Christmas 2011

This last week the world was informed of the death of a very odd man: the dictator/ruler of North Korea.  Amongst both the strange and dangerous aspects of his oddity, there was the one that the commentators kept emphasizing: the personality cult that surrounded him, which was, in fact, invented and encouraged by the government apparatus.  We Americans professed incredulity as we saw video footage of crowds weeping for their erstwhile leader, wondering how they had been duped into such veneration for a pretentious and wicked man. 

Such personality cults are not, however, strange things in human history.  Many ancient and recent governments promoted such things in order to cement the loyalty of their citizens or subjects.  There are personality cults of celebrities, too—from rock stars to actors to sports figures.  It seems a constant of human life that there are people who are so unsure of themselves that they find an identity in adulating famous people and render homage to them in a way that others find demeaning or, at the very least, extravagant.  And lest we think that normal Americans citizens don’t go in for such things, listen to the way some people talk about the founding fathers and the constitution, as if the men who wrote the document were, at the very least, prophets, and perhaps even more than human; and the document they produced has taken on the qualities of a sacred text—more argued about and interpreted perhaps than even the Bible.  Certainly many people are paid extravagant sums to argue their interpretations in front of men and women in black robes.

Perhaps, then, we should not be surprised at personality cults of one kind or another.  But as Christians, we cannot simply be neutral to this phenomenon.  That is because we have our own personality cult, and a rather exclusive cult at that.  We say that Jesus is the only one worthy of worship—which is the definition of the word “cult”.  As Christians we disagree vehemently with all other kinds of personality cults, because we are bound to only one worship—the veneration of our Lord Jesus.  There is none other than He.  We believe in one God, not many gods—so for us there is only one personality cult—all the other ones in our world are objectionable, from our point of view.  We render homage to Jesus alone because we believe He is our great King and Lord and Master and Saviour. 

Tonight is the festival of His Nativity—that is, the official birthday celebration of the great King.  It is the lesser of the two great feasts in His honour.  Easter is the chief festival and celebrates His great Victory, the Victory by which alone we ascribe to Him royal honours.  Without the Victory of Easter, there would be no festival of his birth.  And the festival of His birth celebrates His Kingship won by that Victory.  It is difficult to sort through the details of ancient Christian celebrations, but it seems to me that what was celebrated when the feast of the Nativity was invented, was not so much the mystery and miracle of the Incarnation as the present Reign of the great King Jesus.  From the very beginning, in other words, the feast of Christmas had a kind of political edge to it.  Obviously it was a celebration of the Coming of God to dwell among us humans as one of us.  But if it was the birthday of the One who in fact is the great King, Jesus, then, of course, no one else can be.  Not even Caesar.  The ancient Christians were willing, of course, to grant Caesar the respect due to an earthly ruler, but were not willing to participate in his personality cult.  It is always hard to determine just how seriously those who participated in it actually believed in the divine honours they ascribed to Caesar, but for them there were many gods anyway, and one more couldn’t hurt.  The Christians couldn’t go down that path.  For them, there was only One God, the Father, whose Son came to the world as the man Jesus, and whose Spirit carried on his life and mission in the world.  No one else could share the divine honours.  To the Roman Imperial government, this was treasonous behaviour.  Caesar was doubtful of the loyalty of anyone not willing to participate.  And the Christians actually were not loyal in the sense Caesar wanted them to be.  They were willing to obey civil laws for the sake of their own King Jesus, not because they worshipped at the shine of imperial Rome.  They were good citizens but rejected the political mystique. 

You can imagine what it was like for the early Christians if you can imagine what it is like in North Korea trying to be a Christian in the midst of the personality cult of their leader.  No one like Kim Jong-il wants to hear that there is another leader that some of his subjects regard as greater than he, and with more importance in their life than he has.  Many rulers have thought that way.  That is why, over the years, there has been immense pressure on Christians to compromise this principle.  When the Roman Empire found that it could not stamp out the religion of the King Jesus, it tried instead to make Jesus the official patron of Rome.  Constantine made Christianity his state religion.  Earthly Kings came to call themselves Christian rulers and empires began to regard themselves as holy.  Bishops crowned princes and armies went forth to battle in the name of the Prince of Peace. 

It is not a bad thing, of course, that there should be Christian rulers and presidents and senators.  But the Lordship of Jesus is a radical thing, and his personality cult is shared with no one.  He has won His Victory and now directs His forces from His throne in heaven until He comes again to finalize His campaign and establish His Kingdom completely.  Meanwhile He calls His followers to align themselves with His will and purpose and to carry on His battles in the way He won His own victory.  That way is the way of humility and love.  Jesus was offered in His temptations several alternative ways to advance His Kingdom and rejected them all.  He came to heal the wounds of the world by bearing them not by crushing the wounded, and He bids His followers to carry on the same mission.  And that is where loyalty to Him often runs up against the requirements of earthly politics.  Christians offer to their earthly governors and legislatures a respect and an adherence to their laws as is consistent with their greater loyalty to their Master Jesus.  And they know that there is no winning of the Kingdom of God by the methods of earthly empires.  They respect the local government, but reject the mystique. 

The ancient Christians, when they came to desire a celebration of the nativity of their King Jesus, took over many of the symbols they found in the culture around them and turned them to their own use.  We don’t know when Jesus was born but the ancient Christians took over the celebration of the Unconquered Sun at the winter solstice as a way of proclaiming the true Unconquered Light of God, the Sun of Righteousness that had risen in the world with healing in His wings. The Christians also seemed to have taken over some of the customs of the Saturnalia—the festival of the god Saturn, who, in Roman mythology, was an agricultural deity who reigned over the world in the Golden Age.  It was held in late December and included public feasts, partying, and gift-giving, leading up to the winter solstice.  Of course, through the ages of western history, there have come into the celebration of Christmas many other customs from other cultures, notably German.  The decorated evergreen tree, probably originally part of folk celebrations of life in the midst of the death of winter, was taken over and made part of a proclamation of the unfailing Life that comes through Christ.  So the Christmas Tree symbolized the Tree of Life of the Garden Eden, which was unobtainable by Adam when he was expelled for his sin from paradise but is obtainable once again through the Tree of the Cross. 

In all of these customs a common theme is that the Kingship of Christ gathers up into itself all of the ancient symbols and themes and longings associated with the just and peaceful rule of a True King, and fulfills and extends them.  As we give our gifts and light our trees and even drink our eggnog, what we Christians are doing is testifying to the Lordship of our great King, by keeping feast in His honour.

There is a poem by Robert Herrick (1591-1674), familiar to us because of the music of John Rutter, which our own choir has sung in the past, which puts this all together: 

What sweeter music can we bring
Than a carol, for to sing
The birth of this our heavenly King?
Awake the voice! Awake the string!

Dark and dull night, fly hence away,
And give the honor to this day,
That sees December turned to May.

Why does the chilling winter’s morn
Smile, like a field beset with corn?
Or smell like a meadow newly-shorn,
Thus, on the sudden? Come and see
The cause, why things thus fragrant be:
‘Tis He is born, whose quickening birth
Gives life and luster, public mirth,
To heaven, and the under-earth.

We see him come, and know him ours,
Who, with his sunshine and his showers,
Turns all the patient ground to flowers.
The darling of the world is come,
And fit it is, we find a room
To welcome him. The nobler part
Of all the house here, is the heart.

Which we will give him; and bequeath
This holly, and this ivy wreath,
To do him honour, who’s our King,
And Lord of all this revelling.

What sweeter music can we bring,
Than a carol for to sing
The birth of this our heavenly King?

Christ is the Lord of all this reveling—we are keeping the natal festival of our great King.  Even the mediaeval focus on the vulnerable baby in the stable, which has become so popular, is a way of indicating the fact that the victory of our great Lord was won, not by wielding the sword, but by laying down His life in sacrifice; not by domination over others but through humility and love; not by outplaying the world at its own game, but by playing a different game altogether—heaven’s game, the Father’s will.  As Merton’s once put it, “Humility is more important than zeal: descent into nothingness and dependence on God.  Otherwise I am just fighting the world with its own weapons and there the world is unbeatable.  Indeed it does not even have to fight back, for I will exhaust myself and that will be the end of my stupid efforts.” 

When we say that Jesus is our great King and that we are enlisted amongst His forces, it is the fact of this humility and descent into nothingness and dependence upon God that is the secret to it all.  That is the paradox to which the manger scenes bear witness at this time of year.  It is not just that the great King started out His life as a little child—no king begins any other way.  It is not just the mystery of the Incarnation, that God became human by being born in the normal human fashion.  It is hard to see how God could have become human had He not embraced our life from its beginnings in the womb.  It is rather, I think, that the vulnerable baby points to the vulnerability of the way of love and self-giving in this rather harsh Darwinian world we have made for ourselves.  Jesus’ mother and earthly father were refugees and homeless pilgrims; the infant Christ barely make it out of town before the local king decided to make sure no rumoured King grew up there to take his place.  These things correspond to the One who led an itinerant life and had nowhere to lay His head and finally faced the imperial governor and religious authorities as the true King of the Jews but without any armies or weapons but his own Love and Life.

All of this also answers to a real problem for those of us who have tried to serve our King and believe in His reign but grow weary of wondering why it often seems that so little progress is being made.  Our great King is still operating in this world by means of humility and love, not by means of crusades and power-sharing arrangements with the rulers of this world.  There is evidence of His working in many parts of our world amongst many different kinds of His followers.  But it is not always obvious to the casual on-looker that this is the way the King is fighting His battles.  It seems like such a vulnerable way to win a Kingdom.  Even some Christians who understand that now is the time of humility and dependence on God look forward to a time when the King descends from heaven with the sword in His hand finally to do what love alone could not do. 

I think I used to believe that.  I am veering away from it lately.  Why would the great King, who came to this world and showed us the way of humility and love, abandon His own program in the end?  Has the Father, will the Father, change His mind?  Maybe what God is waiting for is a time when all those who call themselves Christians finally take their own Master seriously and start living according to His own love and humility.  What would that do to our world?  If the billion and a half (or is it two billion) Christians in the world suddenly started to live like their Lord Jesus, it would mean a radical change in the way the world operates.  Perhaps our Lord isn’t so concerned about converting the world to His cause as He is trying to convert His own followers to Himself.