What Is the True Meaning of Christmas? God Came to Be With Us

The true meaning of Christmas is that God came to be with us. At Christmas Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus, and in it the Incarnation: God the Son became a human child, born of Mary in Bethlehem, to save us and to show us God’s love. Matthew puts it in one name, Emmanuel, “God with us” (Matthew 1:23).

John says the same thing without a manger or a star. “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us,” he writes (John 1:14), and he means the Word who “was with God” in the beginning, by whom “all things were made” (John 1:1, 3). The maker came to live among the things he had made, as one of them. Luke gives us the same truth as news, spoken at night to shepherds in a field: “Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:10–11). In his first chapter Matthew hears in this birth the prophet’s name, God with us, and in his last chapter he lets Jesus make the same promise in his own words.

Is Christmas in the Bible?

The birth of Jesus is in the Bible, and the feast of Christmas is not. Matthew tells the birth in his first two chapters and Luke in his first two, and John opens his Gospel with what it means. No one in the New Testament keeps a feast of Christ’s birth, and no verse tells us to. The word itself came much later. In English it began as Old English Cristes Maesse, the Mass of Christ, first found in writing in 1038.

For nearly three hundred years Christians told this story and preached it, and no record we have shows them keeping a day for it. The first trace of the feast is a Roman list from the fourth century that sets Christ’s birth on 25 December. How the Church came to that day, and why churches on the old calendar keep it when our calendars show 7 January, is told in why Christmas is celebrated on 25 December.

Paul leaves the keeping of holy days to each believer and asks only that a day be kept “unto the Lord” (Romans 14:6). Nearly every church keeps the day with joy. A few believers, among them Jehovah’s Witnesses and some Presbyterians in Scotland, decline it on principle, and both answers are set out in is it a sin to celebrate Christmas?

What does the Bible tell us about the birth of Jesus?

In Luke, a decree of Caesar Augustus sends Joseph from Nazareth to Bethlehem, “the city of David,” with Mary, “being great with child” (Luke 2:4–5). There she “brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7). Angels bring the news to shepherds “keeping watch over their flock by night,” and the shepherds come “with haste” and find the child just as they were told. When they have gone, Luke turns back to the mother: “But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:8, 16, 19). Every Christmas we do what she did, keeping these things and turning them over once more.

Matthew begins with Joseph. While he “thought on these things”, unsure what to do about Mary, an angel came to him in a dream, told him to take her as his wife, and gave the child his name: “thou shalt call his name Jesus: for he shall save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:20–21). The child is named for what he will do for us before he has drawn a breath. Later, wise men from the east follow a star to the house where the child is, fall down and worship him, and open their treasures of “gold, and frankincense and myrrh” (Matthew 2:11). The first people in Matthew’s Gospel to kneel before Jesus are strangers who came a very long way to do it.

What follows is hard to read in December, and Matthew tells it all the same. Herod, mocked by the wise men and “exceeding wroth,” sends men to kill “all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under” (Matthew 2:16). The Gospel lets us hear the mothers: “Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not” (Matthew 2:18). Joseph had already taken Mary and the child “by night” into Egypt (Matthew 2:14). The God who came to be with us was born into a world where a king hunted children, and his family fled their own country to keep him alive. If he is with us, he is with us there too, beside every family that has had to run in the night. The whole story, in order and with every reference, is in where the Christmas story is in the Bible.

Why is Christmas important to Christians?

Because of who the child is. The one born in Bethlehem did not begin there. “Being in the form of God,” Paul writes, he “made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:6–7). God came himself, small enough to be laid in a feeding trough.

Ask Christians of almost any church why God became a child, and you will hear two small words: for us. The Nicene Creed says that “for us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and was made man,” and on the feast itself Orthodox Christians sing that “for our sake the Eternal God is born as a little child.” He came to save us, and he came, as the Catholic Catechism puts it, “so that thus we might know God’s love.”

Those two words point past the manger. Paul goes on in the same breath to say that the servant “humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:8). The child of Bethlehem is the man of Good Friday and of Easter morning, and the feast celebrates the first day of the life that saves us. That is why a Christian who knows the story by heart still kneels at the manger. The first to hear were shepherds keeping watch in the fields at night, and the joy the angel promised them was for all people.

What is the true spirit of Christmas?

It is the spirit of the one who came. John draws the line straight from the gift to us: “In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him.” And then: “Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another” (1 John 4:9, 11). Christmas begins with a gift received, and its spirit is that gift passed on.

Paul thanks God for “his unspeakable gift” (2 Corinthians 9:15), which Christians have long taken to be Christ, and in the chapter before he describes that gift by what it cost: “For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). A feeding trough for a cradle, because there was no room for them: that is the poverty he chose. So the poor belong at the heart of the feast. When we remember the lonely, the hungry and those far from home in December, we are keeping close to the manger.

The shops have their own Christmas. We can admit that it crowds out the child, and that for many families December brings debt and weariness along with the lights. Yet giving is close to the heart of the feast. The wise men opened their treasures before Jesus, and God gave first. A gift given in love, within what a home can bear, carries the meaning of Christmas from one person to another.

The angels sang of peace: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men” (Luke 2:14). Isaiah’s child, whom Christians have long heard in the Christmas readings, is called “The Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6). So the feast asks for peace in small places too: a call made to a brother we have not spoken to, a quarrel at the table let go. And it asks for joy that leaves no one out. Leo the Great, preaching in Rome on Christmas Day in the fifth century, put it this way: “No one is kept from sharing in this happiness.” He went on, “Let the saint exult in that he draws near to victory. Let the sinner be glad in that he is invited to pardon.”

The tree comes down in January and the cards go into a drawer. The name Matthew heard in his birth stays true. He ends his Gospel where he began, with God with us, and the last words Jesus speaks in it are a promise: “lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20).

Related reading

• Emmanuel means God with us
• Why was Jesus born in a manger?
• Bible verses for Christmas
• How do Christians celebrate Christmas?
• Which verses in Isaiah foretell Jesus’ birth?