As I’m writing this, the blizzard of ‘10 is raging outside, and it got me to thinking about children’s Christmas pageants. Thanks to those pageants performed in many churches (and to the cooperation of other cultural influences) I suspect that most worshipers are unaware of the discontinuity of shepherd’s abiding in the fields in the cold midwinter, as well as the fact that of our four canonical gospels, only two record a birth narrative: Matthew tells us of the Magi and the angel warning Joseph to flee to Egypt, and Luke tells us of the shepherds and the angel’s announcement to Mary that she will give birth to Son of the Most High. I bring this up not to belittle children’s pageants or to challenge people’s belief systems. I bring it up rather to 1) highlight the danger in homogenizing the Christmas story and 2) to promote awareness of the origins of our December 25th celebration.
When our pageants smash all of those stories of Christ’s birth together into one, we run the risk of further encouraging an already high level of biblical illiteracy among our worshipers. Matthew and Luke have important things to tell us independently of each other; they portray Christ in particular ways, and if we cut and paste their stories together we lose those unique images of Christ in the process. For example, Matthew’s Christ is visited by Magi “from the east” who initially report to Herod; Herod responds with a plot to kill all of Bethlehem’s children in hopes of preventing the Messiah from usurping the throne. The whole scene is an echo of Israel’s experience in the Old Testament. Jesus is portrayed as a new Moses, and many of the events recall similar ones in the birth and life of Moses. Matthew throws in scriptural citations to illustrate the fulfillment of ancient prophecy in the birth of Christ. All of this is an affirmation of Matthew’s Jesus: the Messiah, God’s Son, who fulfills prophecy and saves God’s people, and by being revealed first to Gentile kings/astrologers, Christ’s kingship is demonstrated as universal. This is not Luke’s Christ, and this same story would be out of place in Luke’s gospel. By keeping these distinctions, we can better understand Christ through the eyes of the gospel writers.
Now we come to that midwinter scene of Christ’s birth. Visions of a cold and snowy first noel have a certain sentimentality to them, but it is hardly favorable weather for shepherds or traveling Magi. I won’t argue that we should move the date of Christmas, but we would do well to understand its history and appreciate its significance. George Barna’s book Pagan Christianity probably cemented in popular culture the notion that the Church settled on December 25th as the date of Christ’s birth because they wanted to overshadow the pagan observation of the winter solstice. This is cited as history by both Christians and non-Christians alike and is sometimes used as an argument against the faith on the grounds that the Church has simply stolen pagan ideas and repackaged them. To me, this hardly seems plausible—why would any self-respecting Christian in early Christendom agree to align with a “pagan” holiday a celebration with such deep theological significance as Christmas, especially when many Christians had enough trouble with eating food sacrificed to idols?
Christmas doesn’t show up as a Christian festival until the 4th century, and it’s more likely that the date was born from theology rather than sneaky marketing to compete with the pagans. Thomas Talley, in his book The Origins of the Liturgical Year, suggests that Christmas has its origins in Easter. After the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, some early Christian communities began celebrating Easter on March 25 in the absence of temple authorities who could tell them when Passover fell. At this point, Easter was a celebration of Christ’s incarnation, birth, life, death, and resurrection all rolled into one. Jewish tradition held that a patriarch’s birth and death fell on the same date, and when more emphasis was placed on Christ’s incarnation rather than his birth (see John chapter 1), March 25 became a celebration of the incarnation and a separate festival evolved for observing Christ’s birth, projected nine months later onto December 25.
Do you think a homogenized Christmas story is useful, or should we be teaching the distinctions among the gospels? Do you agree with Barna’s assessment of the origins of Christmas, or does Talley’s seem more plausible (albeit a lot more complex)? What other quirks about our Advent and Christmas celebrations do you find to be a help or a hindrance to our understanding of Christ?
