I’m at the point in the year when everyone is stupid. That person who bumped into me in the supermarket because they weren’t looking where they were going? Stupid. That shop assistant who asked me if they could help me with anything today? Yes, you can help me! That’s why we’re talking! So stupid. That person sitting down over there on that park bench with their stupid book and their stupid legs and their stupid everything? Well, you get where I’m going.
That is, in the week before Christmas, with my emotional tanks emptied weeks ago but still exactly one million things to do before I can rest, I’m not at my best. I’m grumpy. Everyone is stupid. Maybe you feel the same?
That’s Why Christmas Exists
Good news: allowing for poetic license and the vast gulf between the holy God and unholy humanity, God feels the same way. That’s why Christmas exists. See, God agrees that everyone is stupid, so to speak. That’s why he came into the world: to enter into ‘the darkness’ of human thoughtlessness and frailty (and much worse besides) and ‘shine a light’ (Jn 1:5).
Remedial Self-Talk
But two things I need to remind myself of the next time I’m tempted to grumble in my fatigue: first, I’m stupid too. The things I find enraging in others I so easily forgive in myself. When you bump me with your trolley, it’s carelessness. When I bump you with my trolley, it’s an honest mistake.
Second, God actually loves stupid people. Our heavenly Father can look at infuriating people and patiently bear with us. Love us, even. I’m reminded of Jesus looking out at the crowd of hopelessly untogether people milling around him, ‘harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd’—just the sort of needy, half-baked people we could do without. Yet what was Jesus’ response? He ‘had compassion’ on them (Matt 9:36).
This translation is actually rather dainty. The word in Greek comes from the word for intestines, and has the sense of deep, visceral sympathy (the kind we might feel when we see a starving child on television, for example). A modern gloss might say that Jesus looked out on that harassed helpless multitude and was ‘gutted’. That is, he wasn’t frustrated by people’s un-togetherness, impatient with their neediness or angry with their demands, but deeply moved by their plight and eager to help them.
A Grump’s Prayer
God help me to see other people like that this Christmas. To set aside my petty grumpiness and to see people as they are: muddling along in life (like me) and prone to mistakes (like me).
And more profoundly, help me see them as people with a deeper lostness in life, which may have manifested itself as that sudden swerve of the supermarket trolley, but actually goes much much deeper. We sometimes are stupid, and often lost, harassed and helpless. By nature we are all slaves to sin and death.
Help me to see that Jesus has come to help people like us, not be grumpy with us.
Yes, we’re sinful and perhaps you could call us stupid. But if you do, then remember that in that first Christmas God said, ‘I’m with stupid.’
