The real meaning of Christmas, the reason for the season, etc.
I heard a talk/exhortation recently with which I almost entirely disagreed, so I’m taking to substack to say my piece.
The speaker began with the message we hear every year: don’t get caught up in secular Christmas and forget Christ. This is a good message, but if conveyed poorly it ends up sounding trite. But this version of it wasn’t trite; it was misguided and, I felt, missed the entire point of Christmas.
We need to remember Christ and not get caught up in secular Christmas, the speaker said, and I agree. This means, he said (and this is where we disagree), not decorating too early, and when we do decorate, the Nativity scene should be the focal point and most of the ornaments on the tree should be religious. Also, our Christmas cards should definitely have religious images.
Okay, none of these things is bad. In fact, I’d say this is all basically good! But it misses the entire point of Christmas. Christmas is not about getting decor right. It is not about a particular aesthetic style. It’s not even about the images of baby Jesus. All of this can be commercialized as easily as anything else.
It’s about baby Jesus himself. It’s about the fact that God himself entered into the squalor of human history, becoming human himself, and he did so because he loves us, because we’re in a mess that we can’t get ourselves out of. But he could get us out of it. And he did.
A couple years ago, my husband and I had an idea that we’d re-read all the Great Books, and we made it through about half of the Iliad before some major life changes crashed the project. The Iliad is an epic poem about a war, and it’s not for the faint of heart: Besides being very long, it’s full of violent acts described in graphic detail. As we were reading, I was surprised, over and over again, of the absolute helplessness of these epic war heroes. They are quite skilled at sending spears through different parts of their opponents’ bodies and out the other side, smashing each other with boulders, etc., and the narrator frequently reflects on the whole sorry situation. It seems like every time the two sides manage to broker a cease-fire or come to some sort of arrangement to end the war, some superhuman force (e.g. the gods) stirs things up again. The Trojans and Achaeans and their respective allies are killing each other, and it’s awful, and everyone hates it, and they don’t know how to stop.
There the screaming and the shouts of triumph rose up together / of men killing and men killed, and the ground ran blood. (book 8, Lattimore trans)
for multitudes of Trojans and Achaeans alike were that day stretched one by the other’s side with faces in the dust. (book 4, trans)
This describes the situation in some parts of the world, and many of us find ourselves aching from afar for the people suffering from problems that seem to have no solution. But even in more stable parts of the world, if we’re honest, we find problems with no solutions in our own hearts. How often do our hearts fill with shame, self-loathing, and regret? I am not loved, and I cannot be loved, or I should not be loved. There was a thing that I needed to do, the most important thing, and I failed, and nothing can change the past. I am filled with shame, and there is no hope.
Normal people feel this way from time to time. I don’t mean to trivialize how intensely personal and upsetting it is, only to point out that this is the situation of all humanity, and that if you feel this way you’re not alone in it. Life is good in so many ways, but it’s very normal to be haunted by the idea that maybe this shadow is real. Maybe there is something so wrong with me — maybe I have screwed up so royally — that I am beyond hope. And in a certain sense, our fears are correct. We are very far gone; resolving our situation really isn’t humanly possible.
Long lay the world / In sin and error pining / Till he appeared and the soul felt its worth / A thrill of hope! / The weary world rejoices, / for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!
This is what Chistmas is about. This isn’t just a normal morning; it is a new kind of morning. There is hope, because even though our problems are beyond even the greatest human remedies, God is greater than that, and he is coming. As extraordinary as the birth of any new baby is, this new baby is different. This is the Son of God. Whatever your reason for feeling beyond hope — whether it is a bloody war that cannot end or a private thing in your own heart — you have reason to hope. God is greater than all your problems, greater than all your shame and regret, and he loves you, and he is coming.
This is the beginning of his life on earth, and of course there is more to the story. Later, we will see him suffer betrayal and be put to death in the most horrific way humans have imagined. We will see him rise victorious and reveal that his own wounds aren’t gone but glorified. He will ascend and send the Holy Spirit. And we look ahead to the end of time when, as St. Paul says, all things will be summed up in him. The remedy for our problems hasn’t been brought to completion, and we don’t know how it all works out in the end, but we celebrate anyway because we know it is real, and it has begun.
When we celebrate Christmas, let’s take care not to get so caught up in other things that we forget the enormity of what we are celebrating. Let’s shop and bake and plan to spend time with people we love, and let’s do it all for love of God. Let’s decorate with images of the child Jesus because they help us who need a Savior remember what the shopping and baking and booking motel rooms is all about: the night of our dear Savior’s birth.