Christmas Eve
Family. That’s what Christmas is all about, right? More than
Easter, more than Thanksgiving, more than any other holiday, Christmas is all
about family. And that might be why it can so often drive us crazy.
See, our thinking about Christmas has changed a lot in the
last 200 years. It used to be that there were really two sorts of Christmas
celebrations. One was formal worship in Church. Different services were held at
midnight, dawn, and midmorning on Christmas Day, and everyone was expected to
attend all three. You can see how this might make for a rather lethargic
Christmas. The other Christmas was more raucous and rowdy, something akin to a bacchanalia
or Mardi Gras. This was the Christmas that reformers kept trying to do away
with throughout history, which has always been sort of our litmus test for people
being jerks, right? “Oliver Cromwell outlawed Christmas. He must’ve been a
jerk.”
This all changed in the Nineteenth Century, largely due to a
pair of authors. Charles Dickens wrote A
Christmas Carol, with Scrooge and his ghostly guides, of which half a dozen
different adaptations air on television each holiday season. Meanwhile,
Washington Irving wrote Old Christmas,
which is nothing short of a delight, and also Knickerbocker’s History of New York, which introduced the United
States to a Dutch fellow named Santa Claus. These stories exemplified a
movement that reoriented Christmas around neither altar nor alehouse but hearth
and home. Christmas came to embody family, friends, and an innocent
sentimentality. It was still religious, mind you, but this Christmas was
domestic. It brought the religion home.
After the Civil War, as after most terrible wars, our
recovering nation focused on the peace and joys of family life, of a safe and
loving household. We elevated our children as Bob Cratchit had elevated Tiny
Tim. And this is really the Christmas we know and love today: the Christmas of
coming home, of children’s laughter, of gifts given with affection to friends
and loved ones. It is everything for which we long in domestic bliss. It is
family idealized.
But therein lies the tension. I love this new Christmas,
this hearth-and-home Christmas. We all do. But our families are not perfect,
are they? We cannot call ourselves ideal. Rather, we are messy human beings. We
mishear and misunderstand and fall into bad habits and generally just sin. No
one loves you like family. No one can hurt you like family. The Germans have a
term for this—leave it to the Germans, right? It’s called weltshmirz, “world-pain”, which is the stress we feel when real
life doesn’t live up to our ideal vision of life. There can be a lot of
weltshmirz around the holidays, can’t there? The kids don’t like what we bought
them. Christmas dinner turned out poorly. Old and happy memories remind us of
losses, of relationships broken or family absent. But take heart, brothers and
sisters. We’re just looking at things upside-down.
There is a story in the Gospels about how the Apostles James
and John came to Jesus with their mother and demanded that they be given places
of prominence in Jesus’ coming Kingdom. Specifically they wanted to sit one at
His right hand and one at His left in His glory. Clearly they missed the whole “last
shall be first” bit. “You don’t know what you’re asking,” Jesus replies. “Can
you drink the cup I am to drink, or be baptized with the baptism with which I
am baptized?” And when they insist that they can, Jesus says, “To sit at My
right or left hand is not for Me to grant. These places belong to those for
whom they have been prepared.” Just who is it, do you suppose, who sits at the
right and left of Jesus Christ in His glory?
On one level this story seems to point to the twin thieves crucified
on either side of our Lord, one to His left and one to His right. But after His
ascension into Heaven, the Psalmist writes: “The Queen stood on Thy right hand
in gilded clothing.” Now who could this be, the Church argues, but the Queen
Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary? And if Mary stands on Jesus’ right in glory,
who but Joseph could stand on His left? His parents! Jesus’ parents stand at
His right hand and left, an eternal family, the Holy Family, crowned in glory. This
is why most grand old cathedrals have a chapel to Mary stage right of the
altar, and a chapel to Joseph stage left. The thing that God elevates to the
highest of Heaven, the thing that He brings with Him back up into His glory, is
a simple human family—the ideal family.
God could have entered the world in any way that He wanted.
He could have sprung fully armored and grown from the head of Zeus, like
Athena. He could have descended from Heaven on a cloud at the head of a vast
and cosmic army. But no, He chose to become one of us, chose to enter Creation
with us, as a little Child—and not just as a solitary Babe but in the midst of
a family, with His chosen Mother and loving adoptive father. A poor family,
yes, but a royal one!
St. Francis understood this better than anyone. St. Francis
loved Christmas beyond all else because Christmas brings us Jesus, brings us
the eternal Creator become part of His own artwork. For Francis, Jesus changed
everything. The friar asked permission of his bishops to construct the first
ever living crèche, recreating the manger, the gathering of the animals, the
entire Nativity scene. Witnesses claim to have seen a beautiful Child appear in
the straw at Francis’ first live Nativity.
If God has entered our world like this, Francis realized,
then this changes the very nature of our world. Human beings were now holy
because Christ chose to become human. Straw was made holy because He chose it
for His bed. Animals became holy because they were His gathered witnesses, His
first sources of warmth. And most of all, the family was made holy—mother and
father and children were made holy—because a family was the vessel by which
Jesus Christ was born and raised and loved. It wasn’t that the scene was
perfect. After all, who wants to give birth in a cave surrounded by animals?
But the coming of Christ to us made it
perfect.
The Holy Family truly does astound me. At its center is
Jesus Christ, God made Man, come to live and laugh and work and sweat and
suffer and die with us; come to forgive us our sins and raise us from the dead
and lift us into Heaven forever. Then there is Mary, most Blessed Virgin, who
in her spotlessness reversed the disobedience of Eve and in her flesh proved to
be the Body of Christ before Christ yet had a Body.
And finally we have Joseph, in some ways the most remarkable
character of all—for Joseph contributes neither divinity nor physicality to his
newborn adopted son, yet welcomes Him with the warmth and love that only a
father can share with his Child. Joseph amazes me because he, like us, is adopted into the family of God. And that
family would not exist without him. The Church Fathers are clear: Joseph plays
an indispensable role in our Lord’s Incarnation. There would be no Christmas without
him! Yet what he contributes is neither flesh nor spirit but fatherly love.
I will go yet further. From the beginning of the Bible, it
has been perplexingly clear to God’s people that God can be many things at once
and yet be one God. We see this at the very beginning, in Genesis. Genesis 1
speaks of God as distant and unknowable; Genesis 2 speaks of Him as intimate,
close and personal, willing to get His hands dirty. In the Bible God is both
beyond us yet also beside us. This idea develops through further revelation,
until God finally reveals it fully in what we call the Trinity—the truth that
God is Three yet God is One: three Persons united so perfectly in infinite love
that they are truly, eternally, a single Being.
You know what that is? That’s a family. God Himself, in His
very Nature, is a family. And so when God enters this world, when God takes on
flesh as Jesus Christ on that first beautiful Christmas morn, of course He appears to us in a family. That’s
what He is. And that is what He made us to be. Yes, Man was created in the
Image of God, but we are not meant to be simple individuals. The true Image of
God is family, many persons united in mutual love, that at the last we might be
raised up to join in God’s very Being, our family merged into the Family of
God.
That’s why your family is holy! Not because the tree was
perfect or the in-laws got along or because you hit the nail on the head with
just the right gifts. Family is holy because God is family, because God made
us to be family, and because Jesus has entered into each and every one of
our families to make us all one in Him. You’re darn right that Christmas is
about family—messy families, broken families, ideal families, all of which are one in God’s own
eternal Family, now and forever.
In Jesus’ Name. AMEN.
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