Togetherness Trumps Painlessness

What the circumcision of Jesus—ouch!—teaches us about the real reason for the season

The origin story of Jesus is so epic it warrants its own Marvel franchise.

Our family would gather on Christmas mornings when I was a boy to remember what the day was all about by reading the story of Jesus’s birth in the book of Luke. It should have driven me mad with impatience, given the presents waiting beneath the tree, but I loved the intrigue of the story:

• Jesus is conceived spiritually by a virgin girl.

• The Roman empire decrees a census, so the girl and her husband have to travel to his hometown—the very town in which prophecy says the savior of the nation will be born.

• While there, they can’t find a place to stay so she is forced to give birth to him in a barn, surrounded by animals.

• An army of angels bursts forth from heaven to announce his birth to some shepherds in the fields nearby, and a star descends on the barn so they can find him.

To this day, I meditate on that story throughout the holiday season and recite it from memory to my kids before we open presents. Every year, something new about the story catches my attention. Sometimes it’s Mary’s peacefulness. Sometimes it’s her husband’s loyalty. Sometimes it’s the shepherd’s excitement.

This year, though, for the first time ever, the story failed to speak to me. No new insights. No peace. No joy. No…nothing. So one morning, frustrated, I decided to keep reading, and to my shock in the very next verse the story takes a treacherous turn: “On the eighth day, when it was time to circumcise the child…”

Ouch!

It's the first wound of a life that will wound him over and over again.

• As an infant, his family narrowly escapes an ethnic cleansing and are forced to immigrate to a foreign land.

• As an adult, he's run out of his hometown by a murderous mob.

• He sobs at the death of a friend, resulting in the shortest verse in the Bible: "Jesus wept."

• The Book of Isaiah describes him as a man "of sorrow and acquainted with grief."

• Unsurprisingly then, his most popular sermon begins with "blessed are the poor in spirit" and "blessed are those who mourn."

• In the last week of his life, he’s canceled by his entire fan base, because he’s not interested in becoming a militaristic nationalist.

• He is then betrayed to the authorities by one of his best friends.

• Finally, he is tortured, mocked, and killed in public.

"The purpose of a system is what it does," says British theorist Stafford Beer. The same might be said of a person: the purpose of a person is what they do. If that’s true, Jesus’s purpose seems clear.

He didn’t come to eliminate our pain but to participate in our pain.

In other words, if you look around this season and all the jingles about joy and all the pressure to make it perfect or peaceful don’t entirely resonate with you, it would seem you are in good company.

Jesus seemed more concerned with how we suffer than with how we celebrate.

He wasn’t interested so much in happiness as in wholeness, and a very specific kind of wholeness called togetherness. He could have remained up in heaven, well above the fray, a watcher not a walker. Instead, he chose to walk into and through the pain with us.

Pain, it seems, is not to be avoided alone but to be navigated together.

Over Thanksgiving, my son told us of some people in Chicago who are doing the Jesus thing by walking through pain with some fellow human beings. Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities (TASC) is a nonprofit that connects people in the criminal justice system systems with substance abuse and mental health treatment. After all, as Father Gregory Boyle writes:

We draw the lines in ways that are not helpful: good/bad, stupid/smart. What seems closer to God’s take: healed or not so much.

So TASC has established the Supportive Release Center. It’s a large trailer sitting a half-mile from Cook County Jail. When inmates with mental health disorders are released into the very same reality that landed them in jail in the first place, they can walk half a mile to the center. There, they get one good night’s sleep instead of wandering the city, and social workers connect them with treatment centers and other resources.

When you look at Jesus’s birth story, the holiday tinsel makes perfect sense. When you look at his life story, the Supportive Relief Center makes even more sense.

The story says the angels appeared to the shepherds two-thousand years ago and declared the baby Jesus to be “good news that will cause great joy for all the people.” They went on to sing about peace on earth. However, I can’t help but think the shepherds—like most of us—may have overlooked the real reason for the promise of joy and peace:

God with us in our pain rather than protecting us from our pain.

Joy found in being sorrowful together, rather than sorrow found in being joyful alone.

Togetherness rather than painlessness.

Wholeness rather than happiness.

Peace rather than perfection.

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• What does Christmas mean to you? Feel free to share your reactions in the comments—I’ll be sure to reply!

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