THE NECESSITY OF EXPERIENCE:

It is not just the spectacular sinners, with their hands drenched in blood, whose victims cry out for justice. The quiet, respectable sinners--those American whites, for example, who could have done something about racial injustice but chose to turn a blind eye--have responsibilities that a just and loving God cannot ignore.

God cannot love the victim of violence or exploitation without loving and indeed demanding justice; but He cannot love anybody at all unless He finds a way to deal with the reality that no human being can withstand strict moral scrutiny. To hold everyone to a strict standard is to condemn the whole world, but to wink at the real evil that people do is to give up on the moral standard of true justice, and to leave people trapped in a cycle of evil and pain. Christians believe that God refused to choose between His love and His justice. He refused to overlook the evil of the world and say things were OK when they weren't, but He also refused to walk away from the whole ugly mess.

Instead, God chose to engage. He would draw closer to us, but not in a way that took evil lightly. Specifically, God chose to become a human being, to live with us, and ultimately to do for the human race what we could never have done for ourselves. The baby in the manger wasn't just there to look cute and beam rays of benevolence to shepherds and kings. He was born to suffer rejection and injustice, to be tortured and scourged, humiliated and mocked, to face an unjust trial before an oppressive foreign ruler, to feel the full weight of the wrath of God due to all the evil in the world, and to die a cruel death while being ridiculed and mocked by those He came to serve.

God resolved the dilemma between love and justice by taking them both all the way. The Creator of the world took the hit we had coming. The anger, the condemnation, the judgment all fell on Jesus, who bore it all out of love. That, for Christians, is what makes Christmas such a special time of year. God really knows us; He knows the worst things about us and isn't fooled by our rationalizations and evasions. And He still loves us enough to be born among us and to pay the price for all we have done.

Jesus came to deal with the flaws, the weakness, and the twisted selfishness that stand between us and God. He came to deal with the reality that no matter how much we might wish to live the right way--we haven't and don't.

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