Christmas -- Myth, history, parable

I’ve been reading commentaries about the Christmas Story and wondered what your thoughts were. I mean it is your story, after all.

No, I’m not sure it was ever my story. Let’s start with your thoughts.

Ok. Well, obviously I believe you were/are real. I mean you existed.

That’s a start. A lot of people won’t even go that far. I suppose they are waiting for a birth certificate to appear. But even if it was even possible, they’d probably say it was a forgery and I wasn’t really a citizen of Palestine.

I believe you lived, taught, pissed people off, got killed for pissing people off and ….

And?

Maybe you healed people, you certainly inspired people, and you made people who were marginalized feel nourished, nurtured, accepted, loved. But the Christmas Story? That’s something else entirely.

I agree. It has little to do with my actual birth.

Really? So is it just a myth?

Ah! A loaded statement. There is no such thing as “just” a myth. Myths are complex, complicated, multi-layered. As to the Christmas myth? Just consider all that it has inspired – amazing music, incredible art and sculpture, endearing and inspiring fiction, profound poetry. Not to mention hundreds of thousands of businesses churning out Christmas paraphernalia every year. But even more importantly, every year there are miracles of sacrificial giving of parents to children, children to parents, community members to those in need.



I completely accept that the Christmas Story has wielded a lot of power in the development of Western civilization, Western culture. But is it history?


Does it have to be history in order to be true?

Huh?

What Matthew and Luke got right (and let me point out that they are the only two of the New Testament authors to tell the “Christmas Story” and they didn’t agree on much of it) what they got right was that they focused on the message, the beliefs that they wanted to convey about the meaning of my life and death. It was never about my birth, per se, the birth narratives were didactic (teaching) devices. They emphasized that I was originally Jewish and that my life was part of our (Jews) larger narrative of salvation. Matthew, himself a Jew, made a concerted effort to parallel my birth with Jewish prophecy. They told a story about the community I came to save – not just Jews and not the powerful.

 Luke, a non-Jew raised in a Greek city, was emphatic about the role of ordinary working people – shepherds – who were invited to witness my birth. He did not have Magi in his story – wealthy, religious seers, from the orient – like Matthew did. And Luke gave more of a voice to women, my mother and her cousin Elizabeth both have “speaking parts” in Luke’s narrative. Matthew, a traditional Jew, did not break with ancient Jewish tradition that rarely included women as God’s chosen witnesses and prophets; Matthew used my father Joseph as the story’s main character – the one chosen to receive God’s messages.

And so the gospel Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke were constructed with a specific theological intention. Each of them had a particular focus and a particular message to convey about the purpose of my life and death in God’s larger narrative of salvation, and they accomplished this in their gospels beginning with their Infancy Narrative.

I suppose it should be noted that Paul, the earliest New Testament writer, and Mark the earliest evangelist, don’t even mention your birth.

That’s what I am trying to point out. My birth wasn’t important until people began asking more questions about my death – why and for whom – and about the significance of my life – my Jewish roots. And by then there was nobody to ask about my birth. Paul and Mark and Luke had never met me.

Do you mind all the shepherds and magi trampling around in the story of your birth?

Not at all. I have always been touched by the beauty of the scenes Matthew and Luke paint. And Luke’s prose is “full of grace” indeed. The Magnificat rivals the most beautiful of the Old Testament Psalms. The nativity story as it has evolved in the church touches people, it softens the hardest of hearts. It brings hope every year to a world in pain and turmoil. It brings beauty in the raising of voices in carols and in the decorating of whole cities. It moves people to kindness, compassion, and generosity, if only temporarily.

Does it bother you that there has been such an infusion of European symbols and myths – the Christmas tree, Santa Claus? And that people don’t know the difference between biblical versions of the Infancy Narrative, and instead just lump it all together into one story – magi and shepherds, angelic visitors or visions to Joseph and Mary?

No. It is one story, the story of a world in need of hope and redemption and of a God who chooses to work in and through humanity to bring evidence of that hope and redemption each year. There is no more important a story to be told than that.