"All About The Cross"...?

I recently heard for the first time this Christmas Song that emphasizes that what happens on Christmas is really about Good Friday and Easter. That the real focus is not the celebration of Jesus birth but the power of his Crucifixion and Resurrection. I understand this view, but I think it misses something important.

In my opinion, the Cross is a very important key to understanding what God was doing in and through the man Jesus. We cannot UNDERSTAND the significance of what happens on Christmas unless we understand what happens on Good Friday and Easter. However, I do not think that Christmas is 'all about the Cross' I think the Cross is 'all about Christmas'. The Cross is the cost of the Incarnation, it is an inevitable consequence of God choosing to become man and doing what He has to do to save us. However, it is my opinion that it is the Incarnation, and not the Crucifixion, that holds salvific power and significance. The Cross is the cost of our salvation, it is not what saves us.

God became man to enter into a system that the devil had set up. The devil had done a pretty good job of convincing the world that he was god. People saw God as power, as control, and as material benefit. In Matthew 19:16-26, the disciples are shocked, yes shocked, by Jesus' pronouncement that rich people were not destined for heaven. Wealth was seen by people to be a natural sign of God's blessings upon them. Success, power, money, fame, these were seen to be signs of God's special favor and presence with a person. Caesar was god, for most of the world. This was not a new thing. Political leaders had been worshiped for a long time.

Jesus' coming is God's breaking of this lie. No longer could we naturally assume that suffering meant God's disfavor or even testing. Nor could God be naturally associated with control or power as we normally understand it. God's entry into the humblest of forms, His taking on of radical vulnerability, reveals the devil to be a lie, and turns our understanding of who we are who God is on it's head. This is a direct encounter with God, and indeed Jesus must be a direct encounter with God to have the power to break the devil's hold. Affinities with Girard's work here should be obvious.

But whereas for Girard the Cross is central to God's saving act, for me it is the very fact that God cloaked Himself in vulnerability that is salvific. If God came as a vulnerable, poor little baby, that in and of itself would say enough about God to be sufficient. Of course such a coming would be fruitless, for it would remain unseen. No, God had to live the life of vulnerable, suffering love, as a human being. He had to maintain that cloak of radical, human vulnerability all the while throwing off the pressure to become what satan thought god really was. Any human life such as this would inevitably lead to suffering and death, and surely God knew this from the beginning. It was the cost of the revelation, and the clearest and loudest expression of it, but it is the act of the Incarnation as an act of divine revealing that brings about salvation.

Christmas is not about the Cross, the Cross is about Christmas.