A lot of Christians, me included, have been complaining about the de-Christmasization now underway. The very public campaign to eliminate any mention of the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ has swept across the land at dizzying speed, creating such absurdities as the recasting of the ancient feast day as some sort of pagan winter festival.
It’s been coming for a long time, but this year the pagans have struck with a concentrated fury, enlisting hordes of numbskull educrats and municipal bureaucrats to tear down all the remaining symbols of one of Christendom’s holiest observances. It’s as if the barbarian hordes shown in that current credit card TV commercial have been loosed to maraud across the land, waving their battle axes and swords as they go about destroying crèches, Christmas trees and other symbols of the Nativity.
It’s easy to rage against the secularist barbarians but it must be admitted that we Christians have given them an opportunity to create the havoc they’ve wrought – for a long time now we’ve been celebrating the birth of our Lord as if it were more of a civic holiday than a solemn reflection of the true meaning of Christmas.
By so doing we have abetted the crass commercialization of this holy feast day, along the way teaching our children by our example that it’s the gifts we give each other rather than the gift our Father in heaven gave us – His divine Son – that we celebrate.
We wallow in sentimentality, gushing platitudes, mouthing such meaningless phrases such as “peace on earth, good will to men,” distorting the true angelic hymn which has real meaning: “Peace on earth <i>to men of good will</i>.”
This is the reality of Christmas day: from the moment of his miraculous conception Jesus Christ was embarked on a death march towards Golgotha. It was what he came for – to suffer an excruciating passion and death to absolve sinners and open the gates of paradise for those who open their minds and hearts to him.
His passion and death was the final example of what he came to tell us – that the way to peace in this world and salvation in the next is total subservience to the will of the Father “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” as he taught us to pray – he lived that message every minute of his life and died showing us to what extent it must be carried. “Father,” he prayed in the garden of Gethsemani “if it be your will let this cup pass from me, but not my will, <i>but thine be done</i>.”
As St. Augustine prayed “for you made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until we rest in you.”
We don’t like to view the birth of Christ as a prelude to his suffering and death. We don’t like to be reminded of what he really endured. Much of the criticism of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” involved the fact that he confronted us with the whole shocking painful reality of Good Friday.
The fact that it required the Son of God to leave paradise, come and live among us and die a terrible death to free us from the consequences of our sinfulness should be a lesson about the very nature of sin and how deadly it is in the eyes of a loving God. Sin is placing our will above God’s, children defying their father whose only concern is their welfare, and in the case of God, abandoning their ultimate hope of unity with Him.
Christmas day should be an opportunity for us to reflect on the fact that Jesus was born expressly for the purpose of suffering and dying for us – it should be the time to say thank you to the Father for giving his son to us, and to his son for giving himself to us.
That’s the meaning of Christmas.
Merry Christmas.
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”