A
survey from the British Medical Journal made news this week, claiming that 1 in
200 American women say they have experienced a virgin birth. Frankly, I don’t
know what to do with that, but it just seemed like this might be the time to
bring it up. I guess my thoughts on any survey or eyewitness account of the
miraculous is that, as much as we are advanced, rational people, our lives
remain a mystery even to us. I’m not saying that I believe that anybody has a
virgin birth these days—in fact, it would kind of change Christmas a little bit, no?—but what I am saying is that the closer we get to understanding
the world around us the more mysterious it seems to become. And that’s part of
what Christmas is about. As C.S. Lewis once pointed out, the reason Joseph was
worried about Mary’s pregnancy was not because he didn’t understand where
babies come from, but because he did!
When we try to
describe the miraculous it ends up as a he-said, she-said kind of affair; like
a courtroom that will, by the very definition of its rules, find any miracle
implausible. I remember watching a Mythbusters
episode a while back where they were testing whether plants react to human
thoughts. Basically, they were staring at potted shrubs and thinking, “I really
hate you, plant. I’m going to light you on fire!”—things of that nature. The
astounding part was that the first time the Mythbusters did this test the
plant, which they had hooked up to a polygraph, actually reacted. So, they tried
it again; this time with a pane of glass between them and the plant; and then nothing happened. Cut to a seemingly relieved Grant Imahara telling the camera,
“Since the results cannot be replicated, we cannot confirm this one. That’s
science!” This stuck with me because Grant lays out science’s strength and
weakness in one sentence—one-time events are out of bounds because the
scientific method says they do not exist. I repeat C.S. Lewis: Joseph is not
concerned because he doesn’t know where babies come from, but because he does.
For
this rational world in which we live the idea of the son of God in a manger
does not compute, and that is exactly as it should be. There is no greater concern
for our faith than for it to become ‘nothing special’; to have the entirety of
Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection trivialized. Christmas is an impossible
event, an affront to everything we consider rational. After all, Luke has the
heavenly army singing about peace—maybe
you’ve never noticed this before but heavenly
host is another way of saying heavenly
army, and what do they sing, but “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and
on earth peace among those whom he favors!” The army sings of peace; and power
comes through a baby, even as John’s Gospel tells us that this event means we
are all called to become children of God. All the traditional power structures
are turned upside down.
This is a message
as political as it is religious. The Gospel writers go out of their way to make
it so. Matthew has King Herod killing children in fear of this baby, John
redefines authority as the one who humbles himself and becomes like a child,
and finally we have Luke who radically takes this word “peace” that was a sign
of the Roman Empire and says, “No. Peace does
not come from Rome
but from a baby; the Prince of Peace.” So, Christmas has it all: religion and
politics and blatant affronts to science and rationality suitable to upset just
about anyone at dinner-time conversation.
And
so it should be.
The
worry again is that we make today ‘nothing special.’ The worry is that we
acquiesce to the rationalists; or we pretend that Jesus coming into the world
had nothing to do with politics; or we remove religion altogether and make
Jesus into little more than a great teacher. All of these are temptations,
especially in the season where we all just want to be nice. But being “nice”
should be a side-effect of the humility that comes naturally to us as children
of God and not our primary identification as Christians. This is an important
distinction for us, because, as much as we want to make today only about a baby
in a manger, the Christ child came to save the world, and he made a lot of
people upset doing it. This is the distinction between humility and niceness;
Jesus was humble, but I can’t think of a single time I would describe the Jesus
we encounter in the Gospels as “nice.”
I think this is one of the primary ways we miss the point of Christmas. For as
much as Christians complain about the growing tide of secularity in America
being a threat to Christmas; that tide has a lot more to do with the pretense
of self-sufficiency among Christians than it does with some conspiracy to
remove Christ from Christmas. The more comfort we have, the less we want a Savior
who came to overthrow the comfortable and turn the world upside-down. So, we
make this a day to show how nice we are as Christians—anything we can do not to
upset the status quo that feeds us and makes us happy. And little by little we
lose the hard edge of what it means for God to be born into the world.
Little by little
we ignore that Jesus came to upend the world; not just political rulers who we
don’t like but just as often you and me, who are much too satisfied with all
our comforts. As much as we want to focus today only on the baby in the manger,
we must do so acknowledging that Jesus’ life trajectory was not toward
affluence and prestige but toward indignity, suffering, and death on a cross.
That’s the road we walk as Christians, and if that seems jarring to you on
Christmas Eve then you probably need to be jarred. Today is a day of upheaval.
It’s a day where we celebrate the defeat of the powers of this world; where
armies sing for peace; and we pledge to become like children. For those of us
who cling to adulthood as a culmination of our own self-sufficient lives it is
a day to make us deeply uneasy. This is what happened with Herod; it’s what
happened with Pontius Pilate, with the Jewish temple authorities, and, later,
with Saul and other persecutors of the early Christian movement.
And this is how it
must be. Because there will still be rationalists concerned with making today
about analyzing the virgin birth. There will still be political leaders who
claim Christianity but see no distinction between the kingdom of God
and the kingdom of this world. There will still be secularists and historians
looking to make this a day about the birth of a great teacher. And, worse
still, all of us are all of those people. Each of us is a politician and a
rationalist and an historian and part of a world that makes us comfortable. For
all of us, this baby in the manger is exactly what we need, but we’re going to
fight it tooth and nail because we don’t want it just yet. We want Jesus to be
nice—something we can use. But nothing about tonight is under our
control. It’s mysterious, it’s terrifying—just ask the shepherds—but it’s also
exactly what the world needed: a Savior, who rejects our notions of power, and
comes as a child. The same thing we all must become. It’s counter-cultural,
it’s upsetting; it’s more than that: it’s offensive. So shall it ever be.
And thanks be to
God for that.
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