The wise men who helped me understand Christmas
“The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light,” Handel’s “Messiah” instructs us. “And they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.”
Handel’s work, first performed in 1742, is not the oldest contribution to the soundtrack of Christmas. But musically and thematically, the “Messiah” embodies the triumphant spirit of a season that celebrates light over darkness, joy over fear, and a child as a Savior who brings peace and good will to a world so bereft of both.
Christmas is not the most theologically important Christian holiday — that would be Easter — and some Christians over the centuries have resisted celebration of a story told by only two of the four Gospel writers and associated with the bacchanalia of winter solstice revelry.
The scriptural accounts themselves are quite different. The child is visited by privileged wise men in Matthew and humble shepherds in Luke. The democratic spirit prevails in popular devotions that bring them together in stables under Christmas trees. There was no room at the inn for “The Mighty God” Handel celebrates. Christmas is for the left-out, no matter how many commercials we see trying to sell us fancy cars with bows on them.
A friend noted recently that this holiday provides the best opportunity Christians have to make a case for themselves, for what they believe and for what their faith promises. Smart preachers know this and craft their very best sermons for congregants they know they might never see again.
Yes, there are Scrooges and Grinches out there, but the unpopularity of these grumblers and naysayers speaks to the nearly universal association of Christmas with love, generosity and compassionate community — and the consensus that these should be embraced. If Christians can’t make their case in this atmosphere, they should get out of Whoville.
Evangelization is by nature an inclusive craft. It tries to unite rather than divide, to welcome, not exclude. It gathers people in.
None of these comes naturally to us these days — to Christians or anyone else — and two believers in my life who were among the best at embracing such imperatives left us in 2022. I fear for my own struggling faith in the absence of their courage to be countercultural in how they thought and led their lives.
My reflection on Christmas feels pathetically inadequate when compared with the stunning efforts in these spaces over the years by my colleague Michael Gerson. His final Christmas gift to us was a searingly honest essay as he was struggling with the cancer that would kill him.
“Christmas hope may well fall in the psychological category of wish fulfillment,” he wrote, unflinchingly acknowledging the power of the skeptic’s case upfront. “But that does not disprove the possibility of actually fulfilled wishes. On Christmas, we consider the disorienting, vivid evidence that hope wins. If true, it is a story that can reorient every human story. It means that God is with us, even in suffering.”
Gerson, facing death, did not pretend that hope was easy, only that it was possible and intellectually defensible. It is not a feeling but a virtue that requires discipline and determination.
We also lost Mark Shields, the wise and wisecracking political commentator. He taught an essential lesson by asserting that religious and political people alike were divided between those who hunted for heretics and those who sought converts.
Shields remained resolutely a convert-seeker in a heretic-hunting time. He was an egalitarian not just in words (which are easy) but in how he treated everyone, anywhere, at any level, on any hierarchy. Christians preach the equal dignity of everyone as a child of God. Mark acted that way. He would have spent more time with the shepherds than the Magi.
Both of them lived what others mainly preach — hope, even in unbearable circumstances; the possibility of dialogue and conversion, even among the fiercest adversaries; and a calling to the decency and equal dignity that leads us to side with the poor child in the manger against an earthly King who, Matthew recounts, tried to kill him.
One Christmas obligation is to bring tidings of comfort to those who, because they are suffering, find the obligatory joviality of the season off-putting and depressing. But however syrupy the pop culture around Christmas sometimes seems, the best contributions to the genre convey the joy that comes to those who allow their lives to be guided by a brave but gentle love that dares them to put aside hatred and suffocating self-involvement.
Remember: At the end of the story, even Scrooge overcomes his greed, even the Grinch finds his heart, and a baby born surrounded by livestock is revered still.