Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. The excitement is palpable, especially since Frosty and Rudolph have engulfed us since the moment Halloween was over.

However, I mention with reservation that some Christians seem somewhat dissatisfied with the Christmas story. It seems we want a powerful Saviour, not one limited to the poverty of swaddling clothes. We, therefore, tack onto the Christmas story an alternate that anticipates Jesus’ Second Coming.

As Christians, we profess that God enters the world in the ordinary humanity of Jesus as one of us for all of us. Jesus’ story begins as born into a nondescript family in a defeated nation. Jesus is the physical reality of God’s revelation, the flesh and blood of God’s living, still-speaking Word. Jesus is God’s full investment in revelation. Or so we say we believe.

This historical revelation of an uncompromisingly peaceful, humble Saviour is what we have from God whether we are satisfied with it or not. However, some insist on adding the alternate Jesus of the Second Coming to fill in our own demands of who Jesus should be.

Hans Kung and other scholars have long argued that we should understand the end-time accounts the way we read the creation myths. Genesis is meaningful in ways much more profound than the literal reading about talking snakes and magical trees. Myths of “In those days … the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken” are similarly poetic rather than historically prophetic.

Is it because we’re afraid or unwilling to deal with the implications of the Christmas story in our present that we add on these alternate, future Second Coming stories? When Jesus comes at Christmas, God reveals God’s own self, and also who we should be. Jesus as us is both privilege and responsibility. Instead of Second Coming stories of an all-powerful Jesus whose judgments are fearsome and where we simply watch as bystanders, Jesus’ first coming at Christmas is God living completely and selflessly into the creation mystery that we are created in the image and likeness of God — so act like it.

The joyous, hope-filled promises of Christmas begin with the peaceful stories that bring many believers together on Christmas Eve as we remember Luke’s story of the babe born in the humbleness of an animal’s manger and angels sent to shepherds “keeping watch over their flock by night.” Many will gather in candlelit churches to share in the wonder of this profound revelation, that if it were not biblical would be challenged as a blasphemous depiction of the Almighty. How could this divine surprise meld with the prophecies of a mighty Saviour?

One way is to mitigate it by appending the Saviour some prefer onto the lived revelation of Jesus. We convince ourselves that the Jesus who ministered to the outcasts, the sinners, the downtrodden and beaten, the radical Jesus whose origin story is that He came into the world and was wrapped in swaddling clothes, torn pieces of rags, is almost an aberration. The real, eternal Jesus, the Second Coming Jesus, is again about power, judgment and punishment. This makes the first story more palatable for some.

However, what if instead Jesus’ first coming at Christmas and the life He lived are the whole and holy self-revelation of God and the proleptic revelation of who we should be? I wonder if this helps to explain the Gospel passage that has elicited verbal acrobatics for generations. Forty to 50 years after His life, three evangelists all share Jesus’ words that “this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” “All these things” are the aforementioned cosmological and eschatological events that have never happened, and yet, Jesus’ generation had died. Decades later the evangelists share this message without the embarrassment of a failed prediction.

Jesus and those earliest Christians must not have been looking thousands of years into the future. It was “this generation,” Jesus’ generation. The imagery of cosmic failure is poetic, not prophetic. It’s meant to emphasize the lasting importance of Jesus’ first coming — “But my words will not pass away.” It is Jesus’ first coming in the extraordinary ordinariness of His humanity that reveals the power of God and the promise that lives in every generation and person who believes that “in Christ,” as it says some 90 times in the New Testament, we must struggle to build a better world by being better people.

Christmas is God’s unbelievable trust in humanity. If we would only believe as God believes in us, then we would not fill the world with so much savagery. When Jesus comes as a child bereft of wealth, power and title, He comes as one of us for all of us. “In Christ,” the possible becomes the plausible.

I pray that Christmas will fill us with wonder, and may that wonder transform us so that we give glory to God in the highest heaven by nurturing on Earth peace among all God’s beloved peoples.

The First Congregational Church of Sunderland, United Church of Christ, has ministered to local communities since 1717. The church’s website and Facebook page are found under First Congregational Church of Sunderland. The church’s phone number is 413-665-7987. To reach the Rev. Randy Calvo, email him at randyc1897@gmail.com. The Christmas Eve worship service begins at 6 p.m. and will include brass instruments, the handbell choir, vocal choir, Anthony Tracia at the organ and piano, and “Silent Night” sung by candlelight.