This time of year it’s easy to feel all angry and holier-than-thou when we see something like this:
So, who put the X in Christmas, or, who put the X in Xmas?
Should we, as believers, feel ok with seeing ‘Xmas’ written everywhere at this time of year?
There is a sense of dismay, even anger, when we feel that Christ has been taken out of Christmas, even if just semantically and not in a wider sense (different issue!).
But, when we pause and take a step back, when we look into why Xmas is not so heretical, we see that this idea of our Lord and Saviour being removed from the very time of year we celebrate His birth by writing ‘Xmas’ is actually founded in nothing.
In Greek, the original language of the New Testament, Christ is written like this:
Χριστός.
What do you notice at the start?
Χριστός.
We see an x, don’t we? See, as Dave Shirley writes,
“In the Greek alphabet the letter X (chi) may be used as an abbreviation for Christ, a symbol of the anointed Messiah”.
Think, then, about growing in the knowledge of X,
experiencing the love of X,
living in the grace of X,
having your sins covered by the blood of X,
and you will soon start to see X as Christ, and Christ as X.
When you read X, did you actually say ‘Christ’ in your mind?
Same person,
different language.
Same meaning,
different letters.
Same life-giving, sin-covering, and death-defeating Jesus.
So, X put the X in Xmas, just as He put the Christ in Christmas.
This devotional, and everything we’ll post in December, comes from an advent reading plan produced for Saar Fellowship in Bahrain.
To pick up a paper copy on Amazon, click here:
James Travis 