The Myth of Christmas

The Century of Augustus, by Jean Leon Gerome

  

Lections: The Fourth Sunday of Advent, AD 2025 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“You cannot really understand any myths,” wrote G.K. Chesterton, “until you have found that one of them is not a myth.”

In the time of Christ, it was quite common to attribute to great men—world-conquering men—stories of divine parentage, like the Grecian heroes of old. The Emperor Augustus had himself styled “son of god,” after the official divinization of his adoptive father, Julius Caesar. Suetonius, writing a century later, relates the tale that Augustus’ mother had a vision of a serpent in the temple of Apollo just before she conceived, implying that Apollo might be Augustus’ real father.

And why not cultivate such rumors? The divine right of kings has an ancient pedigree.

The philosopher Plato conquered no lands, ruled no kingdoms, yet his writings provide the bedrock for all the Western mind. You might not be familiar with Plato’s works, but I guarantee that you think like he did. He’s in the air we breathe, within our very bones. He’s the intellectual father of us all. Unsurprisingly, some long time after his death, stories began to circulate that his mother too had had a vision of Apollo before his birth, with Plato’s father warned in a dream not to touch his wife for the 10 months of her pregnancy.

That ought to sound rather familiar.

In our Gospel for this morning, we hear the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ, as recounted by Matthew the Evangelist. There is a sense in which our Gospels have been written backward. The thing they all agree on is that Jesus Christ is risen. His Resurrection changes everything, both forward and back. We see now the ministry of Jesus, the life of Jesus, in a new and glorious light, knowing before we begin that He has conquered death and Hell.

And so we work backwards from that, recording His teachings, passing on His traditions, preaching His Gospel. This bit is relatively solid as well. We have a great deal of agreement between Matthew, Mark, and Luke, such that we call these Gospel accounts “synoptic,” that is, “seen together,” with the same eye.

But of Jesus’ youth we have little. Of our New Testament authors, Paul, Mark, and John appear to have no knowledge of the Nativity, no tradition of Virgin Birth. Remarkably, however, this does not in any way alter how they view Jesus Christ. Paul, Mark, and John all have extremely high Christologies, proclaiming Jesus as divine, as God upon this earth. They simply have little interest in His childhood.

Matthew and Luke do offer us stories of Jesus’ birth, but these do not appear to match. Both agree that He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem of Judea, and raised as the son of Joseph in Nazareth. But Matthew doesn’t seem to know Luke’s version of the story, and Luke doesn’t seem to know of Matthew’s. Jesus’ earlier life rests on shakier narrative ground than do His ministry, death, and Resurrection.

We do have a third Nativity narrative, the Infancy Gospel of James, which came along later, and never made it into the Bible, yet has given to us details such as Mary riding on a donkey, and Christ being born in a cave—things still prevalent in Christian art unto this day. Wilder legends spread from there, with some of my favorites involving the Christchild taming dragons and having panther bodyguards. Why do we not have that in stained glass?

When Matthew tells the story of Jesus’ birth, he thinks it most important to establish Jesus’ Jewish pedigree, back through David unto Abraham, demonstrating how Jesus is the rightful Jewish King, the Messiah promised through the Prophets from of old. Matthew makes very clear connections between Jesus’ earthly father Joseph and the earlier Joseph of the Hebrew Scriptures, that favored son of Israel to whom God spoke in dreams. The ancient kings too called themselves the sons of God.

The Gospel account goes so far as to connect Joseph’s dream to a prophecy of Isaiah from seven centuries before. That prophecy had been fulfilled with the birth of a boy named Immanuel, “God-With-Us,” likely the prophet’s own son. But Matthew wishes to show us that Jesus is the deeper fulfillment of the Scriptures, that it is through His life, death, and Resurrection that we must read our Bibles from now on. Christ is the hinge of our history, the One worthy to open the scrolls.

Yet the Gospels are not only Jewish documents; they are Jewish documents written under Rome. Everything about the way in which they tell to us Jesus’ life practically screams, “Here is the real King of Kings, the real Son of God, the true Savior of this and every world—here in Christ and not in Rome.” Which is an awfully astonishing assertion. I mean, think about it: Jesus is presented as a King and a Hero and a God upon the earth, things that we associate with Herakles or Alexander, not with a wandering Galilean Rabbi from an unknown family in a conquered country at the farthest edge of the Empire.

Christ turns our whole world upside-down. Here is God, in the meek and the lowly, in the poor and defeated. Here is God, in the little, the last, and the least, the forgotten and enslaved. Here is God, not conquering the planet, but Crucified, God as a corpse on a stick! What could be more shocking, more blasphemous, more ridiculous, more obscene? And yet it must be true. Because the life that He led, the Kingdom He proclaimed, the death that He accepted, the forgiveness that He spoke to us even in His agony, could never be anything less than divine! And that life sacrificed has shattered every grave.

We don’t see, can no longer understand, how scandalous the Christmas story is. That this Man, this criminal, this Jew is the real Hero, and King, and Conqueror, and God. Born through the guts of a girl! Laid in a trough made for beasts! Homeless, hopeless, doomed to die: here is the Messiah whom God promised; here is divinity made flesh. I’m not sure whether we should laugh or cry, but the last thing we can be here is indifferent. Everything we thought we knew of power has been wrong.

God does not sit on golden thrones. God does not send out self-righteous armies. God does not countenance oppression or injustice or exclusion or even hierarchy. He isn’t to be found at the pinnacle of Creation; He is born to the lowest of the low. And if that doesn’t cause us to fall upon our knees, then I think we have to reassess the way in which we tell His story. Because the proper response to Christmas is to gasp.

One last thing: that connection that Matthew makes to Plato, that period of Joseph not touching Mary until she had borne her Son, I don’t think that’s accidental. Nor is the fact that James placed Jesus’ birth within a cave. Plato’s most famous story, the Allegory of the Cave, speaks of how human beings must rise to God through intellectual enlightenment, how our experience of goodness and beauty and truth here below points us to God, who is the Good and the True and the Beautiful.

And that’s splendid, it really is. I believe that philosophy is a wonderful gift of God. Yet once again, Jesus turns this image on its head. God doesn’t wait for us to climb out of our caves. He comes down to us—is born as one of us—in the darkest recesses of earth, wherein we are fettered. He comes to us that He may set us free. Everyone, free.

I leave you with the words of C.S. Lewis, himself a Christian Platonist: “Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened … The pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’. Therefore it is true.”

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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