IS Christmas over for you – at least, until next year? For some people maybe it feels as though it never started.

While most of us have been partying, others have been working hard maintaining the essential services on which we rely. For others, current circumstances or memories of past years make everything just too painful (and seeing people having fun may only make things feel worse).

But over Christmas week most of us were celebrating, probably with some combination of time off work, spending time with family or friends, special meals, giving and receiving presents, decorations around the house, and maybe going to church.

But now, is it all over? Is the fridge empty, and the decorations packed away? Maybe you have had to go back to work, and normal life has resumed.

For Christians Christmas is both something we need to stay with and something we need to move beyond. When Jesus was born at Bethlehem, God became human (‘incarnate’ is the technical term – ‘Hail, the incarnate deity’ we sing in Hark the Herald Angels Sing). From that point God knows what it is like to live a human life from the inside – God has not just lived with us, but has been one of us, experiencing our joys and our sorrows and all it is to be human.

As the letter to the Hebrews reminds us: ‘For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.’ And it’s not like Secret Millionaire or Undercover Boss, where someone rich pretends to be something else for a short time in order to find out what life is really like for other people. Jesus truly became human, remained human and is still human now. There’s an element of humanity now permanently part of God.

But Christians can’t just stay with the baby lying in the manger at Bethlehem. Because that baby grew up, and when he became an adult he taught and healed, was crucified and rose again. If he hadn’t grown up he wouldn’t have had the experience of human life I’ve already talked about. And if he hadn’t grown up he wouldn’t have done anything for us – neither teaching us about how to live, nor dying and rising so we too could share his eternal life.

St Athanasius in the fourth century wrote that Jesus ‘became human so that we might become God’, and it is what he did as an adult that makes that possible.

So whether you’re still celebrating Christmas, or whether you’ve mentally moved on, you’ve captured at least half of the truth!