Читать книгу Christmas - Adam C. English - Страница 6

By the year 500 BC, the decisive moments in Israel’s foundational history could do no more than dust up distant memories. Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Miriam, David, and Solomon had long since entered the halls of immortal glory. The twelve tribes had risen and dissolved. Jerusalem had existed as a city for over 400 years. The major drama of the Hebrew Old Testament had fizzled out even though some of its books like Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi were still undergoing composition.

Meanwhile, in the intellectually fertile soil of Greece’s Mediterranean colonies, the first buds of philosophy began to appear. These showings initially proved fragmentary and timid, but nevertheless persistent—first appearing and retreating, then appearing again. The success of the Greeks economically, politically, and militarily had opened breathing room for the philosophically minded to stretch and inhale. We read in the pages of Herodotus the historian that the Greeks of this time sailed wine-dark seas, crossed volcanic ridges, dragged through desolate wastelands, and stumbled upon verdant oases. They discovered exotic foreigners beyond their borders and ambitious neighbors nearby. They imagined cloven-hoofed satyrs and nymphs in the woods and scaly creatures in the blue waters. The world had become an immense and strange place, and they had questions.

The first Greek philosophers obsessed over one question in particular. This single question proved as elusive as the saltwater spray off the beaches of the Aegean: the question of the arche, that is, the “origin,” “principle,” “base,” or “beginning” of all things. What was the rock-bottom nature of stuff? Whatever it was, it was arche. Did the cosmos consist of one long chain of this changing into that and that turning into something else? Was there one substance for stones, another for plants and trees, one for water and another for wind, or was everything made up of the same stuff? Thales, Anaximenes, and others offered a variety of answers. Some philosophers suggested that everything was composed of water, which can exist in a variety of states such as gas, liquid, and solid. Others suggested that air compressed into rock and thinned out into clouds and could be found in everything. Each new generation offered increasingly sophisticated solutions to the problem of the arche. Even so, no one could have prepared for the arrival of Heraclitus.

Heraclitus worked and wrote in the coastal city of Ephesus around the year 500 BC. What remains of Heraclitus’s musings can be found in canny aphorisms, clever epigrams, and curious fragments:

It is not good for men to get all they wish.

It is hard to fight against impulsive desire. Whatever it wants it will buy at the cost of the soul.

Nature loves to hide.

War is the father and king of all.10

No wonder posterity remembered Heraclitus as “the obscure.”

He took up the question of the arche—what is the principle and original substance within all things? But, Heraclitus thought that this was a difficult question to answer because everything seemed to be unstable and ever-changing. He pictured the universe as a tumultuous and quick-flowing river. “You cannot step into the same river twice,” he said.11 Every time someone steps into a stream, the waters are different, having moved downstream and been replaced by new waters. “All things come into being through opposition, and all are in flux, like a river.”12 The universe exists as change, flux, and disruption.

Nevertheless, above the fray and ruckus of the ever-changing river of life, Heraclitus perceived that order and unity persevere. “To those who are awake the cosmos is one, common to all; but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.”13 Famously, Heraclitus was prepared to give a name to this eternally organizing principle that “steers all things through all things”: he called it the logos.14 The Greek term logos carries a wide range of meaning and can be translated a number of ways. It can refer to a “word,” to the “thought” or “message” expressed by the words, to the “wisdom,” “rationale,” or “argument” behind the thought, to the overarching logic of the argument. For Heraclitus, logos pulled together all the vagrancies and contingencies of the cosmos. It gave structure to the random and boundaries to the chaos.15

In these fragments of Heraclitus it is easy for Christian theologians (like myself) to spy the visage of John the New Testament Gospeler. John, the most philosophical and weighty of the four Gospel writers, testifies that “in the beginning was the logos” and that “all things came into being through him [the logos], and without him not one thing came into being” (John 1:1, 3). There is correspondence between Heraclitus’s philosophy of logos and the Gospel of John’s Prologue on the Word to be sure.

New Testament scholars seriously doubt that John consulted Heraclitus or derived his ideas from Heraclitus. To find philosophical reflections on the Word and personifications of Wisdom, John needed only turn to the rich Wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible, the rabbinic traditions of Palestine, or the writings of Philo of Alexandria.16 Even so, an intellectual kinship exists between the obscure philosopher and the fourth Gospeler. It is as if John picked up the loose strands of Heraclitus’s conjectures and pulled them across 600 years of loom work and sewed them onto their natural end: “the logos was made flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14).

The Chaos of John

In recent years John has undergone a major reexamination by New Testament specialists. Because the Gospel of John was written so late and because its theology is so sophisticated and developed, scholars long assumed that for those reasons it must be the least historically reliable of the Gospels. New investigations and insights have compelled biblical experts to reevaluate the authorship, date and reliability of the text.17 More and more scholars have reason to believe that John’s gospel expresses the veritable recollections of Jesus’ close friend and disciple, what he saw and heard and touched with his own hands. The Gospel itself gives evidence that its author was an eyewitness to the events and not someone removed by a hundred years or more (see John 19:35 and 21:24).

New Testament scholars previously presumed the beloved disciple John could not have written the work because he was a simple and unlettered fisherman from the Lake of Genesareth. New research shows that he and his family were probably well connected to the priestly aristocracy of Jerusalem. John’s family may have been related to the high priest (John 18:15). Henri Cazelles suggests that John’s father, Zebedee, served as a priest in Jerusalem but did not reside there exclusively.18 Beyond his required presence in the city twice a year, he maintained residence in Galilee where his fishing business was located. John would have helped his father in Galilee and traveled with him to Jerusalem where he undoubtedly absorbed the knowledge, rites, and culture of the Jewish tradition. It is even possible that the “upper room” lent to Jesus and the disciples for Passover belonged to Zebedee as his Jerusalem residence.

Be that as it may, what is imperative to John’s message is that the logos does not represent an impersonal force moving through the universe but God himself. The Word of God speaks the wisdom, will, and desire of God—the arche of all things. We tend to forget that this basic truth of Christian theology sounded radical and countercultural in its own time. The curious thing about John’s pronouncement on the Word becoming flesh is how aggressively it pushed against the grain of classical culture. The Christian theology of John’s gospel would have irritated first-century intellectuals. The popular trend was to elevate the status of the gods, not incarnate them. First- and second-century intellectuals criticized the gods of the old myths for being far too human. They could be captured or pitted against each other. They could lash out in fits of jealousy, give in to lustful desires, kill mortals unjustly, lie and deceive humans or each other. In other words, the deities of old lacked transcendence, omnipotence, omniscience, and in some cases, basic standards of morality. In the eyes of their critics, the gods did not need more humanization. If anything, they needed to become less human, more divinized, less caught up in the traffic of human interaction and more godlike.

It is little wonder that philosophers such as Albinus of Smyrna, who lived in the mid-second century, insisted that the best and most wonderful characteristic of the highest divinity was the penchant for logic, order, reason, and system. Albinus was no Christian theologian. He represented a pre-Christian, or what today we might call pagan, way of thinking. He wouldn’t have called himself a pagan—the word didn’t yet exist. He would have said he was simply upholding traditional belief and giving intellectual clarity to cherished values. Traditional Roman and Greek belief recognized many deities and spirits but always deferred to the one high god who presided over all. The highest god was not scatterbrained and disorganized like us. He was, according to Albinus, flawless in morals and perfectly rational in mind. Albinus argued that prior to the birth of the heavens, matter moved about “chaotically and discordantly” but the highest god “brought it from disorder into the most perfect order, arranging its parts with numbers and shapes that were fitting.”19 As Albinus knew, this was the kind of divinity that people could get behind.

Amazingly, John’s gospel moves in precisely the opposite direction of his philosophical contemporaries like Albinus of Smyrna. Indeed, according to John the highest deity did something completely unexpected. The divine will that revealed itself initially in the darkness before time, organizing and systematizing the universe, threw in its lot with humanity. Banging through the door like an uninvited and very rowdy party guest, the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.

Chaos. Good news.

Human nature itches to rein in, classify, harness, tame, command, order, control. Divine nature disrupts, discombobulates, and disperses. It trumpets a new song, notches the base of the tree with an ax and then starts swinging, splitting mother from daughter and son from father (Ps 40:3; Matt 3:10; Luke 12:52–3; Mal 4:1). The world tilts toward institutionalism, toward bureaucracy, toward paper work and filing cabinets. Such a slant favors law and order, yes, but also the banality of evil that attends it—the systematizing of advantage and disadvantage, privilege and oppression. The gift of the Word unbalances the equation and so fulfills Isaiah’s prophecy of the Christ (Isa 61:1–2; Luke 4:18–9). For the prophecy heralds an anointed one who releases captives and unbounds prisoners, one who unspins the powers and horns the year of the Lord’s favor.20

Christianity is, in the words of Cambridge theologian John Milbank, “the religion of the obliteration of boundaries.”21 By this he means to highlight the importance of the enfleshment of the Word in Jesus Christ. For Milbank, the incarnation becomes the high-water mark of history, the grand moment in the grand narrative of God’s work. “With the doctrine of the Incarnation, Christianity violates the boundary between created and creator, immanence and transcendence, humanity and God. In this way, the arch taboo grounding all the others is broken.”22 The incarnation crosses the threshold separating creator and created, God and humanity. There is for humans a way to God because God made it. God snapped the taboo, God violated the boundary, God in Christ reached through the impenetrable curtain and rescued us.

And not only that. The Christian message places in our hands the dynamite to explode the limits “between nations, between races, between the sexes, between the household and the city, between ritual purity and impurity, between work and leisure, between days of the week, between sign and reality (in the Sacraments), between the end of time and living in time, and even between culture and nature.”23 The power of the incarnation breaks barriers and reduces walls of division to rubble. In Christ there can be found neither male nor female, slave nor free, Greek nor Jew (Gal 3:28). They dissolve, grow pale, disappear, sputter out. They are of no consequence. In the dazzling light of Christ the King of kings and Lord of lords, all other distinctions between individual persons fade to insignificance. If we have faith that the advent of Christ has flattened all obstacles between us and God, how much more has it done so between us and our fellow human beings?

But oh! How even the rubble of a wall can have the effect of a real wall in keeping us apart.

Why Flesh?

The Word stitched flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The Word did not simply go into Jesus or hover over his head; the Word became Jesus, born of Mary. It didn’t have to be that way. It could have been otherwise. What entered the gray haze of the world could have taken the form of law or ordinance or thunderbolt. But instead what came was word, spoken logos—fleeting, uncatchable, unpredictable. It was nothing more or less than speech for those who have ears to listen. Pencil pushers and keyboard fingers put the spoken word on the record, reproducing every jot and tittle so that not one letter or one stroke of a letter passes. But writing offers at best a substitute, a transcript representation of speech—not speech itself. Speech happens in the moment. The moment is unrepeatable. Even when captured on video and audio, what has been caught is no longer a live speech but the archival record of a live speech. “You have heard that it was said to those of long ago . . . . But I say to you . . .” (Matt 5:21–22). In Jesus we encounter the unrepeatable Moment, the eternal Now, the persistent and insistent voice that counters every fixed law and written record—“But I say to you.” Such a voice cannot be snatched, penned, or engraved in stone; it can only be heard and obeyed. And for this reason the religion known as Christianity is really nothing more than a long string of calls and responses.

But why? Why did the Word become flesh?

Just Believe

In my favorite scene from the 2003 family classic, Elf, Will Ferrell as Buddy the Elf tilts back his head and inhales a two-liter bottle of soda, lets out a thirty-second belch, and then exclaims at the dinner table, “Did you hear that?!” Aside from such lowbrow antics, Elf relates Buddy’s Odyssean quest to find his father and his true home. In part, the plot involves the world’s depleting supply of Christmas spirit. The depletion causes troubles for Santa Claus because his sleigh’s ability to fly is powered by the spirit of belief. Thankfully, the remedy is simple. The way to reenergize the Christmas spirit and spread Christmas cheer, as it turns out, is to sing loudly for all to hear.

The crisis of Christmas magic serves as a plot device for many holiday movies. In the Tim Allen series of The Santa Claus movies (1994, 2002, 2006), the magic of Santa Claus comes and goes, transfers from one individual to another, and can be lost if certain contractual obligations are not met. It is always in precious supply and in peril of disappearing. In Rise of the Guardians (2012), North, Tooth, Jack Frost, Bunny, and other muscle-bound, tattooed, and ninja-trained holiday sprites must protect the innocent imagination and belief of children. More than bearers of glad tidings and gifts, these characters identify themselves as “guardians” who protect the magic of childhood belief. From what? From any and all threats to that magic and those beliefs. Grown-ups will surely groan at Rise of the Guardians’ far-fetched nonsense, but the take-away message of the film is really no different than The Santa Claus, Elf, or the 1947 classic Miracle on 34th Street. In these and other shows, the protagonists desperately need to believe, or to get other people to believe. Believe in what? In the case of The Polar Express (2004), “Santa Claus.” In the case of the many film adaptations of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, “generosity.” Sometimes the main characters and the audience are asked to believe in kindness, other times in love, or imagination, or hope. What is important, though, is to believe. Holiday stores have noticed the trend and so sell ornaments, wall hangings, and other trinkets with the phrase “just believe” written in festively slanted cursive.

Of course, the very imperative to believe is itself an admission of defeat. People who carry on lives according to richly interlaced beliefs and convictions need not be cajoled on a daily basis to believe. Their very livelihoods, habits, activities, and conversations enact and display their beliefs. We might call these people religious, but it might be more accurate to call them convictional. In the absence of convictions, the Hollywood entertainment industry has stepped in, filled the void, and saturated the market with tales of belief that appeal especially to those who want so badly for their innocent childhood fairy tales to be true and for the world to be infused with a primitive magic. Denizens of modernity yearn for a purpose and a reality above and beyond the give-and-take, buy-and-sell, build-and-lose monotony of urban life. They want to believe . . . in what? It hardly matters. Just believe.

The quintessential expression of this wistful call to believe in belief appeared over a hundred years ago in the pages of the New York newspaper The Sun. In what has become the most reprinted editorial in history we see all the hallmark elements of a fight for innocent imagination in the face of extinction. Eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote this inquiry: “Some of my friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, ‘If you see it in THE SUN it’s so.’” The Sun responded in a famous and touching way, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.” The response inspired a musical cantata and an Emmy-awarded TV special as well as countless translations and reprints. It should not come as a surprise that the author of the editorial, Francis Pharcellus Church, worked as the religious-affairs reporter for the paper. In the late-Victorian estimation of Mr. Church, Santa Claus “exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist.” Even if no one ever witnessed the patron of Christmas descending the chimney and even if no admissible evidence could be collected, Church concluded that this would not prove anything. “The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see.”24

Beyond Virginia’s immediate question, Francis Church was responding to the ever-expanding scientific materialism and secularism of the day. At one level, the issue at stake in the editorial was Santa Claus, but at another it was the future of belief itself in the wake of “skepticism in a skeptical age.”25 Americans were at that moment feeling their traditional beliefs battered and blown about by industrialization, urbanization, commercialization, and scientific progress. “One characteristic solution,” says historian Stephen Nissenbaum, “was to think that God must exist simply because people so badly needed Him to; without God, human life would be simply unendurable.”26 People needed God to exist because more than ever God seemed not to exist. Nissenbaum’s observant insight brings us back to the movie, Miracle on 34th Street, with Kris Kringle in the wood-paneled courtroom, complete with objections, overrulings, and I-will-have-order-in-my-court-so-help-me-God gavel banging. In part, Nissenbaum names one reason so many people resonated (and still resonate) with Miracle on 34th Street: they wanted to believe. We want to believe. We just don’t know how or why. So, all we can do is just believe! This has become the best and really the only advice we know to give to people yearning for belief in an unbelieving age.

Our struggle will not be in vain if we are driven back to the incarnation. We must once again rediscover the mystery of divinity made humanity and eternity made time. Let us not be distracted by the sore-scabbed Victorian need to believe; rather, let us turn our attention to the real issue, the what of belief, the who of faith. This we find in the incarnation.

A Word from a Classic

I will always think fondly of Athanasius’s On the Incarnation as the first classic from Christian antiquity I read cover to cover. I was in seminary at the time and I read it over a Christmas break. Quite fitting, come to think of it. I sat on our blue couch next to a scrubby Scotch pine Christmas tree in our Fort Worth duplex’s front room. My reading accomplishment was nothing to brag about—the book spans less than seventy-five pages. But the experience was transformative. As if tipping over a vase and accidentally spilling out the rich treasure of the church’s theological tradition, I felt elated, delighted, and energized by the discovery of this Christian classic. I also felt a bit clownish. I was Nick Bottom from Midsummer Night’s Dream upon the discovery that his head had changed into the head of an ass. I kept touching the long ears of my newfound sensibility. The treasure had been within my reach all along. I had suffered from what C. S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery”—the prejudicial preference for all things new and modern and shiny over against all things old and antiquated.27 I had assumed wrongly that “more recent” meant “more insightful,” “more scholarly,” “more advanced”; I was guilty of presuming that novelty equaled progress. I was an ass, but at least I knew it.

Athanasius (296–373), writing in the Greek of the mid-fourth century, begins with a simple question: why did God become human? Saint Anselm of Canterbury would famously ask the same question 600 years later in his Latin dialogue Cur Deus homo, or Why Did God Become Human? Theologians ask it still today, each in his or her own language. Like a tree whose branches are laden with fruit just out of reach, Athanansius’s question tempts us with delicious mysteries just beyond our grasp. And perhaps because it hangs outside the reach of nimble fingers and agile minds, we feel tempted to frustration. We might want to fold our arms and reject the whole idea of the incarnation of Christ as irrational (1 Cor 1:22–23). Because it presents us with an uncracked mystery, we dismiss it as impossibility. Athanasius meditates on the arrogance of the human mind that declares out of order anything it cannot comprehend, saying, “The things which they, as men, rule out as impossible, [God] plainly shows to be possible; that which they deride as unfitting, His goodness makes most fit; and things which these wiseacres laugh at as ‘human’ He by His inherent might declares divine.”28

In a tantrum of stomping and braying, we let our intellectual pride deride what it cannot grasp. We mean to mock God and religion and the folly of the gospel but we only make a mockery of ourselves. What is surprising, or should we say miraculous, is that the holy and everlasting One chooses to love and cherish us anyway. We should be nothing more than a misplaced footnote in the eternal history of God. We are the impossible and unfitted thing. The scorn we think to pour out on the gospel clings to us like tar; we end up covered in our own filth—we are the laughingstock, the wiseacres.

For all that, the Son does not laugh at us. He laughs with us.

He joins us in the “utter poverty and weakness” of the incarnation and the cross where he “quietly and hiddenly wins over the mockers and unbelievers.”29 The Son does not lead a heavenly assault on the evildoers of earth nor does he stamp his foot on high and demand submission. As Athanasius understood, he quietly wins the world over. In the hidden and unassuming way of the cross, the Son persuades, gestures, prods, and encourages until humans are made “most fit” to be declared “divine.” What the Lord accomplished in miniature in Sarah’s old and decidedly barren womb by bringing forth Isaac, the Hebrew man of “laughter,” the incarnate Son of God accomplished for all the people of the world, turning what was laughable into a genuine source of celebration and rejoicing in heaven (Luke 15:7).

On this point Athanasius speaks with unshakable certitude. The Word of God wrapped himself in human flesh and took on the shame of the cross “out of the love and goodness of His Father, for the salvation of us.”30 By human standards, it was not proper or fitting that the Word of God assume flesh, suffer, and die. These things happened for one reason and one reason only, Athanasius says: “out of the love and goodness of His Father, for the salvation of us.” And so we return to the beginning, to the arche whence the Father’s love issued forth as Word to be heard and seen and touched and believed. And yet in point of fact there was no arche, only the everlasting Instant.

Admittedly we are treading on eternal things where language fails. It is not accidental that at the climactic moment in the 1965 A Charlie Brown Christmas, when Charlie Brown cries out in final frustration, “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?,” Linus answers simply and without commentary by reading the words of Luke 2:8–11. Everyone gets it. The meaning is clear. The curtains fall.

In the end, when language and explanations fail, there is but one thing to say. And even this need not be said because it does not depend on us to say it. It has already been said. As the retired Cambridge theologian Nicholas Lash observes, “God does not say many things, but one. God speaks the one Word that God is and, in that one Word’s utterance, all things come into being, find life and shape and history and, in due time, find fullest focus, form and flesh, in Mary’s child.”31 The simple story of the Word made flesh is the utterance of all things into being—life, history, salvation.

People of the Word

This chapter is about the Word, the one Word of God, and so it must also be about words, the words of humans. Contrary to the sing-song truism, it is not true that words can never hurt us; words can hurt as much or more than sticks and stones. Morally speaking, our commitment to the Word made flesh entails our promise to watch our words and guard our mouths. It is the prayer of the psalmist that “the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight” (Ps 19:14). The third chapter of James marvels at the outsized carrying capacity of the human word coiled on the human tongue. Though small, the tongue can direct or destroy the whole body. Like a rudder that steers a ship, a spark that sets a whole forest ablaze, or a drop of poison that kills a living body, so the tongue jerks the body this way and that (Jas 3:2–10). Who can tame it?

Scripture warns, commands, advises, and speaks to the moral use and misuse of language—“Keep your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking deceit” (Ps 34:13); “Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits” (Prov 18:21). A handful of other related Scripture references include Deuteronomy 27:9; Psalm 12:3–4, 62:5; Proverbs 10:19, 12:18, 15:4, 18:21; and Ecclesiastes 3:7. The deuterocanonical book of Sirach recommends that in the same way that you might make a fence for your property and lock up your silver and gold, “so make a door and a bolt for your mouth” (Sir 28:24–25). Little wonder that the Benedictine Rule concludes it best to avoid speaking altogether. More than disallowing wicked and unedifying speech, the Rule advises monks to refrain “even from words that are good” so as to “cultivate silence.”32

The social media age we inhabit sniffs at such prosaic and out-of-date recommendations. The technologically savvy citizen of today cannot help but smirk at the Benedictine Rule’s admonition to silence and snicker at the charming sermon on holding the tongue and wonder if it will end with a finger wagging reminder to say “yes sir” and “no sir,” “yes ma’am” and “no ma’am.” What use is a thread-worn lesson about good manners when social media allows conversation to stream, refresh, and disappear in a continuous and ever-changing feed? Smart phones, dish, cable, Wi-Fi—these keep us instantly and perpetually connected. We find ourselves never without words to hear and see, never without updates, news alerts, and real-time opinions. Culturally we are still reeling from our own cleverness; we are trying to come to grips with our smart phone apps and find a “healthy balance” of on-the-go user-driven technology.

Christians should feel uneasy about such technological advances if for no other reason than the fact that our very religion centers around an outmoded piece of technology: the printed and bound book. The Bible defines Christian faith, practice, and existence. Come what may, the written word will always smell like home to the Christian. Christians can never succumb to the total digitalization of language. We will always be tethered by a book. Said differently, by a book we are tethered to heaven.

Christians, like Jews and Muslims, are a people of the Book. In liturgical processions, the Book of the Gospels is held high for all to see as it is carried down the nave, set in a place of honor, and greeted with a kiss. Christians take their Bibles with them to church, read them daily and memorize their verses. Scripture represents the supreme guide and source and authority for Christian belief and practice. One cannot hope to understand Christianity apart from the Bible.

While holding all this as right and true, Henri de Lubac (1896–1991), a delightfully quizzical Jesuit scholar from the twentieth century, argues that Christians are not a people of the Book as much as a people the Word, the Word become flesh.

Christianity is not, properly speaking, a “religion of the Book”: it is a religion of the word (Parole)—but not uniquely nor principally of the word in written form. It is a religion of the Word (Verbe)—“not of a word, written and mute, but of a Word living and incarnate” (to quote St. Bernard). The Word of God is here and now, amongst us, “which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled”: the Word “living and active,” unique and personal, uniting and crystallizing all the words which bear it witness. Christianity is not “the biblical religion”: it is the religion of Jesus Christ.33

More treasured than the holy Book itself is the holy revelation the Book contains. Christians answer not to the Bible but to the God of the Bible. To say that Christianity is not a biblical religion is not meant to diminish the Book but to identify its Lord and Master. Indeed, the phrase “people of the Book” came originally from Muhammed, father of Islam, not the Christian community. Christianity is a religion of Jesus Christ. Far from shrinking its scope, this confession expands the reach of Christianity worldwide. Converts do not need to learn Greek and Hebrew in order to practice faithfully. They can read the Bible in their own language and so find the Word in the words of whatever language one knows. The language of the Book can be translated into other tongues far and wide, ancient and modern. The printed medium does not dictate or limit the message. Its virtue and its value derive directly and exclusively from its Lord. Apart from and absent of the Spirit who makes the words of Scripture alive and active and sharper than a two-edged sword, we would have to admit that we hold in our hands nothing more than an archaic record of human experience and religious ideas.

What else do we hope to encounter in the Bible if not the Author of the text, the Spirit of the law, and the Word within and behind and above and in front of the words? Advent marks the beginning of the Christian year because it marks the coming of the Word.34 We Christians have nothing to say—literally!—until we have the Word. It is to the first Word that we Christians must always return in the end.

Lord of Misrule

For us Christians, the conviction that we are people of the Word carries implications for faith, hope, and love. These three virtues should shape the very existence of the Christian even as they are themselves shaped by the person of the Word.

Faith

The virtue of faith translates into trust, believing without seeing, fidelity in the hour of despair. December presents just such a month for proving faith and testing trust. Ancient cultures marked the month in special ways. Greeks celebrated the Lenaea, a time for theater, fatty meat-roasts, and uncorking new wine. At the Lenaea, the god Dionysus experienced rebirth. Attended by dancing satyrs and nymphs, he came ready to party. Germans meanwhile hunted and feasted and spoke of Yuletide. The Irish had Wren Day. Agricultural communities rested from their farming duties, but their collective restfulness quickly turned to restlessness. The sedentary ease of the fallow season did not give rise to quiet meditations and gentle repose. It stirred a need to carouse, amuse, and let off steam.

Barrels of new beer became ready to drink in December. The first snap of chilly December weather signaled the arrival of fresh meat. The cold would preserve slaughtered meat from spoiling, and so protein became a staple of December meals, making up for the lack of vegetables and fruits during the cold months. Perhaps the oldest Roman temple on record is the Temple of Saturn, dedicated to the deity of seed and sowing whose holy day began December 17 and continued for a week of festivities.35 During the Saturnalia, priests symbolically unchained the god so as to let him run free. Ordinary commerce was suspended as were the customary rules of behavior and decorum. Slaves might be treated as the equals of their masters, being permitted to wear their clothing and to be waited on at meal time. The plain toga could be exchanged for colorful garments reserved for special occasions. The civil authorities made allowances for gambling in public places and cross-dressing. Friends visited friends and brought gifts of wax candles. Public banquets were held to honor the god. Some of these became raucous and out of control.

The Saturnalia was by far the most popular holiday of the early Romans, although the elite rich tended to endure the frivolities away from the crowds, in a private cubiculum or country estate. When spotted out of doors, the plebs expected the wealthy to shower coins and bread freely from their own hands. The poet Lucian highlights the most extreme behavior and gives us a taste of the Roman holiday: “drinking and being drunk, noise and games and dice, appointing of kings and feasting of slaves, singing naked, clapping of tremulous hands, an occasional ducking of corked faces in icy water.”36

At first glance, the celebration of Saturnalia seems to offer a foretaste of society as it might become if all were treated equally and if money and pride lost their power. But in truth, it did not anticipate a Golden Age, it memorialized one, the Saturnia Regna. Instead of an age of the future, it referred to an age of the past. Fueled by nostalgia, people allowed themselves to follow Saturn’s wistful gaze back to an imaginary era when equality and freedom wafted like incense through the streets, when those who had shared with those who had not, when masters needed no slaves and slaves knew no masters, and when friends did not drag each other to court. The magic of selective memory and wishful thinking took its effect on people as they nodded their heads in agreement: life was better way back when.

Christian faith leaves little space on the shelf for the musty perfume of nostalgia. Jesus Christ, the true Lord of Misrule, did not come to restore a lost kingdom or a Golden Age. In Acts 1 we encounter a puzzling little episode. Jesus had been executed but risen from the dead. He appeared alive to his overwhelmed disciples and held conversation with them. What questions might the disciples like to put to the crucified, dead, and resurrected Messiah? The wonders of heaven? The harrowing of hell? the sensation of coming back to life? Instead, in Acts 1:6 the disciples asked, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” This is the best they can come up with. What an odd question! What does it mean? They seem to be asking if Jesus now intended to raise up an army, evict the Romans and the Greeks, reestablish the Davidic throne, and usher in a new Golden Age in Israel’s history. Now that he had come back from the dead in power, they wanted to know if he intended to use that power to make everything like it had been under King David. It’s like they were asking, “Are you about to bring back the good old days?”

They missed the point completely.

The resurrected Lord responded that it was not for them to know or waste time with such things as the Father set by his own authority. Jesus instructed them to wait until they received the Holy Spirit in power to carry out the Gospel message first to Jerusalem and Judea, then Samaria and the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8). It was no mere kingdom of Israel that he had come to restore. “Behold,” he says, “I make all things new” (Rev 21:5).

Jesus is no Saturn. He is not the God of pleasant memories but the God of things yet to come; not the God of the dead but of the living. Believers drink the cup and eat the bread of communion not simply as a way of recollecting the Lord’s last meal, but of repeating it and so participating in the experience of his death and sacrifice. It is remembrance in the form of repetition and expectation. Communion does not snare the mind in nostalgia, it anticipates the heavenly banquet where we will sit at the common table of the Lord and share his bread.

Christmas faith celebrates the advent of something new, not the return to what formerly was. We must reject the notion that salvation aims to restore a spiritual, intellectual, and physical perfection lost in the fall. It is not the case that in the paradise of Eden humankind enjoyed all perfections which were then shattered and lost in the catastrophe of sin and disobedience. This picture of things makes it seem that Christ came to earth as a cosmic Plan B, an impromptu solution to fix what went unexpectedly wrong in a perfect system. Sin neither caught God unawares nor did it destroy God’s creation. God created a good world and declared the creation of humankind to be very good (Gen 1:31). The fleshlings of creation stood before one another naked and innocent, not knowing good and evil, to be sure. But they were not perfect. They were innocent. Perfection comes with wisdom, and wisdom comes through the Word, and the Word came through Mary and was born and dwelt among us. Faith in the Word is trust that the one who began a good work will see it to completion, and that the same God who created us will also resurrect us and make us fit to see him face-to-face.

Hope

After faith, the virtue of hope shapes our conviction as people of the Word. In terms of hope, the season for celebrating the Word made flesh anticipates the coming of the new time when death and dying shall be no more and all flesh shall be reborn. Christmas has always been a time to look ahead toward something better, the promise of a millennial age, peace, harmony, and the end of winter. This hope is not unique to the Christians. Long ago humans of all cultures established traditions for ending the cold darkness of winter’s ever-shorter days and ushering in the new year. In a preindustrialized world dependent on the slow turning of the seasons, the new year marked a true turning point. It signaled that winter would spend its strength and spring would soon slumber forward.

In addition to the Saturnalia, later Romans observed the Brumalia in order to mark the winter solstice. Like the Jewish festival of lights, Hanukkah, the Brumalia attended to the passage through the darkest day of the year and the anticipation of the end of winter. Picking up on this solar symbolism, the Emperor Aurelian added the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun to the carnival of festivities in ad 286. The Kalends of January rounded out the season of dissipation and decadence. Initially this celebration of the new year involved the humble exchange of gifts and the sharing of special meals, but by the fourth century the Kalends had become another reason to party with abandon. John Chrysostom (347–407) in a sermon “On the Kalends” described what happened at Antioch in tantalizing detail: lurid jokes and pranks, midnight dancing, processions in the forum, unmixed wine in large bowls, nocturnal feasts, and gaming in the taverns.37 Chrysostom instructed his congregation to resist the temptation posed by such invitations to wantonness for the sake of self-control and Christian holiness. Disciples of Christ must somehow resist the urge to follow the scent of desire wherever it leads.

Yet, Chrysostom did more than shake his head “No”; he also tried to give a new perspective on feasting. The “heathen” reserved feasting for new moons and special occasions. Every day the Christian could enjoy the feast of a clean conscience and good works. Chrysostom’s valiant efforts did not ultimately sway society to drop the charades of the season. The custom of gorging and drinking during the last days of December continued well into the Christian era. Over a millennium after Chrysostom’s death, the Reverend Increase Mather and his son the Reverend Cotton Matter made their own stand against the familiar debaucheries of the season.

In a noteworthy sermon delivered on Christmas Day, 1712, the American preacher Cotton Mather (1663–1728) warned of the moral and spiritual dangers of Christmastime frolicking. For shame, people “dishonour Christ more in the Twelve Days of Christmas, than in all the twelve Months of the Year besides.”38 Mather made an appeal based on the vulnerable innocence of the children: “My Concern is now with our own Children.”39 He might well protest for the sake of the children and the impressions that a liquored and debauched Christmas might make on their souls. Throughout pre-twentieth century American history, Christmas Day was punctuated—and punctured—by firecrackers and gun pops, unrehearsed songs sung loudly by ragtag gangs of boys. Gentlemen chortled at “rough jokes,” convivial tavern keepers offered samples of alcohol and food free of charge, the constables made arrests for disorderly behavior. Women drunk their fill and children were served eggnog and toddies fully loaded.40

Here we beseech hope to enter the picture. The unspoken anxiety of many well-intentioned believers is this: is becoming a Christian the end of fun? When Jesus washes our hearts of sin, are they also washed of all color and texture and personality? The gospel commands that we live free of sin, but must we also live free of frivolity? Some Christians believe as the early Lutheran Pietists did. In a 1689 rule book for the “protection of conscience and for good order” we read: “All laughter is forbidden. . . . Joking does not please God; why then should it please you?”41 This verdict did not originate with these long-faced ancestors. We can trace it all the way back to the 200s and the Egyptian teacher of Christian faith, Clement of Alexandria (150–215): “laughter must be kept in check.”42 He instructs us not to “laugh before all and sundry, nor in every place, nor to every one, nor about everything.”43 The early saints of the church often received praise and recognition for their mastery over emotions and their Zen-like equipoise. Rarely were they caught by surprise and never did they snort and guffaw, cackle and hee-haw, or even, we must presume, smirk.44 The Rule of Saint Benedict warns against “laughter that is unrestrained and raucous.”45 Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274) cautions us to avoid “inordinate laughter and inordinate joy in excessive play” as mortal sin.46

The caution is well-intended; prudence judges correctly that anything taken to excess, even humor, can demean and denigrate. Proverbs 25:28 says, “Like a city breached, without walls, is one who lacks self-control,” and Ephesians 5:4 permits “neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor coarse jesting, which are not fitting.” These wise words should be taken to heart. Yet we should also remember, as G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) says, that “seriousness is not a virtue. . . . [Seriousness] flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.”47 The reason that lightness is hard and laughter a leap is that they both require the person to disarm and drop guard. The person who throws back his head, opens his mouth, and laughs out loud is made vulnerable in every sense of the word: physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Only the most confident and self-assured can risk laughter—only those who have had a foretaste of eternity. Martin Luther is often quoted (at least on the Internet) as saying, “If I am not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don’t want to go there.” That sounds like something he would have said, and if he didn’t, he should have. It’s not a ham-fisted ultimatum to his heavenly hosts but an expression of the very nature and essence of heaven. It is an expression of hope. What else can Scripture mean when it says “he will wipe every tear from their eyes” (Isa 25:8; Rev 21:4) than that the Lord will replace those tears with an uncontainable gladness—the kind that cannot help but erupt in laughter (Isa 25:9)?

The virtue of hope contests the pseudo-seriousness of our own selves and the world. Once a person has been brought face-to-face with the ultimate concern of eternal life in the good news of Jesus Christ, the concerns of the world lose their luster. Once a person has experienced the earth-swallowing grace of Jesus Christ, all else feels hollow. From the perspective of heaven, the affairs of earth appear as little more than the scuttling of ants. Hope would have us put things in perspective. Hope does not ask that we discard all festivities and seasonal celebrations. Hope would have us celebrate with greater purpose and fervor, knowing finally what we are celebrating and what we have yet to anticipate. The false seriousness of “serious partying” turns out to be a form of escapism in which the person escapes from the stresses of life by drinking and carousing to “forget the world,” if only for a little while. Christian hope does not make merry in order to escape and forget but in order to cheer on the good and make way for the world to come.

Love

Having considered faith and hope, we now turn to love. The conviction that we are people of the Word means that we are committed to words of love and works of love. Words and works must always link arms; words are deemed lovely only if attended by works and works commend themselves to love by way of words. And so we return for a third time to the history of Christmastime revelry and make a circuitous route to Christian love by way of wassailing. The word wassail means more than a hot drink of spiced ale; it derives from the Anglo-Saxon expression for good health. It is to drink to someone’s health and well-being. The practice provided a way of cheering good friends and honoring good neighbors. Singing accompanied wassailing. Perhaps the oldest vernacular Christmas carol preserved for us dates to the thirteenth century, the Anglo-Norman Seignors, ore entendez à nus. To our blushing chagrin and consternation the carol says nothing of religion but instead sings of strong drink and tipsy companions.

Lords, by Noël and the host

Of this mansion hear my toast—

Drink it well—

Each must drain his cup of wine,

And I the first will toss off mine:

Thus I advise.

Here then I bid you all Wassail [Wesseyl]

Cursed be he who will not say, Drinkhail [Drincheyl]!48

The folklore scholar Clement Miles reminds us that the word carol had strong secular and even pre-Christian connotations in its first usages. “In twelfth-century France it was used to describe the amorous song-dance that hailed the coming of spring; in Italian it meant a ring- or song-dance; while for the English writers from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century it was used chiefly of singing joined with dancing.”49 The tradition of caroling, dancing, imbibing, and carousing spread far and wide. Troops of young men and boys would go house to house at night singing, stamping, and playing instruments with the brash expectation that hearers would pay them for their performances. Robert Herrick preserved this wassail song from the mid-seventeenth century:

Come bring, with a noise,

My merrie, merrie boys,

The Christmas log to the firing;

While my good dame she

Bids ye all be free

And drink to your heart’s desiring.50

Unlike the lacy carols of today, the wassail songs of yore were flagrantly unreligious. Unlike the church choirs of today, the roving wassailers were rascally and unpredictable. Nor did they confine themselves to the one day of Christmas, but roamed throughout the season.

Youngsters in early modern and pre-World War Europe viewed every special day of the season as a chance to cruise the streets, sing, drink, and ask for handouts, whether “soul-cakes” on All Soul’s, November 1, St. Martin’s goose and horseshoe pastries known as Martin’s horns on November 11, or coins on St. Catherine’s Day, November 25. The practice went by many names: thomasing (after St. Thomas’s Day, December 21), clemencing (after St. Clement’s Day, November 23), mumming, a-mumping, and a-gooding. Rovers knocked on doors with rods (a gerte), threw lentils and peas at the windows, and bellowed loudly to get attention and to get someone to open up the house or the shop. They sang and danced and held out hands and tin cups for money and if not money, ale, and if not drink, victuals. The residents of southern Germany came to dub this time of year Knöpflinsnächte, the “Knocking Nights.” Carousers incorporated the demand for payment into their song.

If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do;

If you haven’t got a ha’penny, then God bless you!

Along the coast of North Carolina in the early 1800s, it became custom among slaves to perform a similar routine at Christmastide. The so-called “John Canoe” bands of men dressed elaborately, went to the doors of white citizens performing song and dance, and expected payment in return. There is some connection between the John Canoe bands of the 1800s and the Afro-Caribbean Junkanoo processional bands of today.

Former slave Harriet Jacobs recorded the words of blessing and good fortune bestowed on those who contributed freely as well as the tongue-in-cheek response to any individual too stingy to donate:

Poor massa, so dey say;

Down in de heel, so dey say;

Got no money, so dey say;

Not one shillin, so dey say;

God A’mighty bress you, so dey say.51

In the “so dey say” one should hear the sounds of freedom and dissent. The John Canoe bands used and subverted the traditional forms of wassailing and thomasing as vehicles for subtle protest. In the same way, one should hear in the “God bless you” of the two tunes quoted above a clang of sarcasm and feigned piety. The ironic blessing appears in both the traditional wassailing song of the British and the John Canoe songs of North Carolina as a barb. The miserly listener who refused to give should feel the sharp stab of shame and chastisement.

Love sometimes needs a prod and a push. Love sometimes needs to be put on the spot. And when push comes to shove, love sometimes needs the shame of youthful catcalls. The lesson of the wassailers is the lesson of accountability for words and deeds of love.

10. DK 22 B110, 85, 123, 53.

11. Ibid., B 91.

12. Ibid., A1.

13. Ibid., B 89.

14. Ibid., B 41.

15. For the most part, Heraclitus believed that the organizing pattern of the cosmic logos would forever elude human effort and human knowledge. Even “though all things come into being in accordance with this logos,” he recognized that people “always fail to comprehend it, both before they hear it and when they hear it for the first time.” Ibid., B 1. Robinson, Early Greek Philosophy, 94.

16. 1 En 14:24; Wis 9:4, 18:15; Sir 15:2, 24:3, for instance. See Keener, Gospel of John, vol. 1, 343–63.

17. See the work of the “John, Jesus, and History” SBL group. For example, Anderson, and Thatcher, eds., John, Jesus, and History, vol. 2.; Thatcher, ed. What We Have Heard from the Beginning.

18. Henri Cazelles, “Johannes: Ein Sohn des Zebedäus,” Internationale Katholische Zeitschrift Communio 31 (2012), 479–84; cited in Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, 224–25.

19. Albinus, Didaskalikos 11, in The Platonic Doctrines of Albinus, 47.

20. Hannah’s jubilant prayer over the birth of her son Samuel makes sense of the topsy-turvy logic of divine action expressed in Isaiah. Hannah exults that while the bowstrings of the mighty snap, the feeble strap on shoes for battle. While she who has given birth to many children goes about forlorn, the barren maid pops them out like corn from a popper (1 Sam 2:4–6)—“for the Lord is a God of knowledge” not of appearances or expectations or privilege. “By him actions are weighed” (1 Sam 2:3). Theologically speaking, the logos is the ultimate knowledge of the Lord and in it the final action weighed.

21. Milbank, Being Reconciled, 196.

22. Ibid., 197.

23. Ibid., 196.

24. Francis Church, “Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus,” The New York Sun, September 21, 1897. For an online reprint, see http://www.newseum.org/exhibits/online/yes-virginia/ (accessed July 28, 2015).

25. Ibid.

26. Nissenbaum, Battle for Christmas, 88.

27. Lewis, “Introduction,” in Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 6.

28. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 25.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid., 26.

31. Lash, Holiness, Speech and Silence, 66.

32. Saint Benedict’s Rule, 6.1.

33. de Lubac, Exégèse Médiévale, II.1, 196–7. This passage translated by Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery, 101. Also see, de Lubac, “Commentaire du preamble et du chapitre I,” La revelation divine, vol. 1, 296.

34. The four weeks of Advent in ancient symbolism stood for the four comings of God’s Son: the first in the earthly body, the second in the hearts of believers, the third at the resurrection of the dead, and the fourth at the day of judgment.

35. The length of the Saturnalia varied from three days to seven, depending on the edicts of the emperors, who sometimes tried to shorten the time in which courts and commerce were closed.

36. Lucian, “Saturnalia,” 2, in The Works of Lucian, vol. 4, 108.

37. Chrysostom, In Kalendas, Patrologia Graeca, 48:953–62. For a comparison of the perspectives of John and Libanius, see Graf, “Fights about Festivals,” 175–86.

38. Mather, Grace Defended, 20.

39. Ibid.

40. Nissenbaum, Battle for Christmas, 261–2.

41. August Hermann Franke, “Rules for the Protection of Conscience and for Good Order in Conversation or in Society,” in Erb, ed., Pietists, 111–12.

42. Clement, Paedagogus 2.5.

43. Ibid.

44. Severus, Vita S. Martini 27.1.

45. Saint Benedict’s Rule 4.8. Benedict teaches “not to be given to empty laughter on every least occasion because: ‘A fool’s voice is forever raised in laughter’ (Sirach 21:23),” 7.17.

46. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 2.2, q. 168, a. 3. So says Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, book 1.2, cited by Thomas: “A man shall not be full of laughter and mockery, nor sad and mournful, but joyful. Thus the wise men said: ‘Laughter and levity bring about illicit sexual conduct.’ They commanded that a man not be unrestrained in laughter, nor sad and mournful, but that he receive every man with a cheerful demeanor.”

47. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 125.

48. Translated by F. Douce and quoted in Miles, Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, 36.

49. Ibid., 47.

50. Quoted from Nissenbaum, Battle for Christmas, 9.

51. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life, 180. Cited in Nissenbaum, Battle for Christmas, 289. See also Restad, Christmas in America, 75–91.