Christmas pulls me in each year.
The goofy thing about me is that I both do and don’t believe. I am what you might call a reluctant atheist, although even that isn’t quite true, because I still believe in God and I still believe in Jesus. I believe that Jesus was born the son of God, and died and rose again, and will return. I have tried not to believe it, yet I do. Jesus the man in the gospels has influenced most of my ethical principles and the way I see the world. Jesus always prefers the company of the outcast. He is not excited by fancy parties, or wealth, or status, and none of these things have any sway over him at all. It’s one aspect of his character that is frankly very likeable. He responds to the genuine integrity of people, like in the famous example of Magdalene washing his feet with her tears. He responds to suffering. He responds to faith. In any room, he would go first to the person who is the loneliest, the most frightened, the least loved. Power, as we define it, is meaningless to Christ.
This makes him terribly subversive, and he cannot be bought, and he cannot be subdued. He was, and remains, radical. He stands in direct opposition to controlling power at every turn, and he is not interested in working within existing structures of power. There’s nothing diplomatic about him, which is probably where Winston Churchill got the idea. This is why he overthrows the tables in the Temple. Jesus exists to overthrow all of it. Hell, he doesn’t even have a home. The hope of the whole world rests on the shoulders of an itinerant preacher, or more simply, a homeless man. His willingness to die represents divine intercession, radical submission. He could have killed the ones who betrayed him with the snap of a finger. He could have brought himself down from the cross. Jesus was resplendent with power; he chose instead to act with love. His attendant suffering on the Cross closes the final gap between God and humans. There is no length to which his love will not go, and in the end his love is what overcomes death. It is his love that terrified the powerful, and continues to terrify them now. Because they knew, and they know, that power is never enough.
I love this man and want to follow him. But for a variety of reasons, some of them theological, some of them personal, I am not able to have a relationship with God or belong to a church anymore, though both things were part of my life for nearly a decade. I loved the church, and I loved my rituals of reading scripture every night (which I did faithfully for eight years), and praying. I have experienced profound intimacy with God. I have also experienced profound disconnection, and in the church, I have experienced even worse. Betrayal.
So I can’t go back. I will not go back. I haven’t felt welcome in a church service in many years; it’s as if everyone can see that I am reluctant, that I have questions, that I am hard-wired against obedience and the very idea of doctrine. The church is not welcoming to a lot of people, which is one reason why membership is declining throughout the United States.
But then Christmas comes, and I am reminded again of Christ’s birth and all it means to me. Even in his birth, he is humble; the son of God, born in a barn, with animals mucking about and hay and birds cooing in the rafters. Here, too, the circumstances of his birth foretell the rest of his story--that he will eschew power and control in favor of radical humility. The shepherds get a message from an angel, telling them the son of God is here, but they are frightened, because angels are warriors of God. The fact that there are so many angels in the sky seems to me more like the assembly of an army than of a choir. Christ’s birth brings with it tidings of the war to come. So it is thrilling to me to imagine the angel with flaming eyes. Your hope is fulfilled. Prepare for the coming storm.
The bright star in the darkness. Oh, how I long for it to be true, the message that hope is here at last. I am always reluctant to trust hope, and then Christmas comes and dares me to place my bet. Some years I don’t. Some years I do.
And I imagine what it was like for Mary, her deep joy at the birth of her son. The Bible says that she cherished all these things and held them close to her heart. I think that is because Mary knew her son would be persecuted. She knew his life would not be easy. What must it have been like for her, to watch her son grow. Perhaps she saw him running through the field with wild abandon and it seemed to her that he’d been here before. Perhaps his dependency on her filled her with wonder. Perhaps it was bittersweet because she knew that as he aged the distance between them would grow, as a result of their different natures and the demands of his fate.
At the beginning of the story and the end, Mary gets something of a raw deal. She would have been shamed for her pregnancy as an unmarried woman, and she would have to watch her son suffer brutal torture and an agonizing death. By the time his ministry begins he belongs to everyone, not just to her. But before that, she gets to raise a child who is actually, truly, Gifted.
The older I get the more interested I am in Mary, the woman in the story without whom none of this would be possible, who is marked as holy, but who is left as something of a mystery because most of the gospel writers don’t think of her as very important. Mary is totally instrumentalized, but she is also given the most crucial job of anyone in the entire Bible, perhaps in history: raise the Messiah. Greatness is thrust upon an ordinary teenage girl, an angel pops out like a demented jack-in-the-box and gives her this tremendous duty that will implicate her standing in the community, and she is frightened. But she rises to the occasion. It’s like any bog-standard hero’s journey, except the MacGuffin is the Christ. Mary is the Everyman and Everywoman’s hero. If you’ve been overlooked your whole life for the family member who is *much more important,* or told that you’re supposed to put other people before yourself, or been given a seemingly insurmountable set of expectations without much support, or been shamed for circumstances beyond your control, or been powerless to protect the ones you love, then you can find kinship with Mary. If you’re a mother who feels the weight of the world on your shoulders, who’s constantly exhausted from the demands of raising children, you can find kinship with Mary. And who knows--maybe Mary is the one who taught Jesus to speak in parables. Maybe she encouraged his distrust of authority figures, having been chased across borders herself because of Herod’s baby massacres. Maybe she was every bit as subversive as he was. We don’t know.
But this year, as I think of Christmas, I am with her, full of longing and love for her newborn son while also aware that separation from him is inevitable. I am there as she comforts her son as he cries. I am there as she is exhausted after a long journey, and in pain. If I cannot approach Christ directly, then Mary will do it for me.