What is your favorite Christmas carol? There are many wonderful options to choose from, both secular (“Jingle Bells,” “Holly, Jolly Christmas”) and religious (“Go, Tell it on a Mountain,” “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”). Usually, when we think of Christmas carols, especially the ones we sing with others, we think of ones that are light and happy. We think this way in part because we think of Christmas itself as light and happy—as a time for family, cheer, and worshiping an adorable baby.
Christmas is everything good that we think it is: Christmas is indeed a time for family and cheer, and we do worship an adorable baby. Yet Christmas is also more than this. Christmas is something good which embraces even the darkest evils. The hinge in the gospel reading for the Vigil, the great genealogy from Matthew, is the Babylonian Exile. An event that happened because of the infidelity of the Israelites, and which brought unspeakable evil to the people of Israel as the Babylonians conquered and destroyed Jerusalem.
The birth of Jesus comes out of a lineage that includes great evil. God comes to earth to be in the fray, and stand right in the midst of the darkest parts of human existence. There is a joy to Christmas, though not the joy of final victory. Christmas is not Germany surrendering at the end of World War II. Christmas is the Allies invading France in the middle of World War II. The joy of Christmas is the joy of hope. The joy of Christmas is knowing that even as we stand in the depths of evil, our God stands with us and will bring us to victory.