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On Christmas: it’s all good
🕑 Added 2020-12-26 06:26:08 +0000 UTC
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. — John 1:14
God loves things by becoming them. — Richard Rohr
In Christianity, much is usually made of the notion that Jesus was born to “save” humankind through some kind of substitutive blood sacrifice. I don’t entirely share the dim view that many take of that wildly problematic doctrine, but I will say that I think it is at best a bit of a wrong turning, a bad place to seat one’s spiritual emphasis. It certainly doesn’t resonate a huge amount with me.
But Jesus does.
Why Jesus? For me, specifically. Why not dump the whole Christianity thing and just go wholesale into Paganism without all that baggage? That’s a extremely fair and genuinely interesting question, and I could write a ton about it, but it’s late and I’m feeling mellow in front of a dying fire with a cat falling asleep on a Santa hat next to me, so I’ll keep it short and somewhat oversimplified.
I cannot stop being compelled by the notion of a God who loves humanity so much that They wanted to experience being human for Themself.
All of it. Every part of being human. The bad parts especially. The nasty, painful business of being born, the embarrassing nightmare of being a teenager, the confusion of early adulthood. Heartache, loneliness, exhaustion, frustration, grief and loss, and in the end torture and one of the most humiliating and painful deaths imaginable.
And also yearning, fellowship, friendship, contentment and happiness, compassion, peace, hope, and love.
Evangelical Christians and even some Mainliners and Catholics complain with relish about a fantastical War on Christmas and bemoan the secularizing liberal agenda; obviously that’s all pretty much bullshit in the way they mean it, but I do think something both wonderful and wondrous about Christmas has slipped a bit in the simple passage of time. And it isn’t a focus on Jesus explicitly; there’s already plenty of that, however loudly Christians complain.
It’s a focus on what actually happens in the Christmas story. Which is that a god loves people so much that they become a person.
Which is unbelievably strange. Quite literally.
It’s so unbelievable that sometimes I think maybe it happened.
There is nothing in the actual biblical Christmas story about any substitutive sacrifice. Instead there are angels appearing to a group of men who should be the last people angels would appear to, the absolute lowest rungs on the social ladder, and saying A child has been born for you—for you and for all people.
What specifically that means is largely left unspecified. So what I come back to over and over is a child has been born and a child has been born for you.
On an immensely strange night, immensely strange grace appears in the most improbable place. A god loves human beings so much that that god has become human so that god will fully understand what being human is like.
This is another thing Druidry has done for me—in its rejection of any concept of Original Sin and its inherent reverence for the world as it is, it’s dragged my attention back to the unto you a child is born part and everything that statement implies. Which is to say: Creation is not bad. Creation is not dirty or broken or wrong. Creation is beautiful and blessed and lovable at its foundations, and God loves it so much that God became it.
On Christmas, this is what leaves me low-key stunned: That the very notion of the Incarnation serves as a mirror, turning one’s wonder at God back to wonder at the pure fact of existence. How amazing the world is and how amazing we are, despite all the evil we do. That in this story, God looked at this mess and said Wow, okay, I actually need to get in on that.
Julian of Norwich wrote that God was amazed by creation, that They marveled at it and that creation marveled right back—that “they are endlessly marvelous to each other”. So marvelous that one can’t help but reach out and touch.
I love this strange, unsettling story, and tonight I tell it to myself again. God loved something so much that God became it.
For me, the message of Christmas is that we were all always already holy. Sometimes we forget who we are, and we need to be reminded.
Perhaps that’s the most powerful kind of salvation.
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Peter Larsen
Have you read Nadia Bolz-Weber's Accidental Saints? You might find her interesting.
