Christmas Meditation, December 1988
Angels singing in the night sky. Shepherds and wise men. Carols. Snowy darkness. A thousand points of light....The Christmas story holds a deep and winsome appeal for millions of people who otherwise find the Christian message silly or irrelevant or repugnant. The sense of goodness, blessedness and wonder still breaks through the commercialism to touch those for whom the Crucifixion is just a grotesque historical accident and the Resurrection a gauche fable. No wonder conservative Christians get suspicious at any move toward emphasizing Christmas at the expense of Good Friday and Easter. Important as the Incarnation is as a theological doctrine, any attempt to put it first seems like insidious, sentimental liberalism.
I suspect this uneasiness comes form our sometimes faulty understanding - perhaps more accurately our faulty proclamation - of the good news about Christ's death and resurrection. We have a hard time making these events sound credibly like good news in the way the Christmas story is so clearly good news for everyone. Whether we like it or not, in modern times Christianity has managed to get itself associated with much of the bad news of the world. Instead of being a message (like the Christmas story) most people would hope is true, the Christtian message - as heard - has become something people hope isn't true. Christian faith has become identified with respectability, complacency, "middle class morality;" with having all the answers, with smugness, with the desire to condemn and control: with the denial of life. So far as I can see, we can't make sense of what has happened during the last few centuries without appealing to the central fact that the Gospel of Jesus Christ has been co-opted by moralism. But Christmas seems to be the part of the story that has not been completely obscured.
We need to re-integrate the meaning of Christmas with the meaning of the Cross and the Emptied Tomb. "Behold! The virgin will be with child and will bear a son, and they will call his name Immanuel, which means 'God with us'." God himself takes the initiative. His action is unconditional and unexpected. Into the land of the dead comes a small thing, barely noticeable; for a moment just a cluster of cells. Infinitely vulnerable, totally at risk. The original blessed event: the first and only child born thoroughly alive; born not dead in Adam who sought to be his own source of life and thereby rejected life Himself, but born alive, in loving fellowship with the very Source of life. Yet in being born this Lord of Life is now counted among the dead, the lost, the wounded. God fully identifying himself with us in our separation from him, becoming part of it, placing himself under its laws and effects. God reckoning himself as one of us not just later, at the awful cross, but here, from the beginning. Here lie the wonder and attraction of Christmas, but the true message of the Cross is already there.
It's so easy to betray the child Christ, to try to fit his passion into our moral and religious categories; to portray his sacrificial death as placating an angry Deity whose laws we have broken. But here, as with the miracle of the Incarnation, it is God who makes the first move, becoming one of us, with us and for us. The healing he brings wrecked humanity is unconditional. On the cross Christ is reckoned a sinner so that we sinners are reckoned as having his goodness. This is the inestimably valuable idea of salvation by imputed goodness - of justification by faith in Christ's sufficient sacrifice It is as full of wonder as the vision of the child in the Bethlehem stable under the starry night. God accepting us precisely as we are; loving us without condition. No less than God taking infant flesh, here lies the deep mystery of goodness and hope that penetrates the hardest hearts. When this good news is remembered, preached and celebrated, people respond. God's grace breaks through the moralizing; the transforming Gospel is heard again. We become again the Church of the Great Christmas.
And then finally the beginning: the Resurrection. In his life we have life. We who were born dead, not functioning, incapable of friendship with God and God's creation, are made alive. We receive what Jesus always had, what Adam rejected: the covenant tie to the source of life, but now a tie our fear and pride cannot break. Now the deadness in us begins to fall away; now the healing begins. We grow in the experience of God's tender love for us. We no longer belong to the kingdom of death and dread. The gift of the child of Christmas is an everlasting gift to those who dwell in darkness and despair.
One mesage of love and hope unites Christmas, Good Friday and Easter, always there, ready to break forth as good tidings of great joy which will be for all people.
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