First and Continuing Christmas

This Advent and Christmastide I have sought to again understand the Christmas story and its meaning. I've been struck by the contrast between insights I've gained through reading and insights gained in religious practice, and I've struggled to bring them together. For me, the problem is: “In modern tellings of a story that we know had ancient origins and meanings, how do we best relate the ancient and modern meanings?”

I've been reading The First Christmas by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. Like many scholars, Borg and Crossan focus on careful studies of biblical texts and surrounding historical materials to attempt to elucidate the meanings the texts may have had for the ancient authors and audiences. They argue that in the context of the Roman empire, these stories were designed to assert the primacy of Jesus as savior of the world through justice and peace. Jesus was thus placed in deliberate and revolutionary contrast to stories of the Roman emperor, who was cast as Son of God and savior of the world through violent (but in the mind of Rome, just) conquest. They make about as good a case as is possible with contemporary scholarship to elucidate the meaning that the Christmas story had for ancient Christians.

I then trooped off to church with modern Christians. On the last Sunday before Christmas, our parish put on the annual Christmas Pageant. In line with the practices of thousands of churches, the youth of the parish dressed in costume and told the Christmas story. Our telling culminated with two teenagers and a baby—Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—center stage, surrounded by tiny prophets, angels, shepherds, and magi. At that dramatic moment I was profoundly struck by a sense of “This is it!”; that we as a community had just made our statement about the meaning of Christmas: “Witness the essence of God and God's love incarnate: people and a baby; love, creation, hope, and possibility, repeated every moment throughout the world.”

That interpretation of the Christmas story, if Borg and Crossan are right, is profoundly different from the interpretation intended by the authors of the Gospels and the earliest Christians. We've taken their story and mucked with it, yanked out parts, performed it, re-staged it, given it new political and social overtones. For example, because our parish uses teenagers for Mary and Joseph, I was also struck with a feeling of “Gee, we've just made an argument about how God enters the world, through unexpected and socially unacceptable means, teenage parents.” This feeling was immediately followed by the spirits of scholars pointing out that at the time of the Gospels, “teenaged” mothers were the socially acceptable norm. Bad intellectual! I was being anachronistic.

But isn't that the essence of religious practice at its best? True creative anachronism perhaps? These stories are dead if they aren't re-lived. At one level, it doesn't matter what the first Christians thought or didn't think about the Christmas story. The events they narrated are lost. Even Borg and Crossan, for all their scholarly knowledge, can only, at best, muster a reasonable approximation of what the meaning of the story may have been 2000 years ago. Borg and Crossan's book is valuable for how it can enlarge our understanding of an ancient story, but at the end of the day we have to continually make and remake these understandings. In our parish pageant, we did nothing more than the early Christians, we strongly declared what this story meant to us. This remaking is particularly powerful, as it was the natural expression of our community's present hopes and longings.

Nonetheless, I do think we need both our scholarly approximation of the ancient meaning of Christmas and our modern performances. In this time of continued conflict and war—a war cast by our own political leaders as a just means of achieving peace through violence—we may need to look again at another meaning of Christmas. As Borg and Crossan show, earlier understandings of Christmas are relevant to our own and can enlarge the transformative value of the narrative. Maybe our best hope is to marry our past and present, start with our powerful and basic community understanding and add to it. Perhaps next year our parish pageant should also put the peace that comes through love and justice at center stage along with Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Our hope is for more than just an ideal family, but rather for a human family that idealizes peace and justice.