Peter Wehner’s piece for Christmas is beautiful. Jesus came through a family full of brokenness and dysfunction. That is significant for each of us and will hopefully move us past the perfect postcard pictures we’re flooded with in this season.

The disreputable lineage of Jesus reminds us of something else as well: Past is not prologue. If Jesus himself came from a line of murderers, adulterers, cheats and frauds, the Rev. Scott Dudley, senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Wash., told me, “then there is hope for all of us. He’s a cycle-breaker showing that generations of dysfunction don’t have to be predictive of future events. Cycles can be broken. Systems can be replaced. Families — and therefore whole nations — can be healed.”

This is the great hope of Christmas. Cycles can be broken. Deep wounds can be healed. Forgiveness can set us free.

In our brokenness, in our grief, in our sorrow, in our anger and anxiety and fear… Christ has come. The anxiety and brokenness we feel today is not the future that is set in stone before us. Christ has come.

Christ sets me free to love those I would rather be angry with. He pours forgiveness into my own life when it is undeserved, allowing me to be free from hurt because I can now forgive others.

He has come through brokenness, into chaos, and he brings peace.

Rejoice!

Christ has come.