Christmas Day (means D-day)

Discard your childhood notions of the original Christmas Day as a day heralding peace to the world. Christmas Day in the year 4 BC was anything but a picture-perfect, idyllic nativity scene, where chubby, pale-winged angelic envoys disrupted the tranquility of snow-clad Judean life, bringing strange news to a confused bunch of shepherds.

Invading earth

Christmas Day was all about an invasion taking place; an invasion planned long before the first fragment of a second had even materialized. But this was not anything like the June 6 1944 experience, the largest amphibious invasion ever undertaken. This was not a case of thousands of heavily armed soldiers flooding the shores of Judea to oust an army of occupants in a beautifully synchronized, brute show of force. This was an ingenious plan being carried out in its embryonic stage. And God initiated this invasion in the form of a tiny, vulnerable human being. No superior weaponry or superbly trained legions. A boy. A tiny Jewish baby boy.

Anticipating revolution

In appearance this baby boy was deceptively plain-looking. Nothing alerted friend or foe to the fact that would become apparent decades later, namely that his mission in life was not to be recognized as a great moral leader, but to upend the sociopolitical and spiritutal order of things. He came to confront, defeat and ultimately to destroy any power hierarchy, visible or unseen, that had perverted and paralyzed true justice among humans. And December 25 2008 he is still clinging to this agenda of global revolution.

The baby has left the manger

Forget all you have ever learned about the innocent-looking, rosy-cheeked, overly sweet baby Jesus. He didn't remain in the manger for long. He was destined to leave it behind. He didn't come to make Christmas the comfiest time of the year for you and me. He came to shake us out of a false sense of security and comfort: that by emulating grand moral principles we can create a society in which justice "rolls like a river" in perpetuity.

We can't. Not on our own. We need this boy, now crowned pantokrator, the all-powerful heavenly king, to usher in the kind of justice that will last. He didn't come to make people religious, bible-bashing zealots, but do change them inwardly to begin with, then moving on to families, tribes, communities, cities, nations and beyond - producing a new breed of humans.