We live in an age where everything glitters: gigantic, gaudy and loud. Even the Christian faith, once marked by simplicity, is often swept up in the brash spectacle of celebrity pastors, mega churches, grand lights and grand stages. The result is that December easily becomes a month of distraction, while the Christmas story is drowned out by noise. However, in biblical imagination, the birth of Christ is anything but grand and noisy. The Advent drama is a miracle of divine presence woven into ordinary life. Nothing flashy, nothing grandiose; only the quietness of God’s presence engaging humanity.
Christmas is the culmination of Advent, a season of solemn anticipation, reflection and waiting in watchful hope for Christ’s birth into our troubled world as “Emmanuel, God with us.” Today, that solemn waiting is frequently traded for “Detty December,” a frenzied secular festival of end of year revelry whose very name jars against Advent’s contemplative calm. Feasts, carols and celebration were meant to mark the fulfilment of God’s promise, not to cover a deep collective emptiness.
At its heart, Christmas tells of God stepping into a wounded world with a willingness to share our human condition and draw it into healing; not with condemnation or indifference. The story is utterly simple: a birth in makeshift shelter, the first announcement to labourers on the margins; the shadow of violence from a frightened tyrant. From the beginning, this quiet arrival hints that the good news of Jesus will carry weighty social and political implications.
For a nation wrestling with poverty, insecurity and fragile institutions, the story of Christmas is not abstract theology. It is a quiet but insistent challenge. If God has identified so closely with the vulnerable, then any serious response to Christmas must take seriously the cry for peace and justice in our streets and villages. Thus, Christmas confronts us with unsettling questions: What if hope is more than positive thinking? What if reconciliation is more than a political slogan? What if justice is not just our project but also God’s? What if love is not mere emotion but a call to take costly risks against injustice?
Christmas invites a re examination of faith that begins with a person, not with dogma. At the centre is a child born on the margins of empire, who will later describe God’s reign as good news to the poor, freedom for captives, recovery of sight for the blind and liberation for the oppressed. In this light, Christ, and Christmas, put a blunt question to us: where are the Christians in a hurting world?
The claim of “Emmanuel, God with us” is not a one off divine visit. It proclaims that in this particular vulnerable limited life, the very image of the invisible God has come to dwell among us. But have we lost sight of the One who came? Have we lost touch with Emmanuel, in whom the fullness of God dwells? Are we now numbered among those who, when he came, did not receive him?
The contemporary image of the church, and the lifestyle of many modern Christians, often fail to resemble the Christ of the Gospels whom we confess and profess to follow. Understandably, sceptical observers are tempted to reduce the Christmas story to the record of the church’s compromises or the lack of inward and outward piety. This weakness of the Christian does not empty the story of its power; it simply makes the call to return to Emmanuel more urgent.
The birth of Christ is God’s reminder that he has not walked away from a world that repeatedly disappoints itself and God. Christian hope is severely tested in our society where trust is thin and many feel left behind. The point is not to romanticise hardship but to show that God’s reconciling work often begins in unlikely places.
To speak of hope at Christmas is to face our national fractures of inequality, insecurity, retreats into ethnic or religious silos, and still insist these are not the final word. Christmas comes through people who quietly refuse to give up on one another: Joseph who stayed with Mary, wise men who kept searching after palace doors closed, Anna who prayed and waited until hope took the form of a child in her arms.
Christ’s coming is, at heart, an act of reconciliation; not as a hollow pious cover for injustice. Genuine reconciliation demands truth telling, the naming of harm, and a willingness to change attitudes and structures that keep reopening the same wounds. So, at the end of a long year, amid responsibilities, shortages, insecurity and unrest, the Christmas story quietly insists that God has not grown tired of his world.
In Christ, God has come close – to reconcile, to heal, to unsettle what needs unsettling and to strengthen what is good. If that is true, then our debates about policy and progress, though important, are not ultimate. They unfold against a wider horizon of grace in which our failures are not the last word and our small acts of courage, honesty and solidarity matter far more than we imagine.
This Christmas, may that horizon come into sharper focus. May those who believe find fresh courage to live what they profess. May those who doubt discover that faith can dwell alongside hard questions and intellectual integrity. And may all of us, whatever our convictions, be drawn a little closer to the justice, reconciliation and hope that the child of Bethlehem embodies – for our nation and for our restless hearts.
