas Eve service
I have a terrible time concentrating when I’m singing. I know I should pay attention to the words and really mean them, but my mind often wanders. And this Christmas Eve, during our church’s service, my mind was inexplicably wandering far away from the manger and Christmas to a terrible event that happened over twenty years ago. The father of someone I knew sexually abused his adopted children1. He was caught, sentenced, and imprisoned, thankfully. But the trauma was already done to those precious children. And my friend had to live with that image of his father. And I had to come to terms with that kind of evil in the world. Here I was, more than twenty years later, my stomach in knots, thinking about this tragic story in the middle of a Christmas Eve service because of some random twitch of the subconscious. And then, all I could think about was the question, “What does this Incarnation mean for those children?”
A few months ago, a reader of On Getting Out of Bed reached out to me to ask about the problem of evil. I immediately felt over my head. I have my own ways of answering this question for myself, but I’m no public expert on the topic. I know enough about suffering to take the question seriously and not offer a flippant response. But I know enough about God to know that philosophical answers will all feel soulless and visceral answers will lack the theological precision to satisfy the rational mind. And in the end it will come down to a faith in Christ. Do you believe in the Person of Christ, that He is who He says He is, that He will do what He says He will do, that He loves as He says He loves? And when you are in the midst of suffering or trauma or facing the reality of evil—even the reality of evil twenty years ago—such faith can take another virtue, courage, to muster. But that is not how I answered the question that Christmas Eve.
Culturally, we don’t associate Christmas with suffering, although personally we might due to some personal loss or trauma. Christmas is the reprieve of winter, the brightspot that saves us from the long dark, cold, march of wintertide. Which is why I have always appreciated that A Charlie Brown Christmas and It’s a Wonderful Life both address depression, anxiety, dread, and despair at Christmas. Because these are real human emotions that face all of us at one time or another, even (sometimes especially!) during the holidays (as I arguing in On Getting Out of Bed). This year I was particularly struck by the scene of George Bailey returning home utterly distraught after losing the $8,000. The moment when he grabs his son and cries into his neck. The moment he smashes his model bridge. When he yells at his daughter to stop playing piano.
Of course these are horrible moments, but they are also raw and real. Sometimes fathers come home scared, really scared. Their composure fails them and they breakdown, to their shame. It may be caused by a mental health condition or life circumstances, but breakdowns happen. And when they do, apologies are in order, as George does. But I’ll forever be grateful for that depiction of a real father breaking down and apologizing on screen, normalizing the burden of responsibility that many adults feel. Evil and suffering are real experiences in It’s a Wonderful Life, even at Christmas, but the answer given in the film, divine intervention and community, doesn’t always happen in such dramatic ways, if at all. Sometimes evil and suffering exist and nothing seems to happen. And while normalizing suffering can help sufferers not feel so alone, it doesn’t help us answer our question: what does the Incarnation mean to those children and the evil they suffered?
This question was especially echoing in my mind as I sung Christmas hymns because I had just learned that someone who I had looked up to as a responsible, respectable, and godly person turned out to be deeply depraved. It’s an old story, but a terrible one. And that was bothering me, too. As I sang, I was overwhelmed with this sense that there’s so much evil in this world, so much suffering caused by terrible people, in the Church and outside it. So much hurt. So much trauma. So much pain. So much wickedness. And here we are singing about a little baby born two thousand years ago. Yes, He saved me from my sins, but what about that evil? Does His birth have anything to say about those little children’s sufferings? Or the victims of the person I looked up to? Or the victims anywhere else?
This particular service was a Lessons and Carols service, so after one of the hymns, someone read from Isaiah chapter 11:
[1] There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.
[2] And the Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him,
the Spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and might,
the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.
[3] And his delight shall be in the fear of the LORD.
He shall not judge by what his eyes see,
or decide disputes by what his ears hear,
[4] but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,
and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;
and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.
[5] Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist,
and faithfulness the belt of his loins. (ESV)
Then I remembered that this little Babe will judge the nations (Matt 25:31-33). The Incarnation of Christ was the Incarnation of the Judge of all the world, Justice Incarnate. Yes, the Incarnation was a beautiful and wondrous event and the hope of all humankind, but it was also terrifying to evil and evildoers. It meant the ultimate defeat of evil and suffering and trauma and pain. Once that Child was born, in broke a Person into this world who would never allow evil to have last word, who would never allow abuse to go unpunished. He is the Prince of Peace because He brings justice. And that is a terrifying thing, or it should be.
In Yeats’ “Second Coming” he asks “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” The implication is that whatever (pagan) thing is coming after Christ (in his pagan cosmology) is going to be terrifying, unlike meek and mild Christ. But sitting there, listing to Isaiah read that night, it struck me that Yeats got it all wrong. Certainly Christ wasn’t a “beast” “slouching,” but Yeats didn’t see what C.S. Lewis could see (as depicted in Aslan), that Christ is not safe, but He is good. Or as T.S. Eliot would write in the Four Quartets, which you should read:
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
And isn’t that what we are looking for? Isn’t that what I was looking for that evening in answer to my question? Some way for past and future to be conquered and reconciled.
So I returned to singing carols with renewed vigor, confident that the Incarnation had something powerful to say to those children and every victim everywhere on Earth. Justice has come, and He is Christ the Lord. And this Justice loves us and died for us, also in an act of justice. His mercy covers our sins, even our anxious adult breakdowns, and His justice establishes equity. We live in the now and not-yet. Not all wounds are healed, yet. Not all victims have received their justiced. But the Christ-child has come, and with Him comes justice, and that means justice will come. And so we practice the virtue of hope. Based on our faith in Christ and His promises, we hope in His work of justice, knowing that for those who are in union with Christ, every tear will be dried, every trauma healed, and every wrong will be brought to right. Just as those in the Old Testament waited faithfully for Christ, we wait faithfully and in hope for justice. For He is coming. And He is bringing His Rod of justice.
Unrelated!
Last week, I published a piece at TGC I had been working on for weeks on the loneliness epidemic and the way Character.AI and other chatbot apps are being used to address it in a disordered way:
I have no scientific way of proving this hypothesis, but if we look at each of the pieces of this puzzle, I think it’s reasonable to conclude a nontrivial percentage of Character.AI users use the platform to escape negative feelings of loneliness, meaninglessness, and isolation. We know we’re in a loneliness epidemic. We know it particularly affects the young. We know the young are particularly addicted to smartphones. We know Character.AI is wildly popular with Gen Z. We know Character.AI offers people a substitute for relationships through role-playing. And we know that at least in one case, that relationship was deadly.
Also, my publisher, InterVarsity Press is running a Free book club for On Getting Out of Bed. It starts in the beginning of January, and I’ll be dropping in at least once to join the fun. Please sign up!
Before someone jumps to the conclusion that this is another example of homeschool abuse or church abuse, neither of those labels apply here. This particular person was not Christian or homeschooled. Evil knows no boundaries.
I too had the same observation this season that the Four Quartets is about Incarnation, spurred in part by interactions I have had with you and others who have helped me toward new insights. I love this piece. Thank you so much.