We live in a culture where tolerance is the highest virtue (that is, if your views line up with the current cultural narrative; if they don’t, then they are not tolerated; they are canceled—but that’s a different article). All (progressive) views must be tolerated, really celebrated. When celebrities “come out of the closet” and declare that they are gay or lesbian or transsexual or non-binary or whatever other self-determined version of sexual identity they have devised, their view must be accepted, even applauded.

This glorification of tolerance even influences Christmas.

Listen to these words from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. “The coming of God is truly not only a joyous message, but is, first, frightful news for anyone who has a conscience.” Well, there you go! I’m afraid that we’ve turned the Christmas season into a “safe space,” and Bonhoeffer will have none of it. We don’t mind Christmas as long as it is about a baby. Babies are sweet and innocent and cuddly. Even the phrase “swaddling clothes” sounds cute. We don’t mind Christmas as long as it is about a homeless couple and an unwed mother and an immigrant family needing refuge. These are socially acceptable themes. So-called progressive thinkers can rally around all the social justice narratives they weave into the nativity. But Bonhoeffer reminds us—if we have a conscience enough to hear it—that the coming of Jesus into the world can be frightful news. You see, there came a point in time—the Apostle Paul would call it the “fullness of time”—when God said, “Enough is enough. They have spurned my promises, they have spurned my law, they have spurned my prophets. I must go there myself, in the form of my Son, and declare right from wrong, hold people accountable, and begin the process of making all things right.”

Later in his life, Jesus himself would make this plain. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Mt. 10:34). Jesus did not come to make our lives comfortable; he came to stir things up. He didn’t come to agree with all our choices and affirm our commitment to self-determination. He came to tell us “No, you can’t do that. No, you can’t believe that. No, you can’t be that.” He had the audacity to tell us, “It is not about you. It is about me.”

Here is Bonhoeffer again. “We have become so accustomed to the idea of divine love and of God’s coming at Christmas that we no longer feel the shiver of fear that God’s coming should arouse in us. We are indifferent to the message, taking only the pleasant and agreeable out of it and forgetting the serious aspect, that the God of the world draws near to the people of our little earth and lays claim to us.” When Jesus came to earth, in the form of that baby in a manger, he didn’t come to be nice. He came to “lay claim” on us. I’m afraid that we have lost the “shiver of fear that God’s coming should arouse in us.”

As Bonhoeffer said, the message of Advent is “frightful news” to those who have a conscience. Our conscience tells us that something inside us is wrong, twisted, warped. When Jesus came, he came in judgment, he came in power, he came in authority. He came demanding answers. He came to call to account. He came with reckoning, with a plumbline in his hand. And this reckoning began at his first coming and will culminate at his second coming. Now, to those honest enough to say to him, in all humility, “I’ve messed up. I don’t measure up. I’ve failed. I’m a rebel to your great design. Have mercy on me, a sinner.”—to these the coming of Christ is good news, even if it brings us a “shiver of fear.” Why? Because, as Isaac Watts wrote in Joy to the World, “He came to make his blessings flow as far as the curse is found.” If we admit that the curse and its effects are found in us, then he has come for us, to save us, redeem us, change us, bless us. What a joy to be held to account, and then, found wanting, to have the consequences of our deficiencies paid by another.

The problem is this. We don’t mind the Lamb of God; we just can’t allow for the Lion of Judah. That’s not a plastic baby’s rattle in his hand, that’s a sword.