Why Christians Celebrate Christmas (especially in a pandemic)
No other books from the ancient world are read every week in every country across the world, studied as avidly, or quoted from so frequently as the gospels that tell the story of Jesus. When you get time (the slow days after Christmas are as good as any) - just read a bit beyond the familiar Christmas stories in one of them. You will find unfolding before your eyes a portrait of someone from whom a mysterious power seemed to flow – a power that the early Christians could only describe with one word: Love. It’s an overused word in our culture, but had little to do with romance or even emotions. It was that the secure, steady, persistent capacity to joyfully surrender his own fortunes, longings and eventually his life, for the sake of others.
This kind of love not only expressed sympathy, as most of us might do; it actually changed things. There was Zacchaeus – the filthy rich tax official, despised by just about everyone as an agent of the occupying Roman power and as a cheat, as many of his fellow revenue collectors were. The equivalent for us would be the reviled loan shark, preying on the poor by charging extortionate interest. On visiting Zacchaeus’s hometown of Jericho – in contrast to everyone else, who refused to speak to him and treated him as a pariah – Jesus made a bee-line for this loathsome man, and invited himself to his home, a place no one else would be seen dead in (this kind of love has little to do with feelings of attraction). The result was dramatic – Zacchaeus resolved to give away fifty per cent of his bank balance, and promised repayment and more to anyone who he might have cheated or demanded extra cash from in the past.
Then there was the woman caught having sex with someone else’s husband and summoned by the religious police to face justice. Just as the (presumably male) crowd begin to pick up stones for the public execution that her crime was thought to deserve, they turn to Jesus for his expected confirmation of the sentence passed on her. Enigmatically, he bends down and starts scratching something in the dust with his finger while they wait for his verdict. ‘OK,’ he says, ‘who is going to be first to stone her? I have an idea – why don’t we find someone who has never had a lustful thought towards a woman like this and let them start . . .?’ Silence. Slowly the stones drop to the ground and the crowd slips away, leaving just the woman and Jesus. ‘I don’t condemn you,’ he says. ‘Just go – make a new start, but mind you don’t get into this mess again.’
This power of this love was so strong and creative, it sometimes healed physical sickness, and even, on a couple of occasions, so it was said, brought people back from the dead, such as the time he and his friends bumped into a funeral procession. The young man in the open coffin was the only son of a woman who had already lost her husband some time before. Jesus, it seems, was grieved in his own spirit at the heart-rending sobbing of the mother, now left alone and defenceless in the world. He reaches out his hand and touches the bier, tells him to get up, upon which the boy suddenly sits up and begins to talk. Jesus helps him down, takes him to his mother and the joy that follows is left to our imagination.
Stories like this recur throughout the Gospels. They are even given a name: the ‘kingdom of God’ – the state where things happen the way they were always meant to be in the beginning before everything got twisted. It is what happens when everything gets wrapped up in love. The point of the early Christians’ belief that Jesus, the baby in the manger, was God’s Son, the ‘reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being’, as they put it, is that these things that Jesus did reveal our Creator to us. Forget the angry old man with the white beard shaking his fist and flinging curses on whoever irritates him – that is Thor or Zeus, not the God of the Christians. Forget the impassive despot dispensing good fortune and bad, depending on whatever mood he is in. When Jesus heals a leper, welcomes a loan shark, forgives an adulterer, gives a grieving widow her son back from the clutches of death, that is what God does. It’s not that God doesn’t get angry. He does. But he gets angry at everything that threatens to dismantle and destroy the good things he has made – and that includes the pride, envy and greed that diminishes us, breaks up our friendships and destroys our (or better, his) planet.
Christians celebrate Christmas, and even suffer for it, because in the face of the man this baby grew up to be, we see the Love that created the world. It is the Big Bang with a face and a name. If you translated God, the Creator of the world, into an ordinary human life, this is what it would look like. It’s what it did look like. This was not one of the regular appearances of divine beings in mortal form, the staple of many Greek myths, but the God behind the gods, the mysterious source of everything that exists, appearing before their very eyes, no longer invisible but the visible ‘image of the invisible God’. You couldn’t tell immediately – there was no obvious halo behind his head, or phosphorescent glow to his flesh (apart from one dramatic occasion when a small group of his closest friends suddenly saw a luminous, brilliant light shining out of him on the top of a mountain). You could shake his hand as with any other human being, but if you had eyes to see it, when you did, you were shaking the hand of God. No wonder strange things happened around him.
Of course, it took the early Christians several centuries to work out the full implications of the mind-bending possibility that God had appeared on earth, like an author suddenly appearing in the middle of his own novel. But the basic outlines of the belief are there from very early days. Christians say that God is love not because they think it would be convenient if he was, and certainly not because the world is a nice place and the creation as we experience it points unambiguously to a good and kind God (this year more than ever, we should know that!). They say it because they believe that God has revealed his hand, or more exactly, showed us his face, in the face of Jesus.
This year we have endured things we never thought we would have to experience. We have missed, or even lost loved ones. We have seen the injustice of a world where black lives don’t seem to matter as much as white ones. We have come face to face with our frailty, our fears and with the ugly spectre of death itself. Into that messy, malfunctioning world, Christmas gives us an assurance that, despite everything that spoils it, it was originally born out of love, and will end in love – the love that becomes visible in the compassion turned towards a grieving widow, a despised tax official, a guilty woman – people just like you and me in our worst moments. It invites us to tune and shape our lives not to the forces that want to undo the world - a destructive virus, the disease of racism - but to the ordinary and extraordinary power of this love that comforts the lonely, forgives the repentant, gives time for those who are usually ignored, and enables us to find our true selves in the process.
It is a message that we need to hear this year more than ever.
If you want to read more, these thoughts are developed in Why Being Yourself is a Bad Idea (SPCK, 2020)
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