Showing up in person still matters. We learn that afresh at Christmas as we enjoy the in-person presence of family and friends, whether we’re hosting or doing the visiting.
For generations, a burst of technologies made travel easier than ever: trains on tracks, automobiles on roads, and planes in the air. More recently, our wealth of devices conspires to keep people at home. We still have access to travel like never before. Yet many feel more content to stay put.
In a world increasingly remote, Christmas teaches the power of actually showing up and being in the same room — not merely because so many of us still have the habits of visiting and hosting at Christmas, but because Christmas itself celebrates the supreme Visit.
God’s First Visit
For centuries, Israel’s twelve tribes waited for a promised visit. They were slaves in Egypt. The book of Genesis ends with a dying Joseph telling his brothers,
God will visit you and bring you up out of this land to the land that he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. . . . God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from here. (Genesis 50:24–25; also Exodus 13:19)
In the fullness of time, that first promised visit came when the nation languished in the days of Moses. At age forty, the palace-privileged Moses had it in his heart to “visit” his brothers and rise as their deliverer, but the initiative and timing were simply his own (Acts 7:23). God had it in his heart to wait another forty years and visit his people with deliverance through a far older, feebler, and humbler human instrument.
When God at last took the initiative at the burning bush, Moses returned to Egypt to embody the long-hoped-for arrival of God to deliver his people. And they believed Moses, “that the Lord had visited the people of Israel and that he had seen their affliction” (Exodus 4:31).
This “visit” did not mean only that God drew near, but that his long-attentive eye and caring concern were now manifest in his coming near to help them. His visit was a rescue mission. And deliver them he did: from slavery, through ten plagues and the waters of judgment and a generation in the wilderness, and finally into their own land.
Still, hundreds of years later, the prophets would foretell, and the people would ache for, some greater visit yet to come, a Visit from God himself.
God’s True Visit
After four centuries of divine silence in the mouth of prophets, the Gospels begin to unfold this Visit with the birth stories we rehearse each Christmas.
An angelic visitor named Gabriel appears as a forerunner of the coming Visit. He first calls on a priest named Zechariah, then a relative of Zechariah’s wife, a virgin named Mary. After the birth of Zechariah’s son, the priest prophesies that this coming, like the exodus, is another long-anticipated divine encounter: “He has visited and redeemed his people” (Luke 1:68).
Zechariah understands that his son, John, “will be called the prophet of the Most High” and “will go before the Lord to prepare his ways” (Luke 1:76). Opaque as his vision is, Zechariah sees this new divine action as
the tender mercy of our God,
whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace. (Luke 1:78–79)
This Visit will bring the dawning of life to the dead, and light to those in darkness. But now, unlike the manifestation of God’s concern and help through Moses, this new dawning, coming after John, will be a Visit of an entirely new order. This is next-level visitation: the climactic arrival of God himself in the life of his own divine-human Son.
John prepares the way, the child comes of age, and the people begin to catch on as he heals the blind, lame, mute, and dying. And when Jesus raises a widow’s son from the dead, and the boy sits up and begins to speak, the crowds take notice.
Fear seized them all, and they glorified God, saying, “A great prophet has arisen among us!” and “God has visited his people!” (Luke 7:16)
If God showed up for his enslaved people in the ministry of Moses, then what might he be up to in this new prophet who surpasses them all? Might this be the climactic Visitor, who is not just David’s anointed heir but God himself in human flesh?
Some began to see it. Far too many did not. Especially in Jerusalem. And so the Messiah wept over the great city and lamented her coming destruction. Why? “Because you did not know the time of your visitation” (Luke 19:44). God had come at last, and this time not through the mere words and deeds of a prophet; God himself had come to visit in the person of his own divine Son.
And this Visit was far more than God showing up to rescue one nation. This, as the apostles would preach, was God’s great Visit for all nations (Acts 15:14), extending the arms of mercy not just to the lost sheep of Israel, but also to other sheep, from all the peoples. At Pentecost, the Spirit fell on Jews from all nations; he would soon fall again, this time on Gentiles from all nations, making them into one new and spiritual Israel with believing Jews.
The Author Enters His Story
Christmas tells the world’s most stunning story: Our Creator came as our fellow creature. The potter came as clay. The owner of it all became a guest, welcomed by some and turned away by many. The very Author of all history entered the story himself.
The Son of God visited to be the hero of all history, yes, but not by being born into royalty, enjoying a privileged upbringing, and ascending unchallenged to the throne. He “came down” as man, and he kept descending:
Being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:8)
However, he would rise. And he would visit his disciples again. And he will visit us again when he comes a second time.
In a day when many seem less willing and eager to visit in person, Christmas shows us how Christ showed up. He did not keep his distance and remain remote. He came. He dwelled among us. He shared in our own flesh and blood and curse and sufferings.
He visited us in person, and in doing so showed us his long-standing attention and care. He rescued us as only God-with-us could do.
Desiring God