A Christmas sermon I'd like to hear: "Cursed be the day I was born!"

For Christmas Eve, we were staying with my wife's family. Before 0pening the presents, someone suggested, "Does anyone have a passage of Scripture for us to read?" Someone suggested, "How about something from the book of Job?" This got my own mental gears atwirling, and I suggested the passage in Job 3:3, "May the day of my birth perish, and the night it was said, 'a boy is born!'" Jeremiah 20:14 offers a similar passage for meditation, "Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed!" Perhaps I was reminded of these passages from an incident back in college, when I was blindfolded for my surprise birthday party and had such cheery passages read to me.

Even though I initially mentioned the passage as a joke, after thinking about it longer, it struck me that it would be a good passage to read at Christmas. Even if most of my posts are (at least meant to be) funny, I am being serious here. Such a passage is most fitting specifically because it seems least fitting, and might challenge us to think of Christmas in a new way. Job, looking back on the whole of his life and seeing his recent suffering in its immediacy, thinks it would be better if he had never been born. Wouldn't Christ have reason to feel the same? A divine God trapped in a frail human body, betrayed by one of his hand-picked disciples, believed to be insane by His own family, and He dies on a cross while His countrymen shout, "Crucify him?" Yet on the day of his birth, choirs of angels sing that these are tidings of good news. Jesus had good reason on the cross to curse His birth, yet instead He prays, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). With divine irony, His birth is a day of good news for us specifically because His birth will end with His suffering and death--a death which is not an end at all, but a new beginning of an imperishable body for Him and the promise of redemption for His people. "Anyone who is hung on a tree is under God's curse" (Deut. 21:23), just as His birth, from different perspectives, is both curse and blessing.