AP

Christmas on my street

A woman was very recently murdered just 300 metres from where I am writing this. Her attacker was a stranger recently released from a mental health facility. Rightly, several enquiries are underway to try to understand the event and prevent repeats.

Sadly, such stories of human brokenness in various forms can be multiplied many times over this Christmas.  A trend of our day is to try to explain them wholly in terms of contextual issues such that the offender is seen as a victim of societal structures. On this narrative, the human problem is seen as a lack of this or that. Correspondingly, the solution is that someone supplies more of this or that. 

The gospel gives a different narrative, In this, the key human problem lies in our choice to deny and defy God in the idolatry that puts us in his place. This plays out in the fallenness that is like a layer of dust covering the whole of creation. It also plays out in the individual and universal sinfulness that shows itself in the tragedies that sell newspapers. Every human problem comes from this universal fallenness and individual sin.

How we understand the human problem shapes the solution. If the problem is sin, the solution is in a saviour. This is where Christmas comes in. At heart, Christ came into the world to save sinners (1 Tim 1:15).   Or, as Jesus put it, the Son of Man came into the world to seek and save the lost (Luke 19:10). Jesus came to bear the penalty of sin and to break its power. He is the double cure for sin.

The cultural Christmas around us wallows in syrupy sentiment and sloppy expressions of goodwill.  These do nothing to address the human problem. This Christmas,  let us each face our own darkness and embrace the Saviour. And let us together tell the unwanted truth of the human problem and proclaim the good news of the infant who was born to save.

– David Burke, Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Australia