Christmas Makes No Literal Sense

 

Christmas Makes No Literal Sense

Something has been really bugging me as we head into the Christmas season 2023. I’ve written about this issue before, though I’d have to check to see if any of that writing is on this blog. It is the issue of chronology, the issue of time. We Christians have always said that salvation came to humanity in and through Jesus Christ. We call him our Savior. Our word Christmas comes from Christ Mass, the festival day of the birth of Jesus. We don’t know when precisely or even where he was born, though Nazareth seems a more likely birthplace than Bethlehem. In any event, Jesus of Nazareth lived, and all of the things we call the Christ, event took place at a particular time. There was a time, a very long time actually, before the Christ event, and, of course, there has been a time after it. The traditional Christian story says that salvation came to humanity at that particular time, a time we call the first three decades of the first century CE.

Now here’s my problem. If salvation came with and through Jesus Christ at that particular time, does it mean that God had not saved humanity before that time? There had been humans on earth for millennia before the birth of Jesus. Perhaps the authors of the birth stories in Matthew and Luke (the only places in the Bible where there are stories of Jesus’ birth) didn’t know that humans had been around that long, but we do. Were all the people who lived before Jesus damned because Jesus hadn’t happened yet? Unfortunately, the Christian tradition has usually answered that question yes. That’s why the Christian church dreamed up the story called “the harrowing of hell.” That story has it that, in the brief time between Jesus’ crucifixion and his resurrection, Jesus descended into hell to bring out the souls of the righteous who had died before he came along. That story has no biblical roots whatsoever, but it is still one that much of Christianity, including the Roman Catholic Church, tells to this day.

Does the belief that salvation came to humanity only through a particular man and through particular events that happened at a particular time in a particular place make any sense at all? To answer that question, we need to make a distinction. Understood as literal fact, the notion that salvation came at a particular time and wasn’t there before that time makes no sense at all. It is, in fact, terrible theology. It contradicts the reality that God is a God of universal grace. Universal here means everywhere and always. It makes no sense whatsoever to say that as a matter of fact God didn’t save all the people who came before Jesus but did save all (or at least some) of the people who came after him. Why would God handle salvation that way? Surely those of us who have come after Jesus haven’t been any better than the people who came before Jesus. Did God damn them just because of when they were born? Of course not. A God who did that would be completely arbitrary and capricious. I could never believe in such a God.

What was so special about the time we call the first century CE that God decided to grant salvation then but not before then? Nothing that I know of. Nothing I have ever seen any credible historian or theologian point to. There is no reason to believe that at that time all of a sudden people deserved salvation when none of them had deserved salvation before. Moreover, salvation isn’t and can’t be about deserving. God grants salvation, we don’t earn it. So if we understand the Christmas story in particular and the Christ story generally as factual history, it makes no sense whatsoever.

So is it just complete nonsense that we should dump on the trash heap of history and have nothing more to do with? No, it’s not that. But to understand how it is not that we have to shift our thinking from the factual mode to the mythic mode. Please understand what I mean by myth. I don’t mean a story that people believe is true that isn’t true. That may be the popular meaning of the word myth, but it is not that word’s theological meaning. Rather, in theology, a myth is a story that points beyond itself to some truth that we cannot express in merely factual terms. A true Christian myth points to a universal truth not a truth that appeared on earth at some particular time in some particular place. In this sense, the Christ story isn’t nonsense, it is the most profound truth.

What is that truth? It is the truth of God’s grace and the universal salvation of creation. The stories of Jesus’ birth (there are only two of them in the Gospels, and they aren’t the same) have a meaning far beyond an account of historical fact. They tell a story of God’s will to be Emmanuel, God with us, to be present with God’s people on earth. They tell a story of God’s will to extend grace and salvation to all of God’s people. That will did not arise with the Jesus event. It was always there. It always will be there. In this sense the Christmas story points beyond itself to a truth far more profound than the truth of mere fact. A truth that has always been there. God didn’t change when Jesus was born. God didn’t start doing something for humanity that God had never done before. God has always been grace because God’s essence is grace and always has been. Salvation coming with Jesus? No. Jesus pointing us to a salvation that has always been there? Yes. Jesus demonstrating a profound truth about God in a way we mere humans can grasp? Yes. Jesus points us toward that incredibly powerful truth in an incredibly powerful way.

So as I celebrate Christmas this year, I will try always to think of it in mythic terms not factual terms. If I had to understand it as fact, I wouldn’t be able to believe it at all. But I don’t have to understand it as fact. Neither do you. As myth the Christmas story has far more power than it could ever have as mere fact. When we understand the story as myth we avoid making God arbitrary and capricious. We come to understand, to the extent our limited human minds are capable of understanding it, that God is and always has been a God of universal grace, of universal salvation. When I understand Christmas that way I can celebrate it with joy. Perhaps you can too.