Christmas is a celebration of the Incarnation, and the Incarnation is a reality that addresses our confusions in a wonderful way. When God determined to send the Lord Jesus to live a perfect life among us, die on the cross, and rise again from the dead, this intervention excludes certain heretical notions from the outset.
God removes the iniquity of His people. He cleanses sin, and the only place that can be cleansed is inside the human heart. That is the font of the evil. That is where the problem lies. And that is precisely what we don’t want to admit. We want all our problems to be environmental and outside ourselves, but they are all of the natural and inherited, and deep within ourselves.
But our tendency is to find a scapegoat outside ourselves. We want to blame the stuff. We want to blame the matter. We want to blame the mashed potatoes for the gluttony, we want to blame the beer for the drunkenness, we want to blame the good fortunes of somebody else for the envy, we want to blame the guns for the crime, and so on.
But Jesus embraced the matter, and He handled the stuff. If sinlessness were a function of avoiding the stuff, the Incarnation would have wrecked the Lord’s holiness. But Jesus did not avoid matter—He became material. That’s not where the problem is.
The problem is the heart, and Jesus was born into this world so that He might be born into your heart as well.