A few weeks ago, I was in the countryside of Pracht, Germany located in the well-known area called the Rhineland. As my wife, Sue, and I strolled, looking over rolling, green hills dotted with herds of sheep, I paused to think how this scenery may well have been familiar to my mother’s Jewish family who once lived in country towns a little further up the Rhine valley.

I was in Germany to teach at a conference on Messianic Jewish Biblical perspectives for people who had gathered from across the country.  Sue and I developed some genuine new friendships with the believers, German speakers conversing with us in halting English. I was touched to hear of their great love for Israel. When I shared my recurring memories of the Holocaust – family members, including young children, who thought of themselves as loyal Germans and were murdered just a generation ago – our hosts spoke to us of their own deep regrets.

We were a bit early for the Christmas markets that are a delightful part of the seasonal celebrations in these parts. The market at Merode Castle in Langerwehe (a bedroom community of Cologne) is a special local event featuring local crafters. Perhaps I will go there someday; it is where my grandmother’s family, the Jacobs, lie buried according to a book on local history. It’s where my mother lived before her family fled to Palestine in 1933.

I never thought I would come to Germany, but I have – more than once now, as the customs officer reminded me when we landed in Frankfurt. In family memories, this is the land of darkness. The land of Gentiles. A place that remembers Christmas, but bears little witness to Yeshua.

Of course, those seasonal celebrations – I was at a Christmas market in Berlin just a few years ago – are superficial reminders of a Jewish child’s birthday, a day that my Israeli Messianic friends call “Yom Yeshua.” 

Sue and I looked out on the sheep in the fields of Pracht and recalled the shepherds of Judah. The crowds walked among decorative hay ricks and decorated mangers – imitations that belong to an ancient Jewish town in the Judean hills. And yet they are sharing in a promise to Israel; one that the prophet Isaiah described with what now appears to be touching accuracy:

The people living in darkness
have seen a great light;
upon those living in the land that lies
in the shadow of death, light has dawned.

Almost 90 years ago, my family was driven out of this country because of darkness – and yet, as among my own people, some have found light. Among those I met in Germany was a remarkable woman whose Jewish father, came to faith as a boy in a concentration camp due to the witness of two older women of faith. Another was an Israeli believer married to a German. Her family had gone to Palestine from Cologne around the same time as my grandparents. We wondered if our families had known each other.  Finding each other was a special joy.

This is the truly amazing blessing that I’ve found in Yeshua.  The wounds of the past find healing; old scars no longer prevent me from being a voice of spiritual peace to people whom I had once disdained as not worth knowing.

The presence of “the holy child” Yeshua overcomes all the tinsel shallowness of the season with the genuinely penetrating light of truth: we are all sinners rescued by grace.  Don’t we all need more light? 

As we enter a new year, may Yeshua indeed light your path, “…like the morning sun,  shining ever brighter till the full light of day” (Proverbs 4:18).