God's redemption does not begin with the brutal death of Jesus on the cross. It properly begins with Christmas.
It is God's revelation in the Incarnation that reveals the nature of God as one who reaches out from outside of all space and time into the matrix of space and time itself in order to join with it. It is by the joining of God to nature in the form of a human being that we see the nature of God as one who redeems what God has created not by a command, but by a presence inextricably fused with it. As Reinhold Niebuhr says in The Nature and Destiny of Man (Vol. 1, pp., 144-145):
There have always been interpretations of the revelation in Christ, , from early Hellenistic Christianity to certain modern forms of Catholic and Anglican thought in which the Incarnation is regarded, not so much as the bearer of divine mercy, as the assurance that the gulf between the finite and the eternal, between man and God, between history and superhistory is not unbridgeable. "The word of God became man," said Clement, the early church father, "in order that thou mayest become a god."
For this reason the content of revelation is not primarily the assurance that God can speak to man but rather the assurance that His final word to man is not one of judgment but of forgiveness and mercy. The primary problem of human existence is believed to be not man's involvement in nature but the tragic consequence of his effort to extricate himself from nature, finiteness and time by his own effort.
By joining with humanity in Jesus, God reveals that God's will for humanity is intimacy and love. Christmas is for the church a time not to exchange gifts, but to exchange the gift of love with one another as God reveals in the babe in the manger. It is to heal the sick, feed the hungry, attend to the child; in short to love one's neighbor as a means to love God. It is by loving one another that we become more like God. It is through human intimacy with each other and with nature that God's revelation progresses in all epochs and situations of human history.
It is John who said that "God is love." It is the Incarnation of Christmas where we see the model of what this love should look like. It is not that Jesus died that we see this love first. It is that God joined with humanity in Jesus in a way more intimate that any of us could ever imagine. that is the true image of the God we worship. For without love, as Paul said, we are nothing. Only with love, we become like God.
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