Empty Chairs, A Manger, and the Vulnerability of God
Why modern Christmas sometimes leaves us out in the cold.
There’s a version of Christmas that has nothing to say to the person with an empty chair at the table.
It’s the Christmas of mandatory joy, of “have yourself a merry little Christmas” piped through every grocery store speaker while you’re trying not to lose it in the cereal aisle. It’s the Christmas that demands you perform celebration even when something—someone—is missing.
When you’re grieving, carols feel like accusations. “Joy to the World” lands like a slap. You’re drowning in despair and no one notices because it’s the most wonderful time of the year.
When God becomes incarnate, he isn’t born in a palace. He’s born the son of a poor, disenfranchised, powerless young woman from nowhere. A teenager from a town so obscure it appears nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Talmud, or even contemporary historical records. Even one of Jesus’ future disciples is skeptical when he first encounters the Messiah. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
A baby who can’t lift his own head. A feeding trough for a bed. Laborers as the first witnesses. A child who will become a refugee, his family fleeing political violence before he can form complete sentences.
Nothing about Jesus’ arrival speaks to the kind of power and majesty we might associate with the coming of the Son of God. If you were on the planning committee for the advent of the Messiah, would you have chosen unwed teenager, manger, and Nazareth?
And yet the wisdom of God chooses the margins. The low places. The humility of a stable. The rough-hewn wood of a manger cradle.
The greeting card version of Christmas puts joy and grief on opposite sides of a wall. You’re either celebrating or you’re not. But the actual Christmas story knows no such division. The joy of the Incarnation is that God shows up in the darkness. The location is the point.
The shepherds are working hard, dirty jobs in the middle of the night—and the angels show up to them. The magi are unsuccessfully recruited as assassin spies by a murderous, two-bit tyrant, and still find their way to worship the infant. The joy doesn’t wait for the darkness to clear. It arrives in the middle of it.
Why is that person not here tonight? Why will that seat be empty at the table?
I don’t have an answer that will satisfy. But in the darkest corners of our hearts and in the darkest moments of our lives—that’s exactly where Jesus is. Jesus is often not where we expect him, but exactly where he needs to be. Because love is drawn to the suffering and sorrow where it is needed most. God is indeed close to the brokenhearted.
The empty chair at the table and the baby in the feeding trough are not opposites. They’re the same story. Both speak of vulnerability. Both speak of love that makes us susceptible to loss.
The triumphalist Christmas demands that we paper over that reality with tinsel and forced cheer. But the actual Christmas—the one with the scared teenager and the barn and the political refugees—meets us in the darkness. And the darkness, it turns out, is where the light has always dawned.
We have permission to grieve. We have permission to be joyful. We have permission to experience both at once—not because we’ve resolved the contradiction, but because there isn’t one.