The writer watches afternoon sunlight break out along the highway in Galilee.
PHOTOS: KEN WILLINGER
Christmas is a celebration of the light and life of Christ Jesus. It’s a season to cherish God’s “Son-light”—the timeless Christ dawning in individual human consciousness. Christ is the very “light of the world”—the universal Truth revealing our Creator’s endless love for us and for all creation. I’ll never forget the time this Christ-light broke into my life in a surprising way.
I was speeding down a highway in Galilee in northern Israel in a rented van. It was April and the late afternoon scene was dull and overcast. A small camera crew and I were in the region for a week to capture video footage of historic settings where Jesus lived and worked. After several hot days and a few hundred dusty miles, the weight of “history” was crowding out the inspiration I had expected to feel on my first-ever trip to the Middle East.
After visiting one historic site after another, it was starting to weigh on me that there wasn’t a shred of physical evidence anywhere that Jesus had ever existed. I don’t know what I expected to see, but the day before, when our guide pointed out a rare archaeological discovery with Pilate’s name carved into it, I couldn’t help but wonder, “Why not Jesus’ name? I mean, Would it be so hard, God, for You to help scientists uncover some artifact that proved irrefutably that Your own Son had walked the earth?”
The highway stretching before us at that moment was as grey and lightless as the mental clouds gathering in my thought. Then, without warning, the scene shifted. Rocks, trees, and fields all around us brightened. We glanced out our windows and saw the sun emerging from behind a massive wall of clouds. Suddenly, we were smack in the middle of a flash flood of brilliant light. We pulled over to the roadside and jumped out with our gear. For the next half hour, we pointed our cameras at the western sky and videotaped the sun’s spectacular performance. Great shafts of light broke through dark clouds and radiated a vast prism of light and color reflecting across hilltops, meadows, paths, and tarmac, transforming the whole scene from somber to celestial.
As I stood there in awe, these words spoke distinctly to my thought: “Stop looking for me in the earth! Look UP! I am the light of the world!” In a moment, all those feelings of doubt and heaviness melted like shadows. I found myself thinking about how extraordinary it was that the light of Jesus’ life and teachings had never been buried in the earth. For two thousand years, amid repressive regimes and materialistic cultures, the “good news” he voiced on earth had persisted, survived, even thrived. People of every age and culture, including me and my family, had been touched and transformed by this humble man’s words and ideas.
“I am the light of the world,” Jesus told his followers (John 8:12). I was very familiar with his words in the Gospels, so it’s not surprising that they came to mind as I was watching this sun-filled scene. But on this hillside in Galilee, and increasingly since then, his words have taken on new meaning for me. And not just his words. I have felt the light and love of the Christ as a tangible presence in my life—a loving counselor and friend, who brings healing and guidance.
Christmas is a natural time of the year to commune more deeply with the Christ, to feel our intimate relationship to the Christ, as Jesus' disciples did.
The Gospels tell us that “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). It was Jesus’ mission to bear witness to God’s love for us, to reveal the immediacy of the kingdom of heaven, or reign of harmony. This humble man knew that his divine nature, the Christ, had been doing this forever. “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58), Jesus said of the Christ-idea that transcended time. And he also assured his followers, “I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20).
As we cherish Jesus’ life-story at Christmastime, it’s deeply healing to affirm that everything Jesus did on earth, the Christ, God’s eternal Son, continues to do for us individually and collectively: heal us when we’re sick, feed and clothe us, cleanse our inmost thoughts and motives, call us to our mission in life, shepherd us when we’re lost, support us when we’re wavering, love us unconditionally, lift us up when we’re sinking.
Who doesn’t yearn to feel more of Christ’s healing presence? It’s right at hand. Christmas is a natural time of the year to commune more deeply with the Christ, to feel our intimate relationship to the Christ, as Jesus’ disciples did.
The early Christians came together to remember and retell what Jesus said and did, and to encourage each other to follow him faithfully. To these humble men and women, the Christ was an everyday presence in their lives. A few of them had actually walked with the Master.
Others had seen his healing works. Some had even seen him after his resurrection. But all of them were learning what it meant to actually feel the presence of the Christ as Jesus said they would by healing in his name and loving one another. Reading through the Gospels at Christmas—perhaps with a Bible translation or two we haven’t opened before—is a wonderful way to celebrate the season. Christian author and healer Mary Baker Eddy even felt it appropriate to “memorize the nativity of Jesus.” She wrote, “To him who brought a great light to all ages, and named his burdens light, homage is indeed due,—but is bankrupt” (Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, p. 374).
“Oh, to think what he has done for me,” Eddy once said with tears rolling down her cheeks as she stood in her parlor before a portrait of Jesus (J. MacDonald reminiscence, The Mary Baker Eddy Collection, The Mary Baker Library). Her profound love for the Savior and her intimate understanding of the saving presence of the Christ are evident throughout all her sermons and writings.
A few years ago, my wife and I gave each other a Christmas gift of reading through Eddy’s entire textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, out loud together, about 20 pages a day leading up to Christmas. It was a transforming experience for both of us, and we’ve enjoyed doing it again. Jesus’ promise, “I will pray the Father, and he shall send you another Comforter” (John 14:16), finds fulfillment in the healing message of her textbook.
It’s no surprise that the Preface of Science and Health opens with a sunrise—“The wakeful shepherd beholds the first faint morning beams, ere cometh the full radiance of a risen day”
(p. vii). It’s an inspired description of the light of the Christ breaking in on human consciousness just as the sunlight broke through the mental clouds for me that day in Galilee. This “Son-light” is what Christmas is all about, and we can rejoice in the healing truth it reveals to humanity every day of the year.
