What If Christmas Means a Little Bit More?

And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow,
stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so?
It came without ribbons. It came without tags.
It came without packages, boxes or bags.

And he puzzled and puzzled ’till his puzzler was sore.
Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before.
What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store?
What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more?

~Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas

Men and women have always had their mythologies—tantalizing tales about gods who came to earth and walked among us. Reasonable, sophisticated people tried to hush up those stories, embarrassed, perhaps, that anyone could be so naive. Simpler minds, however, kept spinning yarns about Someone who would come to save us and set things right. These tales were their treasures.

As incredible as it may seem these days, the manger is where those myths came true. The God of all the universe came to earth—to a cold and solitary cave into which shepherds drove their flocks at night—“immensity cloistered in Mary’s dear womb,” John Donne would say—and was born as a helpless infant with unfocused eyes and uncontrollable limbs, needing to be cuddled and cared for. Almighty God made terribly weak and vulnerable.

Since that day we’ve not had to make up any more myths; the hopes and fears of all the years were met in him that night.

How is it that immortal God became flesh and blood? My task is not to explain it, but to take it into my heart. Here is the lesson for me: that God loves us enough to share our brokenness, weariness, worry, and sorrow. He clothed himself in mortal flesh “that so, / he might be weak enough to suffer woe” (John Donne). He was and has always been, as one of Israel’s prophets put it, “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”

The world is steeped in sadness these days. Despite the season that promises great joy, there is little that comforts and satisfies us. Poet Mathew Arnold was right: “The world, which seems /To lie before us like a land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new, / Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; / And we are here as on a darkling plain” (“Dover Beach”). Packages, ribbons, and bows can never dispel that darkness nor can they heal our broken hearts.

We know it’s true, of course; it’s a simple and undeniable fact. We’ve all tasted the sadness that descends upon us when the holidays are over and everything is done. Life is dukkha, Buddhists say, painfully disjointed and unhappy.

But what if the Grinch was right? What if Christmas doesn’t come from a store? What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more? What if it means that God loves you—you, the one reading these lines?

Indeed, God does love you. He loved you before you were born; He will love you after you have died. He has “appeared . . . from afar saying, ‘I have loved you with everlasting love’” (Jeremiah 31:3).

Human love has reasons to love—wealth, beauty, intelligence, or other attributes that make love’s object loveable and desirable. Divine love is not based on merit or deservedness. God loves you, not because you are yourself but because He is Himself: “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). Philosopher Peter Kreeft argues that God’s love cannot answer the question, “Why do I love thee?” He can only say, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways . . .”

One measure of that love is the crib where God, for our sake, became a wee bairn. The final, irrefutable proof that He cares.

Why, then, are there no crèches these days? Why do we try so hard to avoid the mystery of God’s amazing grace when it is so simple and so blindingly clear? Why are we so afraid of those three little words: “I love you”?

God loves you. Why not tell Him now, “I love you, too.”

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