Theologians and historians quarrel over just about everything relating to Jesus Christ. In an effort to come to terms with Christmas and what it means to believers and non-believers, I’ve been doing some homework, reading some of the best and most highly regarded works on Jesus and his life. I am surprised to say it is some of the most entertaining and enlightening reading I’ve done in a while.
I am not doing this for religious purposes but for secular and very personal ones.
Christmas is a time of great joy and also great suffering. There are people who live for it, and people who struggle with it. Some people are completely in sync with the idea of the holiday, many people are not, and for them the holidays are a difficult time, a time of exclusion and guilt and sad and painful memories.
Christmas can be a great feast or a Feast Of Failure, depending on who you are and where you come from. I want to love Christmas, as i once did, and as someone who lives mostly in his mind, that means I have to think it through. Sharing the process has been both helpful and healing for me.
This week, the real mission and life of Jesus Christ began to reveal itself to me. It’s a great story.
He was a man of great faith, anger, and compassion. He was intensely political, a radical minister who fought for the poor and the sick, and who despised the wealthy, the political and the greedy. No one, he believed, should feast on rich and plentiful food with others went hungry. He was campaigning almost every day of his short adult life, he promised his followers a new world, he called it the Kingdom Of God.
Jesus was a fierce nationalist, his kingdom would only come, he said, when the Roman occupation of Israel was over. God would make it so, he promised that.
Jesus Christ had nothing but contempt for the rich and for clerics and religious bureaucrats. He believed them to be corrupt parasites, co-conspirators in the suffering of the poor. He despised them so much he provoked them constantly, and it became necessary for them to kill him. Jesus believed the Kingdom Of God was coming any moment, and this idea – so powerful and urgent at the time – was the lure for so many of his followers and his primary mission.
“Seek first the Kingdom of God,” he said, “and God’s justice, then all these things shall be added to you.” The only way to enter the Kingdom of God was to forsake everything and everyone…”
According to the historians, Jesus spoke so often and so abstractly about his kingdom that it is not possible to know whether he himself had a specific material idea of what it would be, or whether his idea was about religious transformation, a state of grace. But his political underpinnings for the new kingdom were very clear.
When Jesus’s Kingdom of God is established, wrote Reza Aslan in his book “Zealot,” “the rich will be made poor and the strong will become weak, and the powerful will be displaced by the powerless.” It would be very hard, if not impossible, for the wealthy to enter this kingdom, Jesus said over and over again.
The implications of Jesus’s preaching, say historians, were quite clear: The Kingdom of God was not some utopian fantasy whereby God transforms the lives of the poor and the dispossessed. “It is a chilling new reality,” writes Aslan, “in which God’s wrath rains down upon the rich, “for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full, for you shall hunger. Woe to you laughing now, for soon you will mourn. (Luke 6:24-25).
The rich and the poor are one of the world’s oldest stories, if you read much history. The story usually ends the same way, the rich get richer, the poor get screwed. Jesus thought he would re-make history.
How does this kingdom of Jesus relate to us and our Christmas celebration? Perhaps more than I might have thought.
Americans are not into forsaking anything, they are all about acquiring things. Last year, Americans spend nearly $500 billion on Christmas. In our time, the rich are not despised, but admired and favored. Increasingly, they dominate our judicial and political systems. The wealthy are seen as representing the best of our enterprising spirit, having gained the rewards of hard work and equal opportunity. Our culture tends to see them as worthy and superior, successful practitioners of the American Dream. The poor have fallen from favor, increasingly viewed as lazy or even dangerous.
I am not speaking of the left or the right, but I was reading these books on Jesus while watching some of the presidential debates and I was struck by the realization that every single idea I heard being advanced there was a complete repudiation of every thing that Jesus stood for or believed. That is not hard to see, and I couldn’t reconcile the claims of these politicians that they were the most favored by people who call themselves devout followers of Christ, just a few weeks before his birthday. In fact, the people invoking his name are the very ones he spent his life denouncing.
How ironic that these were the people who lay claim to being the most religious and the most devoted to the defense and promotion of Christian ideas. But if you read almost anything about the inspiration behind Christmas and the Christian faith, Christ’s ideas are all either missing from their hearts and rhetoric or utterly corrupted and despoiled. I don’t think those people are getting anywhere near the kingdom if he is guarding the gates.
Where does that leave us at Christmas, believers and non-believers alike?
I think of Jesus resurrected once more, perhaps returning to the world to resume his own campaign.
As John The Baptist languishes in prison, awaiting his execution by the Romans, he hears of the wondrous healing being performed being performed in Galilee by one of his former disciples. He sends a messenger to ask Jesus if he is the “one who is to come.” In the Middle East, in that time, it was widely believed a Messiah was coming, he would deliver the people from the Roman occupation.
“Go tell John what you hear and see,” Jesus tells the messenger. “The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor are bought good news.” That may be the greatest political promise in world history, I can’t help but wonder how it would play on social media, and how apoplectic it would make all of those cable news commentators.
I wonder how this message relates to our time, our political leaders, our Christmas, where the blind are not seeing, no one is cleaning the feet of lepers, or bringing good news to the poor. If you read the Kabbalah, the ancient mystical text of the Hebrews, it relates very closely to Jesus and his message. Again and again, God demands that the people of the earth give hope to the poor. He warns them that if he returns and finds that they haven’t, the world will suffer.
To Jesus, the wealthy were not entrepreneurs to be admired and protected, they were parasites feeding off of the unfortunate. Any one who kept more than they needed while others went hungry would, he predicted, meet an awful fate.
So this much we can see. Jesus’s message is not the message of our time, not the tenor of our Christmas. In fact, the tenor of our Christmas – joy for us, good will to men, elaborate rituals of family, the spending of many billions of dollars on presents to ourselves and our families is, like our political debates, almost the very opposite of his message and beliefs.
This has all been helpful and clarifying to me. It doesn’t make me hate Christmas, it helps me to love it in a new way.
There is much to love about Christmas for me, now that I am learning about it. There is much to love about Jesus, even if you don’t worship him as the son of God. (I don’t.) I have talked with two oil companies about helping to provide heating oil to people with no money to pay for it this winter. I am returning to my former with as a literacy volunteer, hoping to help immigrants learn our language. I hope to keep the poor in my consciousness. They are the point of Christmas, not a by-product of its marketing.
More importantly than that, I feel connected to the very powerful and stirring values of the brave and committed man whose birthday everyone says they are celebrate. I hope he is the son of God, I wish he were around. If I close my eyes, I can imagine him on a podium, blue eyes staring into the cameras, and telling our shocked moderators as Jesus makes his campaign promises about what he will do once his Kingdom of God is established on the earth:
“Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped, the lame shall leap like deer, and the tongue of the mute shall sing for joy.” Jesus will get a standing ovation, the moderators and the reporters will tremble and weep.
The politicians standing alongside of him will be struck dumb, unable to speak any kind of lie or cruelty or bigotry. When they open their mouths, only truth and love will be spoken. If they lie or divide, they will be smitten and turned to ashes.
The kingdom of God will have revealed itself to us. I bet Jesus could do that. He is said to have the most awesome special affects.