Why Christmas is Revolutionary

I am sure there are many other, but the following ten reasons popped up in my head (more precisely, jumped out of my heart) when I reflected why Christmas is revolutionary. Let me know if you want to add yours. Why is Christmas revolutionary?

1. Because Christmas is about God coming to the world in the form of a helpless babe, not a superhero we all wish to have so that we can project our needs to have a false sense of security.

2. Because Christmas is about a birth of a baby whose sole purpose in life is to die.

3. Because the details of Christmas took place exactly as foretold by the prophets hundred years prior. There's got to be something extraordinary about that birth.

4. Because at Christmas, the birth of baby Jesus that was witnessed by more than animals than human did separate the two era of history: B.C. and A.D.

5. Because Christmas is about God oddly choosing two poor, nervous, inexperienced teenagers to be the earthly parents of Jesus, and trusted them for the first critical few years of a child's life, mostly as a refugee family who kept running into life-threatening dangers.

6. Because, as lovely as our Christmas cards depict the nativity scene may be, it was really a bloody Christmas. The mass murder of two-year old infants around Jesus' birth cannot possibly be worse. Christ's solidarity with people in pain and anguish was obvious right from his birth.

7. Because Christmas is about God coming in flesh, about the spirit entering the physical, thus showing that God cares both with our spirit and our body, with our spiritual and bodily needs, both of which he experienced first hand as a human. "What an unthinkable fact", said the Western and Eastern religious philosophers.

8. Because Christmas gives a whole new paradigm. We always think that our problems come from outside and the solutions come from within. We become our own savior, that's why we always end up disappointed. Christmas says. "Stop thinking that way. Instead, think this way: Your problems come from within and the solution comes from outside, Christ Incarnate."

9. Because Christmas only becomes "a good tidings of great joy" (as the angel said to the shepherd) when we readily accept the profoundly self-transforming fact of Christ as Savior first as a soul-piercing sword, like Mary did.

10. Because Christmas is a news, not an advice, that needs individual responses. Responses which collectively will transform individuals, families, nations, and the whole world. It has been that way in the past 2,000 years, and it will continue to be so.