The ultimate second chance
Christmas is so many things. It’s a brilliant guiding light. It’s about refugees in need, the birth of a child, the making of a family. It’s about awe and fear, the power of faith, the yearning for spiritual renewal and transcendence.
More than anything, perhaps, Christmas reminds us of the power of story in human experience, the need and genius of men, women and children for narrative in finding meaning and inspiration.
No YouTube clip recorded the nativity. There are no newspaper reports of the birth of Jesus Christ. The wise men were not scrummed to explain the gifts they brought to Bethlehem. No one knows the precise date of the birth. Not a single photograph exists.
Word of the event would have spread only as fast as one set of lips could impart it to another’s ears, only as fast as a man or woman could walk or a donkey trot. It was decades before the story was even recorded, and then in several versions.
So to most of humanity who have been moved and enriched by it, the birth of Christ came only as a story. It had to be taken on faith. Yet that story spoke so profoundly to men and women that, for better and for worse, it changed the course of history, made Jesus Christ the single most influential figure in the history of Western civilization.
Over the generations, that story and the way it is marked and celebrated has evolved and changed, as most things human do. So claims by arrogant and ignorant men to have saved Christmas or restored it to any one true form are bogus. There are no fixed and frozen versions of Christmas celebration to return to. They varied according to their time and place.
There is only one constant. That is the story. And anyone wanting to honour Christmas as more than a secular cultural ritual, as more than a matter of consumption and indulgence needs return to it.
Virtually all that is known of Christ — and only a few years of his life at that — is found in the New Testament. So logic suggests the true meaning of Christmas is to be found in its gospels, where accounts of Christ’s birth and later teachings reside.
These are at the same time simple and radical, as clearly set out as they are difficult to follow or master. Fear not. Judge not. Be generous. Be humble. Do not mistake wealth and power for virtue. Above all, treat others as you would have them treat you.
That message has been reiterated through millennia. And it’s difficult to improve, for lovers of story, on the version offered by Scrooge’s nephew Fred in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
Christmas, Fred famously declared, is “a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time, I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow travellers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”
If Christmas marks the birth of Jesus Christ, inspiring such humane words, that birth also presaged the emergence of Christianity as a faith and force. And it’s astonishing to contemplate that those so loudly purporting to honour Christmas seem at the same time so impervious to Christianity’s tenets.
At its core, as C.S. Lewis has written, Christianity is the ultimate second chance. It is about forgiveness and redemption. It has nothing to say, Lewis wrote, “to people who do not know that they have anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness.”
In response to a loud and powerful man who knows little of such things yet claims to have brought Christmas back “bigger and better than ever before,” the Jesuit priest and scholar James Martin recently tweeted (as the times require of even the clergy): “1) Christmas never left. “2) Christmas is about littleness. God entered the world as a poor, small, helpless infant, the most vulnerable state imaginable.
“3) Christmas is about humility. God lowered himself, ‘emptied himself to enter into the human condition’.”
The Christmas story of human renewal, gratitude and reverence — for new life, for the inherent value of the poor, the small, the helpless, for the connectedness of all of us and the duty one to another — has always been worth celebrating.
Merry Christmas to all.
At its core, as C.S. Lewis has written, Christianity is the ultimate second chance. It is about forgiveness and redemption