Scripture: Isaiah 7:2-14
Our movie begins, appropriately enough for this holiday weekend, on Thanksgiving, with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Before the parade starts, a man who calls himself Kris Kringle—i.e., the “real” Santa Claus—tries to give the Macy’s Santa tips on how to be more like the real thing.
[Show Clip #1]
I love Christmas music—both the sacred hymns and carols that we sing in church and the secular Christmas songs… the ones that are about the season of Christmas itself. But I don’t love all of the secular Christmas songs. For instance, I could live without “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” Or remember, back in the ’80s, that dog barking out “Jingle Bells”?
My least favorite Christmas song, however, is one that many people obviously like… Bruce Springsteen, for instance, likes it. We hear his version of it, over and over, this time of year. And if you like it, too, please forgive me: But the song goes like this: [in a threatening tone:] “You better watch out/ You better not cry/ You better not pout, I’m telling you why…” Y’all know the song. “He knows if you’ve been bad or good/ So be good for goodness’ sake.”
Be good for goodnesss’ sake… But even that line is a lie… If you’re being coerced into be good, you’re not being good “for goodness’ sake”; you’re being good for the sake of avoiding punishment… or in order to receive gifts from Santa!
Am I overthinking this? I don’t think so!
Look… There’s no bigger fan of Santa Claus than yours truly—I love him. But because I love the real Santa, I can’t stand that song. It doesn’t describe the Santa I know and love.
Because when I was a kid, I was “bad”… plenty of times… even after my parents warned me—starting around Thanksgiving—that Santa might not come if I misbehaved. Or, at the very least, he’d bring fewer gifts if I wasn’t good.
Every kid I knew accepted this fact. It was part of the Christmas propaganda.
But here’s the truth: I never saw any correlation between my “badness” and the gifts Santa brought on Christmas morning—thank heaven! The Santa I experienced wasn’t the Santa of that song.
No… Like the good Christian saint he is, Saint Nicholas operates on pure grace!
And that’s what the gospel of Jesus Christ means… That’s how God loves us. On the basis of pure grace!
So, getting back to the movie, while I agree, of course, that this drunk department store Santa should be fired, I worry that Kris Kringle isn’t quite as compassionate as he ought to be. This alcoholic clearly needs help. He needs healing! Instead, Kris gives him a tongue-lashing: “You are a disgrace… I refuse to have you malign me in this fashion!”
I’m glad Jesus doesn’t treat us that when we fail. After all, the New Testament says we’re supposed to imitate Christ—to represent him—to become Christ-like. For instance, 1 John 2:6: “Those who say they live in God should live their lives as Jesus did.”
In our efforts to look like Jesus, do we ever make Jesus look bad? Absolutely!
The apostle Peter did! That frightened disciple denied Jesus three times because he was afraid he’d be killed too. In that moment, Peter was nothing like Jesus!
But thank God that wasn’t the end of Peter’s story. Later, in Acts 4 and 5, we meet a transformed Peter standing before the same religious authorities Jesus faced, except this time they threaten Peter with death if he keeps preaching. Yet he says he won’t stop. He can’t. “We must obey God rather than men,” he says.[1]
Why the change?
Because Jesus didn’t simply forgive Peter when he denied him. Jesus didn’t say, “You better watch out… You better behave differently next time.” No, he gave Peter the power to be different. In Acts chapter 2, he gave him the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
And good news: Christ has given us this same Spirit—who empowers us to become more and more like him as we continue to trust in him.
By the way, I included Kris’s conversation with Alfred, that young janitor who works at Macy’s, for two reasons: First, when Alfred describes dressing up like Santa and handing out toys to kids, he’s someone who imitates the “real Santa” far better than the drunken Santa we saw earlier.
Also, when Kris asks him, “Do you enjoy impersonating me?” Alfred doesn’t contradict him. He doesn’t say, “Impersonating you? What do you mean? You’re not the real Santa Claus!”
No… Alfred simply believes Kris is the real Santa. He has faith.
Speaking of faith… let’s watch the next clip… Doris Walker, the Macy’s employee we just saw, organized the parade. She’s a divorced mother of a precocious child named Susie, played by Natalie Wood. In this clip, Susie is watching the Macy’s parade from a neighbor’s apartment. The neighbor is Fred Gailey, a lawyer.
[Show Clip #2]
Doris Walker, as you can sense from this clip, prides herself on being reasonable, realistic, and level-headed. She isn’t naive or gullible, and she’s taught her daughter to be the same way. They don’t believe in anything they can’t see or touch.
King Ahaz from Isaiah 7 could relate to them! Sure, he may sound pious when he says, “I will not put the Lord to the test,” but his faith is mostly fraudulent. He plans to enter a military alliance with Assyria—trusting their power and protection against his two enemies—an alliance of Syria and the northern kingdom of Israel.
Isaiah urges him not to enter this alliance. He tells Ahaz that God alone will protect Judah, rescue them, and defeat their enemies. So trust in God, not people! “If you are not firm in faith,” Isaiah warns, “you will not be firm at all.”[2]
It’s in this context that Isaiah offers the famous “sign of Immanuel”: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.”[3] Matthew reminds us that Immanuel means “God with us.”
But Ahaz fails this test of faith. He prefers what he can see with his eyes over the God he can only see through faith.
Trusting in Assyria for military help, after all, feels “reasonable and realistic and level-headed.”
But it isn’t faith.
Now consider this: when the Holy Spirit conceived Jesus in Mary’s womb, God became—in the most literal way possible—a part of Mary. Physically connected to her. No human being in history at that point had ever been closer to God than Mary… because Jesus is God.
That is awe-inspiring: God himself living within her.
Yet the same Holy Spirit—the Spirit of Christ—now lives within us. Jesus is no less connected to us than he was to Mary… even more so.
How should that change the way we live ow? If we could feel Jesus’ own hand resting on our shoulder when he asked us to do difficult but necessary things, wouldn’t we obey him more readily?
Yet that’s what it means that Christ is our Immanuel.
It takes faith. Do we believe it?
If we’re not firm in faith, we will not be firm at all…
Well… the world is filled with skeptical people like Doris Walker and Susie… Do we want to win them to the gospel of Jesus Christ?
Kris Kringle shows us an excellent way to do that in this next scene!
Please note: this movie was made in 1947, shortly after the end of World War II.
[Show Clip #3]
I’m not crying! I was chopping onions!
God’s Word says:
Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.[4]
Jesus said, “So now I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other. Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.”[5]
So, in this next clip, after Macy’s hires Kris Kringle to be Santa, suddenly lots of good things start happening.
[Show Clip #4]
Notice the movie is called “Miracle on 34th Street,” but if you follow it closely, there’s only one ambiguously miraculousthing that happens—at the very end—and it doesn’t even take place on 34th Street, where the Macy’s store is located.
In fact, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything in the movie that most people would call miraculous.
Instead, you see, for example, fierce business rivals, Macy and Gimbel, adopting Kris’s strategy—not out of the kindness of their hearts, mind you—but because it creates all this goodwill and free publicity, which leads to more customers and greater profits for their stores. In spite of their motives, good things happen like… Kris’s doctor gets the x-ray machine that he needs. People are inspired to become more generous, to reject some of the greed and consumerism of the holidays.
And, by the end of the movie, even hardened skeptics like Doris Walker experience a change of heart and learn the importance of faith in things we can’t see with our eyes or deposit in our bank accounts.
Whatever the miracle on 34th Street is, it’s not anything that most people would call “supernatural.”
I like the way the movie portrays these kinds of so-called “lesser” miracles… not because I don’t also believe in more conspicuously supernatural miracles… of course I do! But I like these lesser miracles in the movie because they portray the way God works in our lives most of the time. We call this providence.
For instance, when I visit someone in the hospital who’s having a potentially life-saving medical procedure, I pray that God will physically heal that person. And when I do, I usually expect God to furnish this healing through the work of gifted doctors and nurses, sophisticated technology, and medicine. I expect God to heal through these otherwise natural, fully explainable channels.
And when that person is healed in this way, I believe that they’re healed by God every bit as much as if Jesus were right there in the flesh, saying, “Take up your mat and walk.” And I praise God for the healing! Because it comes from him.
This kind of miracle may not be as dramatic as the parting of the Red Sea, but it’s still God, and God does this sort of thing for his children all the time.
While Kris is working at Macy’s nearby, Fred Gailey, the neighbor, agrees to let Kris move in with him. Kris thinks being close to Susie and her mother will give him the opportunity to soften their hearts regarding the existence of Santa Claus. In this scene, while tucking Susie into bed, Kris asks her what she wants for Christmas.
[Show Clip #5]
Asking for something from Santa isn’t the same as prayer, of course, but it’s easy enough to find an analogy in this movie…
For instance, notice that Kris gives Susie a good explanation for why our prayers sometimes go unanswered. Like the child asking Santa for a B-29 bomber, we can’t often foresee the consequences of getting what we ask for.
What if an answered prayer harmed us—or someone else? What if it disrupted something better that God intends for us or for his kingdom? Only God can weave together all the possibilities and all the prayers of all his people to accomplish good for us, for the world, and for God’s kingdom.
And God hears the deeper prayer underneath our prayer requests.
Take Susie’s wish for a house, a yard, and a swing, for instance. She’s not really asking for mere material things; she wants her mother to be happy and to know love again. She wants a father. We can trust, therefore, that God hears that deeper prayer… and that he will always answer that deeper prayer.
Jesus said, “You parents—if your children ask for a loaf of bread, do you give them a stone instead? Or if they ask for a fish, do you give them a snake? Of course not!”[6] God will only give what is for our good.
As so often happens when someone does good in the world, enemies appear. For Kris, it’s Mr. Sawyer, from the personnel department. He fancies himself a psychologist and insists Kris is not only delusional for claiming to be Santa, but dangerous—someone with “latent maniacal tendencies.” While Sawyer is wrong, Kris does give him a well-deserved whack on the head with an umbrella. Sawyer then uses the incident to have Kris committed to Bellevue. The judge is prepared to lock him away when Mr. Gailey comes to Kris’s defense.
Gailey’s challenge is to prove to the State of New York that Kris really is Santa. And when his law firm fears the case will damage their reputation, Gailey resigns so he can represent Kris anyway. In this scene, he explains his decision to Doris, whom he is now courting for marriage.
[Show Clip #6]
Notice what Fred Gailey is willing to give up in order to do the right thing: the love of his life, his job, his reputation, his future employment prospects, his comfortable lifestyle. By any earthly measure he’s throwing his life away. Yet somehow, Fred believes that choosing what’s right is the way to truly “get ahead”—even if it doesn’t look that way by the world’s standards.
Jesus tells two short parables in Matthew 13 that help explain what’s happening here. “The kingdom of heaven,” he says, “is like a treasure hidden in a field.” A man stumbles across it and can hardly believe his good fortune. In his joy, he sells everything he owns to buy the field. “Or again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls.” One day he discovers a pearl so valuable, so extraordinary, that he joyfully parts with everything he has in order to possess it.
Why are Fred Gailey and the treasure finder and the pearl merchant all willing to give up so much?
Because they’ve discovered something far more valuable than anything they had before. What they gain far outweighs what they lose.
And what is that treasure for us?
For Christians, “those lovely intangibles” Fred talks about—like that treasure in the field, like that pearl of great value—all point toward the same reality: the free, overflowing, abundant life God offers us in Jesus Christ.
Yes, this treasure includes salvation, forgiveness of sin, and the promise of eternal life in God’s new creation. But it also includes a new kind of life now—a life filled with joy, peace, purpose, hope, love, and all the fruit of the Spirit. It’s the abundant life Jesus promised, the life that begins the moment we entrust ourselves to him.
And this gift of life became possible because of what God did at Christmas.
God himself entered our world as a frail, defenseless baby—born not in a palace, but in a barn, with a feeding trough for a bed. In Jesus Christ, God humbled himself, became a servant to us all, and ultimately shouldered the burden of our sins on the cross so that we could be forgiven, renewed, and welcomed into this new life that never ends.
This is the greatest gift of all—at Christmas or any time.
Have you received that gift? If not, I want you to know that God has wrapped this gift, placed it beneath the “tree” of your heart, written your name on the tag, and is waiting for you to open it. Open it and see for yourself. Discover, as Doris Walker will eventually realize, that these “lovely intangibles”—which include the infinite treasure we have in Christ—are the only things that truly matter.
In this final clip, we’ll see how Gailey wins his case…
[Show Clip #7]
[1] Acts 5:29
[2] Isaiah 7:9b ESV
[3] Isaiah 7:14b ESV
[4] 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 NLT
[5] John 13:34-35 NLT
[6] Matthew 7:9-10 NLT