The heart of the Christmas story is not one of escapism
The major issue with our sentimental nativity fun is that it hides the Christmas story behind a veil of tinselled schmaltz, says Gareth Black
Although most of my child r e n h ave l e f t h o me , w h e n we g e t t o g e t h - er at Christmas they still pull out the Nativity! DVD. That’s the 2009 charm-fest starring Martin Free - man as the lovelorn primary teacher who stages an uber-cute nativity play in Coventry Cathedral, and wins back his girl.
It’s a pageant of tinsel and angels and a thoroughly sentimentalised version of the birth of Christ which takes our family nostalgically back to days when they would gig gle uproariously at the infantile antics of the irrepressible teaching assistant, Mr Poppy. In contrast, a rival school stages a dark horror nativity play called Herod! The teacher resp onsible for this, has pretentious aspirations to high ar t but completely misses the Christmas spirit!
If lockdown allows, we’ll watch it together again this year.
The major issue with our sentimental nativity fun is that it hides the Christmas stor y behind a veil of tinselled schmaltz. The realit y was of a vulnerable mother, giving birth in difficult conditions in an outhouse, while paranoid local warlord Herod plotted the child’s murder.
Worse still, when the celebrated wise-men from the East appeared, t h e y p r e s e n t e d t h e c h i l d w i t h myrrh. This was certainly an expensive gift, but was also an embalming oil – and a symbol of death. That is hardly the essence of the Christmas spirit in which ‘all is calm, all is bright’.
Impor tantly though, this more difficult side of the Christmas story – which involves suffering, exile, and symbols of death, speaks more directly and powerfully into our experience than the usual cosy rendition of the tale.
While sentimentalit y offers us light relief from pandemics, lockdowns, and depressions; the true heart of the Christmas story is not one of our escapism; but of ‘incarnation’; God coming to us.
The Christian hope is not that we will be borne away from harsh realities on angelic wings of distraction, nostalgia, and entertainment, but that we will be joined here on earth by a God who will embrace both it and us; and then begin to remake this world again.
As such, the Christian faith proclaims that the sufferings of this earth are both real, significant, and matter. That when Christ came into this world, God embraced humanity – with our faults, flaws, and our s u f f e r i n g . S o t o o , wh e n p e o p l e encounter Jesus Christ today in a spiritual sense, they do not experience being transported out of this world into an illusory snow-dome; rather they welcome the invasion of God into their very life and being. And when he comes, he comes with a h o p e t h a t d e p e n ds n o t o n t h e ephemeral trappings of season’s greetings, but with profound inner p eace, forgiveness, comfor t, joy, purpose, and the hope of an eternal new heaven and a new earth to come.
At h e i s t p h i l o s o p h e r Fr i e d r i c h Nietzsche famously wrote; “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” What 2021 might bring, we do not know; but the true hope of Christmas is born in the frailty and brutality of the birth of Christ – the God who meets us in the storms of life and says to us all, “Come to me all you who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest”.
Gareth Black for Solas