“Remember the reason for the season.” It’s almost become a cliché, but I agree the reason does seem to have got lost. So let’s remember the reason and see if it has much to do with the season.

The other day in a shopping mall I was confronted by a giant Santa and next to it an in-your-face advertisement suggesting I was the most important person in the world. How perceptive of them, that they would know this about me. The message of the season is hard to miss: life is easy with a credit card; you can be young forever with this new product; you are more important than others; you need to be in control and life is about what you can have and achieve.

How ironic that the reason for this so-called season says the exact opposite. The reason for Christmas is God’s subversive activity through a poor vulnerable child, born out of wedlock, born of refugee parents fleeing a murderous tyrant, born in the animal shed behind an inn. The Christmas story shows that for the baby Jesus and Mary and Joseph life was not going to be easy. Refugees find that they actually age rather quickly. They also find out that they are seen as the least important. They realize that they are not in control. And they would have understood the great Australian novelist, Tim Winton, when he said: “Life, in the end, is about love and death. All the rest is just shopping.”

There is some bad religion around too these days. It has also lost the reason, while being mesmerized with the season. There is a new religion that tries to sell its message with more hype and glamour than the secular manipulators of the season.

The reason for Christmas continues to resist our consumer driven world. The Christmas story remains for all time the real message of hope and truth for our world. The reason that resists the season is that Jesus is God made poor. And this reason demands from us a response. It demands self-sacrifice, a commitment to justice and mercy, and a determination to find the sacred in the most vulnerable around us.

Kim Thoday,

Minister with Churches of Christ, South Australia