(RNS) — Each December, we hear a well-meant admonition: “Keep Christ in Christmas.” I affirm that plea with my whole heart. The season of Christ’s birth should not be swallowed up by anxiety about gifts’ shipping dates, nor should the manger in Bethlehem be drowned in tinsel and emptied of wonder.

But there is a quieter, graver danger that does not wait for December and does not end when the lights come down: taking the Christ out of Christian. That happens whenever we subtract empathy from discipleship, whenever the self narrows our field of vision until we can no longer see the plight of our neighbor.

Empathy is not a soft substitute for holiness; it is the pulse of the Christian, and the Christmas, story. To call it a sin is to confuse the selfishness of self with the self-giving love of Jesus.

The irony, of course, is ancient. Many in Jesus’ day grew angry precisely because his heart was too open. He touched those deemed untouchable, ate with those labeled unworthy, healed on days deemed inconvenient and noticed people that others learned not to see. The complaint then — even from his own disciples — was that he was too near to the wrong people. 

The complaint now, in some corners, is that Christians are “sinfully empathetic.” The attitude lingers, even as the gospels show us a savior moved in his very gut by the pain before him.

If we let it, the season offers a gentle epiphany — a revelation about how God draws near. Consider a simple, sorrow-touched holiday tale: Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl.” A child, shivering in the snow, tries to sell matches as passersby hurry past, their errands louder than her hunger. She lights the matches one by one for a moment’s warmth; in the final, flickering glow, she sees the grandmother who loved her, and the story ends with a reunion in a place where compassion is not scarce.

Andersen’s tale is morose and melodious at once, a winter parable about our capacity to look away. Yet it is also about a tender hope that refuses to die. It asks each of us, softly but insistently: Would I have stopped? Would I have knelt? Or would I have tightened my scarf and quickened my step?

These questions are not meant to shame; they are meant to awaken. Empathy is the discipline of pausing long enough to imagine, “What if that were me? What if that were my child?” It is not agreement with every choice; it is the willingness to feel another’s ache long enough to ask what love requires.

Jesus models this over and over. When a woman accused of adultery is surrounded by those who would stone her to death, Jesus stills the violence first, then points her toward a better life. He touched the lepers before he healed them — restoring a human bond before restoring skin. With the hungry crowd, he fed them not because they proved worthy of bread, but because they were hungry. Such empathy is not weakness; it is holiness with hands.

There is, to be sure, a temptation in every age to harvest the political or social capital of Christianity without undertaking its cruciform work. In subtle ways, we can turn “Jesus is Lord” into “Jesus is useful,” wearing the mantle of faith as a veneer for our own authority. The Roman emperor Constantine tried to do as much, draping the cross in the colors of power. We need to ask which way our loyalty bends — toward self-sacrifice, or toward fear and force. The answer will be revealed, not by our slogans, but by our readiness to feel and to serve.

Empathy can be costly. It unsettles our schedules; it tugs at our resources; it asks us to carry one another’s burden. But the answer to compassion fatigue is not compassion famine.

Christmas itself is God’s gentle declaration that empathy is not a sin but the shape of divine love. “Emmanuel” — God with us — means God refuses to love from a safe altitude. Beautifully poetic, God learns our language, enters our sorrows and, in Jesus, weeps at a friend’s grave. If the cradle sanctifies anything, it sanctifies nearness. The cross confirms it: Love does not stand at the edge of suffering with folded arms; it steps toward the wounded and calls them “neighbor.”

Please, keep Christ in Christmas. But do not stop there. Keep Christ in Christian. Keep the tenderness that touches the untouchable, the patience that listens to the silenced, the mercy that moves from feeling to action. Empathy is the furthest thing from a sin; it is the soil in which Christian love takes root. For a Christianity that cannot feel will soon fail to love — and a church that trades empathy for power may gain the world and lose the Christ whose name it bears.

(The Rev. Jonathan B. Hall is senior pastor of the First Christian Church of North Hollywood. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)