12/17/2024
This Christmas, Laura and I have received a beautiful array of Christmas cards—scenes of a serene Nativity, angels dusted with glitter, and peaceful snow-covered hills glowing under a star-studded sky.
But there’s one image I’ve never seen on a Christmas card:
“A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment it was born. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter . . . And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him” (Revelation 12:1-5, 7-9).
This Christmas story doesn’t involve shepherds on a quiet hillside, wise men bearing gifts, or a manger bathed in soft light. Instead, it paints a scene of cosmic upheaval. A woman cries out in labor, and a monstrous red dragon looms nearby, ready to devour her child the moment he is born. Stars fall. Heaven erupts in war. It is raw, brutal, and terrifying.
You likely won’t read this version of the Christmas story to children nestled snug in their beds.
Philip Yancey calls Christmas the Great Invasion: “a daring raid by the ruler of the forces of good into the universe’s seat of evil” (The Jesus I Never Knew, 43). Pull back the curtain that separates heaven from earth, and you won’t find a silent night. You’ll witness explosions, the spiritual equivalent of D-Day.
It’s incomprehensible. And yet, Yancey explains, this is the key to understanding Christmas:
“As a Christian I believe we live in parallel worlds. One world consists of hills and lakes and barns and politicians and shepherds . . . The other consists of angels and sinister forces” (ibid., 44).
Two worlds collided that night in Bethlehem. Among the furrows of a quiet hillside, the eternal God entered time and space. Heaven intersected earth as a Baby gasped his first breath. And in this moment lies the breathtaking truth of Christmas:
“[Jesus] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:15, 17).
Because God entered our world, we can enter his.
This is the wonder of Christmas: the collision of heaven and earth, of cosmic warfare and holy peace, of divine power wrapped in human vulnerability. It is the story we celebrate, even if we cannot fully comprehend it.
And it changes everything.
