I experienced something fourteen years ago that haunts me every Christmas season.

The local hospital gave me, its legal counsel, a call three days after Christmas to come over for a "life-support termination." These are sober occasions when a comatose patient kept alive by means of a ventilator that does the breathing is found by attending and consulting physicians to have no possibility of return to a "cognitive, sapient state." This means that the abnormalities detected in brain activity or the absence of any activity indicate that the patient will remain in a permanent, vegetative state and will not return to conscious, human functions. When such a condition is found, the attending physicians, nursing case manager, social worker, chaplain, and sometimes the lawyer, gather with the family to inform them of the reality and ask them if they want to terminate the life support.

In this case, a young man eighteen years of age was lying still and unresponsive in the hospital’s intensive care unit. He had entered the United States from Mexico illegally, and come to El Norte from a little town in the mountains of central Mexico to find work and hope. I imagine that in the loneliness of being so far from home and family at Christmas and vulnerable by age and alien status to the influence of others, he "partied" on Christmas eve with some "friends." The alcohol numbed the ache in his heart, but the super-potent PCP that laced the cigarette they gave him inflicted severe and irreparable damage to his cerebral cortex. He collapsed on a sidewalk of a downtown street sometime in the cold of early Christmas morning. The friends vanished and there he lay for over twelve hours, probably stepped over and ignored as a sleeping drunk. At nightfall, the police found him and an ambulance brought him in.

The hospital tracked down his parents and a church had them flown up. When I met them in the hospital conference room, I saw a handsome couple in their late thirties. They were tall and slender with striking dark eyes and dressed in the clean, simple clothing of people accustomed to hard work with pride. Their dignity left a profound impression. The physicians told them the background and prognosis. Through a translator, I informed them of their medical and legal options. They listened carefully and answered my questions with nods.

"Si," they understood that their son would never again move, talk, or even think.

"Si," they knew that the machine was keeping him alive by breathing for him.

"Si," they knew that turning off the machine would mean he would stop breathing for ever, his heart would stop, and he would die. I am always acutely conscious of my Adam’s apple when I ask such questions. It always feels like it’s going to fall out of my throat in reaction to voicing such terrible, irrevocable truths.

"Si," they wanted the machine turned off and would sign the paper consenting to this. The father signed stoically. I watched the mother. Her eyes were a maelstrom of disbelief, pain, and sorrow as she signed and the notary gave the finality of her stamp.

"No one brings a child into the world for this," I thought. No one could envision the child of their womb, unconscious, dying, abandoned, and cold on a grimy sidewalk on Christmas. These two people gave him life. It was clear that they loved him and were people of principle. But whether he had begun his life abandoned and cold on a city sidewalk or in the warmth of hope as the first child of a young couple who started their life together, what he did with that life was his choice. Life is a gift precisely because of this element of choice. It is a cruel hoax and an oxymoron to give a "conditional gift." Life is neither "owed" or "forced." It is created and redeemed by Christ in the risk of love that it will be honored and appreciated as sacred.

My presence at the conference table with the grieving parents was an attempt to manage the risk. I represented the law. I could not give life to their boy. I could only see that the paperwork was in order so that the hospital and the physicians could not be blamed for his death. Truly, "the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life" (2 Cor. 3:6). Life and death are always arrayed on the storm front between the controlled and the uncontrollable, and there the lawyer is no more than the meteorologist passing on warnings to take cover and strategies for avoidance of the fury.

As terrible as it is to see that risk of love actualized in failure, it is no reason to withhold the gift, reject it, demand payment for it, or hoard it against loss. It is easy to forget this truth in a world so full of wrong and inequity in a season so full of demand for reciprocation, whether of kindness or vengeance. We stagger through the activities and appearances of the season under the load of social indebtedness, laboring under the burden of proof of love. "We’re making our lists and checking them twice, trying to find out who was naughty or nice," concerned all the while where we might appear on someone else’s list. We speak of our gifts in terms of exchange and bargains. Our anxiety peaks and craters over whether gifts and preparations given or received will make us acceptable. Our relationships are transformed into pageants and the performances are all by command. "In those days a decree went forth from the Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered" (Luke 2:1). It is the season of Martha, not Mary (Luke 10:38–42).

Into this world where our gifts come with warranties of "fitness for a particular purpose," but the stores are still jammed on December 26 with the recipients seeking to exchange them for something they like better; into this world where eighteen-year-olds seek to anaesthetize their loneliness and thus die alone outside on the sidewalk; Jesus came. But he didn’t come to make our endeavors nice and legal. He came to recreate us. "The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ" (John 1:17). "No," Jesus told Nicodemus, a teacher of Israel, "you guys can’t work it out between you no matter how hard you try. What you need is a fresh start from above and that’s why I’m here. The horizontal won’t cut it. It’s time for the vertical" (John. 3:1–15, my paraphrase).

One night last week, when my wife Patricia and I walked under the vault of deep blue illumined by a full moon, she brought all of this into perspective for me. "I’m really tired of all this talk of Christmas as the time to treat each other better, be good and generous and forgiving and all that stuff. That’s not what the season is about at all. The season is about the cross. Christ came to save us because we are lost and dying. Everything else is delusion." Her observation is not warm and fuzzy or neatly wrapped with tinsel and ribbon, but it is grace, and it is, most assuredly, truth.

Listen to the straight talk Jesus gave Nicodemus, as paraphrased by Eugene Peterson in The Message:

This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life. God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again. Anyone who trusts in him is acquitted; anyone who refuses to trust him has long since been put under the death sentence without knowing it. And why? Because of that person’s failure to believe in the one-of-a kind Son of God when introduced to him.

This is the crisis we’re in: God-light streamed into the world, but men and women everywhere ran for the darkness. They went for the darkness because they were not really interested in pleasing God. Everyone who makes a practice of doing evil, addicted to denial and illusion, hates God-light and won’t come near it, fearing a painful exposure. But anyone working in truth and reality welcomes God-light so the work can be seen for the God-work it is. (John 3:16–21)

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