The Christmas season is always accompanied by resurgent feelings of hope. Salvation Army bell-ringers elicit charity from preoccupied shoppers, who stop to drop some change in a bucket in exchange for a momentary sense of Yuletide generosity. Strangers overcome society's customary inhibitions with Christmas greetings and begin to interact humanly. The air is filled with a festive spirit.
In holiday family reunions, usual animosities are overlooked so as not to injure the harmony this day. And pastors join with normally callous newspaper editors in urging that this reconciling mood extend itself globally, perpetually, overcoming the warring hostilities that plague and divide humanity.
These brief annual signs of felicity and hopeful yearning need not be begrudged. Yet, there is a saccharine taste to these hopes; they seem artificially induced by the muzak of shopping malls repeating carols about peace on earth.
The glitter, glamour, and glee of these holidays mirror the secular, seasonal sentiment that things aren't so bad after all. The darkness of the world, and of our lives, is repressed for a few days in the hope that it will disappear in the merriment of office parties filled with Christmas cheer, and by an inward, hurried genuflection before a manger scene in a department store window.
Friends and readers occasionally tell us at Sojourners magazine that they wish more celebration and joy was found between our covers. One recently wrote of her "increasing despair over the brooding gloom on your pages." Such words are understood, and taken to heart.
We do wish to convey in this magazine more praise, affirmation, and love which is nurtured by our concrete experience in the life of our community's own fellowship and as part of Christ's larger body. Especially during Advent and at Christmas, our heartfelt desire is to deepen, rather than dampen, the authentic celebration of this time.
Our wish, however, is that your celebration, as well as ours, be one that genuinely raises a biblical hope rather than merely reflects the vain imaginings of society so prevalent in this season.
The scriptural accounts of Christ's coming--both the prophetic pictures of the Old Testament and the familiar narratives of the gospels--never deny or repress the world's darkness. They do not tell us that Christ came into a dark world and made it all lightness, joy, and peace. Rather, the message is that Christ entered into this world of darkness and triumphed over it.
Isaiah foretells the promise of this coming:
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light: light has dawned upon them, dwellers in a land as dark as death. Thou hast increased their joy and given them great gladness.--Isaiah 9:2-3
At the outset of John's gospel, in his account of the incarnation, we are told, "The light shines on in the dark, and the darkness has never mastered it" (John 1: 5).
Celebrating Christ's birth never justifies ignoring the world's sin. Rather, the cause for celebration is precisely the fact that, despite the world's sin, Christ came. He entered into the midst of humanity's suffering, pain, and injustice to be with us as Emmanuel.
The secular observance of Christmas which seeks to dispel the world's darkness by wishful holiday thinking will not cause any fewer children to die for lack of food; it will not create a new and just international economic order; it will not ease the plight of the homeless and poor in America; it will not end the exploitation of the world's human and natural resources by the wealthy.
Pretending that these realities are not so--by whistling "Joy to the World" while scurrying through crowded stores--is hardly a Christian celebration of this day.
Christmas invites those who worship at the manger to enter into the suffering of the world and to embrace it, as Jesus did, believing in and compassionately giving our lives for the purposes of God's kingdom, for his justice and peace. In this way, Christmas asks each of us where our hope actually rests.
What are the things we look to for our life's security, promise, fulfillment, and meaning? And where does our society place its hopes?
Often we look to ourselves--to our reputation, our accomplishments, our virtue, our talent, or other marks of our self-sufficiency--for the hope to sustain us. But that hides us from the truth, and also keeps us from encountering the world as it really is. Corporately, society places its hopes in the sanctity of the nation, in the democratic process, in a good leader, in the "system's" working, in military power, and in the promises of technology.
Our hope is tragically misplaced if it rests with ourselves, our nation, or our culture.
The entrance of Christ into the world, his continuing presence through his church, and the promise that history will be fulfilled in and through him is the only reliable basis for our personal and corporate hope. This truth is biblically articulated with compelling clarity.
The coming of the Messiah, while it means hope for those called to God's purposes, means judgment for the nations. In Isaiah 40, when the prophet speaks of preparing a way for the Lord, he declares in the often-quoted passage:
Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low; the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.
A few verses later, this prediction of justice and its political implications are made even clearer:
All nations dwindle to nothing before him, he reckons them mere nothings, less than nought.--Isaiah 40:17
Mary echoed this same truth in the Magnificat:
He has brought down monarchs from their thrones, but the humble have been lifted high. The hungry he has satisfied with good things, the rich sent empty away.--Luke 1:52-53
The nations are judged at the Messiah's coming--both then, and now, and in the future--because they act as though they are sovereign, and thus pursue only their own ends.
The normal practice of the church in America has been to worship America's rule even over the church's own life, asking for the Lord's sanctifying blessing. But it is Christ who reigns, and his sovereignty which we are to confess. Christmas asks us to acknowledge Christ as King of kings, and Lord of lords, as the one who calls the nations into his judgment and lordship:
For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder.--Isaiah 9:6
The gospel accounts of Christ's birth are clear about Christ's coming as the ultimate judge and ruler over the nations, and the conflict this created. Just the rumor of this child's kingship was too subversively threatening for King Herod to ignore. Ambitious and vain in his desire to preserve power, he slaughtered Nazareth's infants, while Christ and family were forced from that inauspicious stable into political exile.
From the outset of Christ's entrance into the world, the Psalmist's words, later quoted by the disciples in Acts 4, found fulfillment.
The kings of the earth rise up, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his anointed.--Psalm 2:1-2
The world is not likely to be any more receptive to the radical presence of God's life in its midst today than it was that first Christmas. Yet angels sang, shepherds came, and others traveled far to acknowledge this disarming, vulnerable child as King over all. That too is part of the Christmas story, and it should sustain us on our pilgrimage today.
In our journey our hope rests in the light of the world. "No follower of mine," Jesus said, "shall wander in the dark." The light of Christ has come into the world, and the darkness has not put it out. His promise is that he is with us, and thus, the darkness will not put out his Tight and life in and among us. Through those called to his body, that life will reach out "to be a light for all peoples, a beacon for the nations."
Though darkness covers the earth, and dark night the nations, the Lord shall shine upon you, and over you shall his glory appear; and the nations shall march toward your light and their kings to your sunrise.--Isaiah 60:2-3
We have been given the true basis for our celebration this Christmas. Truly, he has increased our joy and given us great gladness.
Joy stems from the certainty of our hope, from the inner conviction that this child, born in a dingy, dirty stable, came in fact as sovereign over the world, and promises to be so. May we celebrate his birth and reign with the joy that overflows the confines of our lives and extends his presence into the world.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!