Comfortable Christians at Christmas

Posted on January 2, 2005 in Festivals Myths & Mysticism

Consider this body! A painted puppet with jointed limbs, sometimes suffering and covered with ulcers, full of imaginings, never permanent, forever changing.

This body is decaying! A nest of diseases, a heap of corruption, bound to destruction, to dissolution. All life ends in death.

–The Dharmapada

Christmas decorations came down today. The street is dark again. The festivals of lights are over because marketing says that it must be so. The local outlet of Michael’s — a crafts store — has pulled the holly down and decked the aisles of their stores with Easter eggs. We go quickly from the birth of Christ to his death and resurrection. In 2005, it took only a single day.

An article that came in my Sojourner’s newsletter mourns the loss of the true Christmas spirit, which reminds us that Christ wasn’t exactly welcomed into the world:

We smile at the warm cozy nativity scene, but have you ever spent a night in a barn? Or given birth in a barn? The reality is very different. Most scholars suggest that in Luke’s account it’s not just that the inns were full but that Mary and Joseph were forced to take the barn because their family had rejected them. Joseph has relatives or friends of relatives in Bethlehem. So rather than being received hospitably by family or friends, Joseph and Mary have been shunned. Family and neighbors are declaring their moral outrage at the fact that Joseph would show up on their doorsteps with his pregnant girlfriend.

There are many other aspects of the story that we soft-pedal: the massacre of the Holy Innocents, the psychotic rage of the quisling King Herod, or the Roman Occupation which demanded the uprooting of the Holy Family from Nazareth to Bethlehem to suit bureaucrat’s vision of how a census should be conducted. When I hear some Christians complain about persecution while singing yule carols about snow and stables that sound like the Lake Placid Hilton, I shake my head. Oh thank you, Jesus, for making us rich and proud and American! they say. Help us through these times filled with those who deny that because we are Christian we will ride the limousine to the stars! Their Savior stands by, warm and cozy, little more than a ticket checker at Heaven’s Gate who admits those who just say that they are saved.

It’s another one of those bathetic squabbles that modern day Christians fight as they wait in joyous expectation of the Apocalypse. Rolls of fat jiggle as they ho ho ho their way through the holiday. They turn the television off or down so they cannot hear the reports coming out of Iraq or the Bay of Bengal. A few can be heard to murmur that the reason why these nations suffer is that they have not accepted Christ. How soon they forget that the several hurricanes hitting Florida last summer were summarily dismissed as mere disasters.

Tonight, I am thinking about the wicked world that Jesus entered and what he really entered it for. Lynn and I have been discussing the issue of Christ’s life and sacrifice as atonement. “Christ died for the forgiveness of sins.” In this point of view, the crucifixion is emphasized. The whole passion is a play where Christ is but an actor who recites his lines, receives his lashes and his nails, goes up on the cross, and then comes back to show us that he is God. Even Katanzankis, in his radical retelling of the passion The LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST caters to this theology.

Katanzakis puts Jesus on the cross and haves him leave it to escape the pain. Because Christ shirks the crucifixion, terrible events happen anyways, but people gaze upon them without the sanctifying grace which would have helped them to endure them. He goes back and all is well.

This view — with its gritty depiction of the tragic period of history in which Christ lived — is a sight better than the gorefest of Mel Gibson which tells us that Christ not only suffered, but he suffered worse than any man possibly could suffer. Gibson’s Christ says to the quadruple amputees of battlefields, political prisoners, victims of long and painful diseases, and others subject to the worst wracks that can be perpetrated on the body by God or man that their pain is nothing. You cry to the Lord out of the depths and the answer you get back is “Nyaah Nyaah Nyaah. Stop your whining. I had it worse.”

The Greek poet and novelist, on the other hand, allows for the humanity of Christ. But what may be still a fault of the revisited Christ myth is that Christ’s humanity only matters if he goes along with his abductors and treads the path to Calvary. It fits very nicely into the modern scheme of predestination which, in turn, makes everything for the best in this best of all possible worlds. We have our Cadillac Eldorados because God wills it. Christmas is a light and a fun holiday because ultimately, babies are cute, Jesus is the cutest of all, and in the end, all will be right with the world because he comes into it.

Lynn asked the question But what if he hadn’t been crucified? What if his witness to Herod had caused the imperial magistrate to dismiss the charges against the Galilean? What if Jesus had been allowed to continue his ministry, spread it in Egypt and maybe Rome itself? Christ still would have suffered and Christ still would have died. He would have developed painful corns on his feet, lost a tooth or two, experienced constipation, colds, chills, fevers, and many other afflictions that wrack the human body. In the end, he would have faced — just as he faced on the cross — the despair that comes with the uncertainty of not knowing what happens after death. The point of the whole Gospel story isn’t that Christ died for us, it is that an appendage of God reached into our lives and became one of us.

When you get onto the telephone and talk to this Jesus, you don’t receive rejection. You don’t hear an evangelist telling you that all will be well if you just go down to the local church and put money in the basket to support the man in the nice suit. Your problems aren’t made petty. This Jesus says “Yeah, it hurts. I know. I’ve been there. I do feel for you.” And that story of pain starts right at the beginning with the pain of his ostracized parents, with his mother heavy with an embarassing pregancy, ready to bring into the world a baby who will be called illegitimate by murmuring relations who keep the commandments and the law to the letter. If called upon to stone Mary, they might well do so. The best they do, however, is simply shun the family and make them spend the census nights in a stable rank and bitter with the odor of animals, slick and deep with their feces. It’s not cozy, but then the lives of many in this world are not cozy. When it comes his time to preach, this rough-handed carpenter’s son rejects the mere mechanicalization of the Law and replaces it with a new view — that all human beings belong to God and that we should treat one another as precious possessions.

Jesus cried. Jesus felt cold. Jesus was stigmatized in his lifetime. Jesus entered a world of suffering. He underwent these things because those conditions are what every human is potentially subject to. That’s the real meaning of Christmas.