I think it’s time to tell the story of the orange bike again. My friends have heard it before, but I haven’t taken it out of the file for a while and it needs dusting down. But a few other thoughts first.

We’re familiar with the idea of comfort food, things we eat when we need to shut out the world for a short while: toast and marmalade in the morning or cocoa and biscuits in the evening, or chocolate at any time.  Most of us have the same fuzzy warm, comfortable feelings about Christmas. It’s a comfort zone – a place in our thoughts of security and wellbeing. For many, Christmas is a security blanket to wrap ourselves in, protection from harsh realities at least for a few hours. But at the back of our minds, on the edge of consciousness maybe, we know that part of the Christmas story is Herod’s appallingly wicked and depraved Slaughter of the Innocents.  And we know that the Wise Men’s gift of Myrrh symbolised that thirty-three years later Christ would experience the indescribable and infinite suffering of Gethsemane and the cross, necessary to give meaning to his birth. In fact, without Easter, there would be no Christmas. It’s because of Christ’s death that the world remembers his birth.

Dealing with these different strands of Christmas is challenging. For some people the mixture of sorrow and joy is too difficult, so they reject them both for something far less substantial. The prophet Enoch had a vision in which he saw God weeping. In astonishment he asks how is it possible for God to weep. The answer he gets is the centre of the Christmas story. 

32 The Lord said unto Enoch: Behold these thy brethren; they are the workmanship of mine own hands,
33 And unto thy brethren have I said, and also given commandment, that they should love one another, and that they should choose me, their Father; but behold, they are without affection, and they hate their own blood;
37 . . . and the whole heavens shall weep over them, even all the workmanship of mine hands; wherefore should not the heavens weep, seeing these shall suffer?
40 Wherefore, for this shall the heavens weep . . .
(Moses 7:32-40)

Terryl Givens’ book “The God Who Weeps” is drawn from this scripture. Givens points out that believing in a God who weeps is unusual. Like Enoch, most people are astonished at the possibility that God could weep. A large part of the Christian world believes in a God “without body, parts or passions”. Maybe we could just about conceive of a God without body or parts (even though it is not what the scriptures teach) but if you think about it carefully, a God without emotion – without love or compassion makes no sense at all. Givens says:

The answer, it turns out, is that God is not exempt from emotional pain . . . On the contrary, God’s pain is as infinite as his love. He weeps because he feels compassion. In the vision of Enoch, we find ourselves drawn to a God who prevents all the pain he can, assumes all the suffering he can and weeps over the misery he can neither prevent nor assume.
(Terryl Givens, The God Who Weeps page 25)

This is why Christmas happened. Understanding that sorrow and joy go together is part of the Christmas message. To deny it is to misunderstand the nature of life.

However, it’s not wrong to set aside personal challenges for a while and enjoy a little pleasure.  Some people criticise this as escapism, a denial of reality, and I suppose in some cases it can be, but on the whole I think it’s healthy. After all, even the Lord only weeps occasionally, even though his children continue to cause him suffering.