Christmas.  For what?  For whom?

So much is needed to bring a child into the world and bring it up in our hostile world!  Much more is needed for it than formerly, when children were embedded in family and tradition as a matter of course.

In a very early stage already, obscure forces aim their arrows at the young child in our darkened world, and want to seize its innocent forces.  Children are these days not only often left in the cold, but are also often injured for life.  Never has the tragedy of the injured child been expressed more poignantly than in the poem Confession by Ida Gerhardt:

Along flat fields I can go,

On high mountains I can stand,

At no moment can I forget

What has been done to children.

Nothing is so dishonorable as interfering in the becoming of helpless, guiltless children.  And nowhere is Christ’s judgement more irrevocable than of this perpetrator: “It would be better for him to have a millstone hung about his neck and be sunk into the depths of the sea.” (Mat. 18:6)

Not only our vulnerable children, but also the child Jesus is left in the cold in our world—a world in which we threaten to forget for what and for whom we celebrate Christmas.  In our party spirit we threaten to lose what really counts: the child in us, the child in the other, the child that needs all our love and attention to grow to maturity.  This is the entreaty of Him, who comes close to us at Christmas time: Help me to come to manifestation as the child born in eternity.

-Rev. Bastiaan Baan, December 25, 2025