Don't Give Up On Love

...even when it's messy...

“Love came down at Christmas,” begins the poem that Christina Rossetti published in 1885. It’s the most important line of the poem; every word that follows is dependent on the insight imparted in that first phrase: that the birth of Jesus is God’s gift of love to his creatures.

From the very beginning we were told that if we looked at our own humanity we would see something of the image of God. The Christmas gift of God’s love reinforces that message exponentially by assuring us that in Jesus the human person can be fully inhabited by love, since God is love. We struggle to see what it could mean that love has been given to us as a gift to live with at the very center of our lives, our societies, and our personhood.

Partly we struggle because we have gotten carried away with the idea of love as an experience of harmonious convergence when everything goes right in a nearly miraculous way. This romantic idea of love is not to be dismissed, but it is highly limited, since much of the time life is not going all that well for many of us. But at Christmas we have a strong tendency to view the manger scene in this way: as an image of a harmonious pastoral convergence that glows with a golden light, in which neither mother nor child is shivering in the cold, because everything has somehow arrived at a moment of perfect beauty and grace.

The Gospels are at pains not to present the story of the birth of Jesus in this way: as a harmonious convergence of everything going right. Rather, the Gospels assure us that the Christmas story unfolded very much in opposition to this romantic way in which we so frequently depict it. Love comes down at Christmas in ways that are dissonant and divergent and nothing seems right. Mary is an unwed mother and Joseph is ready to forsake her; her child will be a bastard, if he is allowed to live. The coming of this child is heralded by a campaign of terror initiated by Herod, whose insecurities know no bounds. The facts of Jesus’ birth align so poorly with messianic prophecies that the evangelists find ways to assure us that a Nazarene child was actually born in Bethlehem, but they cannot agree on his genealogy. Of course, the Holy Family can find no respectable place that will even take them in, except to allow them space in the barn. So obscure is this birth that even the deployment of angelic heralds singing sweetly through the night can attract only the attention of a few shepherds. When love comes down at Christmas, this love is not an expression of harmonious congruence when everything goes right; when love comes down at Christmas, this love is an utter mess, and nothing much adds up about it.

The messiness and improbability of love coming down at Christmas is, of course, deliberate, too. Because love is so often messy and improbable, and love endures even when everything goes wrong. God knows who and what he is dealing with when God dispatches love incarnate to fully inhabit a human life. God means for Jesus to provide a helpful expression of the possibility of love to us even when everything is far from perfect, not a version of love that will always be beyond our ken because it relies on the improbable convergence of the perfectly harmonious. God means for us to see hope for ourselves in the dissonant and divergent reality of love coming down at Christmas in ways that nothing seems right, so that when we encounter all that is dissonant and divergent in our own lives and nothing seems right, we’ll recognize the deeply imperfect conditions in which perfect love has been beautifully known in its most wonderful expression.

Sometimes love is an utter mess, but it is no less lovely for the messiness. The gift of love that came down to the world on that first Christmas was meant to reinforce the value of love despite its messiness, and to do so with God’s imprimatur. It’s as if God is saying that of course there are other ways of exercising power in the world, some of which are more orderly, but none of which is shared with us by the heart of God. And when love comes down at Christmas, I think God is saying that love is the most decisive and important power that we will ever be able to take hold of; the greatest power with which we are endowed; the power that taps most directly into a divine source. And sometimes it’s an unruly mess.

Love can, of course, be an experience of harmonious convergence of all things working together for good in a way that looks like that’s just exactly what’s happening. But when love came down at Christmas it was an utter mess. All the same, that love changed the world, partly by establishing a realm in which love prevails even when it is not a harmonious convergence of everything going right. Sometimes even the most wondrous love is put to sleep on a bed of straw with a flickering lantern for a light, and the warm breath of barnyard animals to keep the shivering to a minimum, and the hope that tomorrow things will warm up a bit. Such love beseeches those of us to whom it was sent not to give up on it.

When we give up on love, we put more stock in all the other ways we might find some power in our lives: with wealth, or brute strength, for instance. But the love of Christmas asserts itself in the enduring power of its unavoidable messiness. At Christmas, God invites us to look into all the inadequacies of the manger: to smell it, and wrinkle our noses when we do; to shiver in the cold with Mary and with the baby Jesus, and to conclude that we should be able to do better than this... and then to realize that God sends his love to us even where we ought to be able to do better. And then God asks us to share our love with others in exactly the same way - even when we know we ought to be able to do better.

From my perspective this Christmas nothing was even close to perfect, and there was little I could see that I could do to make it better than it was. I had to spend Christmas in the manger I could find, not the palace I might have liked. Maybe you have known Christmases like this too. If you have, I hope that like me, you discovered that messy, flawed, dissonant, and divergent as life might be, love still comes down at Christmas - all the more easy to spot because when love first came down at Christmas, it had to settle for the manger it could find, no the palace it deserved, and it was no less lovely for it.