Every Christian knows what happened on Christmas (whatever date that was) was a necessary condition and an essential part of God’s work to liberate his people from sin and guilt.

But often times what happened is described in ways that leave our understanding anemic and our explanation of the person and work of Christ lacking. On the other hand, there is a disconnect between our more full descriptions of what happened on Christmas and our doctrine of salvation so that we don’t apply it correctly and leave our doctrine of salvation lacking.

What I mean is this. Our doctrine of imputation requires more than merely an affirmation (as important is it is) of the fact of the incarnation. Christmas is about the incarnation but it is about more than that; and that more is necessary for us to have a real doctrine of salvation–specifically, one that includes imputation.

The doctrine of imputation explains how a holy God can welcome into his presence and blessing an impure people–God reckons them as righteous before him because he accounts them as sharing in the righteousness of another. Among other things, this protects God from the charge of being arbitrary and lacking in a commitment to justice. God does not simply ignore his own holiness in forgiving sinners. He is not capricious. He meets the demands of holiness and punitive justice even in showing great undeserved mercy.

But, if this doctrine of imputation is to have any apologetic value, as it is often claimed to have, then we need to be careful about how we express it. To say that God can simply evade the requirements of justice by imputing the righteousness of someone to someone else (and to offer no further explanation) gives of simply another version of capricious injustice. Could God the Son have been born a Micronesian and drowned in the Pacific for the sins of the elect? Could he have been born in Egypt and eaten by a Nile crocodile as a toddler to make atonement for our sins? To the extent that we are trying to explain anything to anyone about how the person and work of Christ satisfies God’s justice, the whole relationship can seem so arbitrary as to solve nothing.

Think about real-life situations. Imagine someone served papers on you because he had been the victim of a car accident and had suffered great loss in medical expenses and time away from work. You would be shocked. “I wasn’t the driver at fault! I had nothing to do with that car wreck. Sue the driver.”

“But the driver died in the accident,” your adversary replies, “so I am imputing his guilt to you so that you owe me for damages. Since I have imputed this guilt to you my lawsuit is perfectly fair. The demands of justice are satisfied.”

Obviously, that would be completely insane. Imputation, rather than explaining God’s justice, if portrayed in such an arbitrary matter, actually becomes a charge against his character.

But that’s not what happened.

It is more like a situation in which your child got killed in a car accident and was at fault in the damage he inflicted on the driver of the other vehicle. Because this child was a dependent member of your household, the victim would have every right and reason to expect you to cover his damages. And, you would be able to pay for your sons sin as his representative.

So we don’t call the celebration of the Nativity “JoeBlowMas,” but “Christmas.” Jesus didn’t just become someone, anyone human in the abstract apart from rank or relationship. He came as Christ, the Son of David, the rightful ruler and heir to the world. He was a member of the priestly people who were called to bring blessing to all the families of the earth As the king of that people, he was also the representative of the nation–especially responsible to fulfill that commission to the other nations, and also the one representative and responsible for his own nation.

Even though a king in exile under the rule of others, Jesus was born with us related to him as his dependents. He had every right and reason to offer himself on our behalf as the true covenant head of God’s people.

Thus, we find that the Apostle Paul sometimes even refers to the people who belong to Christ as “Christ”: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” You would expect Paul to write “the Church,” in the place of the last word of that sentence, but under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he does not.

Thus, the Pauline scholar N. T. Wright argues that for Paul (and, no doubt, for Wright as well), Xpistos bears an “incorporative” meaning: “Paul regularly uses the word to connote, and sometimes even denote, the whole people of whom the Messiah is the representative.”

But why should “Messiah” bear such an incorporative sense? Clearly, because it is endemic in the understanding of kingship, in many societies and certainly in ancient Israel, that the king and the people are bound together in such a way that what is true of the one is true in principle of the other.

And again

In Romans 6.11, the result of being baptized “into Christ”… is that one is now “in Christ,” so that what is true of him is true of the one baptized–here, death and resurrection. This occurs within the overall context of the Adam-Christ argument of chapter 5, with its two family solidarities; the Christian has now left the old solidarity (Romans 6.6) and entered the new one. 6.23 may be read by analogy with 6.11; whose who are “in Christ” receive the gift of the life of the new age, which is already Christ’s in virtue of his resurrection–that is, which belongs to Israel’s representative, the Messiah in virtue of his having drawn Israel’s climactic destiny on to himself. Similarly, in Romans 8.1, 2 the point of the expression “in Christ” is that what is true of Christ is true of his people: Christ has come through the judgment of death and out into the new life which death can no longer touch (8.3-4; 8.10-11), and that is now predicated of those who are “in him.” In Galatians 3.26 the ex-pagan Christians are told that they are all sons of God (a regular term for Israel…) in Christ, through faith. It is because of who the Messiah is–the true seed of Abraham, and so on–that Christians are this too, since they are “in” him. Thus in v. 27, explaining this point, Paul speaks of being baptized “into” Christ and so “putting on Christ,” with the result that (3.28) [translating Wright’s reproduction of Paul’s Greek here:] you are all one in Christ Jesus. It is this firm conclusion, with all its overtones of membership in the true people of God, the real people of Abraham, that is then expressed concisely in 3.29 with the genitive [again translating]: and if you are of Christ… When we consider Galatians 3 as a whole, with its essentially historical argument from Abraham through Moses to the fulfillment of God’s promises in the coming of Christ, a strong presupposition is surely created in faovor both of reading Xpistos as “Messaiah,” Israel’s representative, and of understanding the incorporative phrases at the end of the chapter as gaining their meaning from this sens. Because Jesus is the Messiah, he sums up his people in himself, so that what is true of him is true of them (The Climax of the Covenant, pp. 47-48; Emphasis added).

It is not only about Jesus’ bare humanity. His solidarity with Israel as Israel’s king, Is role as a king to the priestly people, the entire history of Israel through judges, kings, and empires is all part of the work that comes to a climax in the death and resurrecton of Christ.

And it is all implied in that royal title.

Just another thing to remember under the category, “The Meaning of Christmas.”

For Further Reading