The Messiah’s message has been twisted
The first time I visited Bethlehem, I thought I was going to die.
Leaving the town where Jesus was born to re-enter Israel, I waited at the security checkpoint for the bored-looking soldier to check me through. In front of me was an elderly Palestinian man with his young grandson. There was a problem with their papers and the grandfather noisily tried to explain the situation. He then motioned to the child at his side, who lifted up his shirt to reveal a package clumsily taped to his belly. This was at the height of the time of suicide bombings and all I could think was that this was such a surreal way and place to die.
The appendage was actually a colostomy bag and the boy had an urgent appointment at an Israeli hospital. He was allowed through and taken to be cared for and looked after.
An hour later, I sat in my Jerusalem hotel room and suddenly burst into tears. Not out of fear, I think, but out of despair. Salt-stained, sorrowstained, pain-stained despair that in Bethlehem, where I believe that the great conduit of grace came into this world, so much suffering and confusion could still breathe and flourish. And not only in Bethlehem, of course, but throughout the entire world; and the shadows of cruelty and suffering often appear not to be diminishing, but positively growing in their clawing darkness.
How, then, can I still believe in a loving God and how can I be convinced that Jesus is His Son and that there is a greater and higher truth? How can I be convinced this Christmas, and at every other time, that love is the great power and that a baby born to a poor family in an occupied land 2,000 years ago opened a great door to eternal happiness and completion?
Sometimes it’s grimly difficult, sometimes exuberantly compelling. But while my intensity of belief may vary and while I often fail and fall, I haven’t doubted the faith since accepting the Christian narrative more than three decades ago.
On a personal level, I’m convinced my relationship with Christ became its most authentic only when I abandoned what was often religious pedantry for something far more progressive and vulnerable. I stopped speaking and started listening, entered into belief as a dialogue, opened my eyes rather than folded my arms.
This is not the place for direct evangelism and certainly not the time to offer proof and text for Jesus and His birth. It probably wasn’t in December, it may not have been a stable and we don’t really know who was there. But while the literalists are on shaky historical and intellectual ground, so are the cynics who deny everything. He was born, He existed, He spoke, He inspired and He died. There’s no serious doubt. As to whether He was the Son of God and rose from the dead, that is something for you to decide.
In the final analysis, it’s about faith. It has to be. If it was obvious and unavoidable, we’d all be believers out of pure self-interest and that would make the church even worse than it is now. Which is, mind you, saying quite a lot. Because churches and Christians — me certainly included — have done a pretty poor job of revealing the Christian message and no believer should blame someone for being an atheist or for being angry with organized Christianity.
One of the privileges of my life in the past few years, for example, has been meeting so many gay men and women who, while experiencing constant persecution from alleged Christians, have remained loyal to Jesus. God bless them, because they are genuine heroes of the church.
Christ taught the liberation of the soul as well as of the person and pleaded for a preferential option not just for the poor but also for the needy, the marginalized, the despised and the oppressed. He also spoke of a preferential option for the Earth.
Yet so many of us in the Christian church have twisted the Messiah out of shape and out of recognition. We have perverted what are pristine teachings calling for radical action and a world shaped anew into stale conservatism. Too many of us have disguised the Jesus philosophy and painted it as a fetish of reactionary ideas around gender, sex, power, relationships and personal choice.
Please believe me when I say the person whose birth we are about to commemorate would not hurt or abuse, would not reject, would not exclude. He would not deny climate change, would not build walls, would not obsess about procreation and would not condemn you for who you loved. Please, please, in the name of God, whatever you have been told, believe me!
We live in an age of broken relationships and broken understanding, and the thread of humanity that could reattach us to the true rhythms of meaning and community is that baby whose birth we have often obscured.
If there is a war on Christmas, it is not fought by militant secularists, but by Christians who prefer Christmas trees to the Christmas message. The first is beautiful, but unchallenging; the latter is magnificent but, fully lived out, as terrifying as it is vital. The baby became a man who insisted we start a revolution of love and who demanded that we turn the world upside down and make it just, fair, good and wise.
See Jesus and see His living truth everywhere. See Him in the faces of the people of Aleppo, see Him in the anguish of the unemployed, the fear of the homeless, the screams of the besieged, the terror of the victim, the confusion and hurt of those told for so long that they do not belong. See Him in the pleas of an old, withered Palestinian Muslim man and his so frightened, so sick young grandson. See Him. And never stop seeing Him. Have a blessed and happy Christmas.