The Importance of Christmas

As I progressed through college, I came to a point where I thought we shouldn't celebrate Christmas, that it was just a consumer holiday and that the real holiday was Easter. I now think that this is only half true. Though traditionally the Church hasn't put as much emphasis on Christmas, and that it became what it is today because of companies like Hallmark, the birth of Christ does represent a quite significant event. This shift in my thinking came through my studies of atonement. As my understanding of atonement moved from the importance of Jesus' death to the importance of Jesus' life, so too did my understanding of this holiday. Of course Jesus was not actually born on December 25 (he wasn't even born the year he was calculated too, but in all likelihood was born in 4 BC, the year Herod died).

Jesus is Emanuel—God with us. This is the importance of the Incarnation. God has come to us, and not to die in some strange exchange where by God can only forgive if Jesus dies, but as a pledge of God's love and commitment to the world. If God's response to sin can be typified in the two events of the flood and the Incarnation, the latter represents the opposite of the former. God did not destroy the world despite itself, but came to it humbly in order that it might come to God. The Incarnation is like a love poem that God uses in order to romance creation in the hope that it might become God's bride. Jesus' death does not warrant God's love, for, as Augustine points out, if it did hat was the motivation? Rather, according to John 3:16, it was because God already loved creation that God sent Jesus. Nd if God loved creation, God was willing to forgive us our sins, which we see in multiple places int the New Testament where Jesus forgives sin independently of his “dying in our place.” If it was necessary for Jesus to provide a substitution in order to forgive, then he couldn't have forgiven the paralytic, nor said that salvation had come to Zachias, nor God John have offered a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin.

The Incarnation is the great pledge of God, a sign of what already was rather than something new. It is the concrete expression of the reality that God is Love. This is why we celebrate Christmas, and this is why we give gifts—because God first gave to us. So let us continue to give, but let our giving be meaningful and enriching and less about consuming and accumulating. Let all we do be motivated by Love.

I have come to give my life as a ransom for many

Jesus is quoted as saying that “I have come to give mt life as a ransom for many.” Many Christians have often interpreted this literally, which leads them to conjecture about the devil having dominion over humanity and God needing to become human in order to arrange an exchange with the devil, or even God having to do an exchange with God's self, whereby God's anger toward sinners is appeased through Christ's sacrificial death. Neither of these scenarios make any sense at all and have come under critique as long as they've been around.

I propose an alternative. Jesus did not mean that his life is literally a ransom. No one is holding humanity captive and demanding that a certain price be paid (though one could make an argument that "civilization" binds all of us in ways that are inescapable). Rather, Jesus is using metaphorical language (hard to believe, I know) to explain that his purpose is to liberate creation. He isn't paying anyone anything, nor does this liberation focus primarily on this death. Jesus came to "give" his life, not as death, but as life, as in devotion to the cause of God. The purpose of the Incarnation is for Jesus to reveal the Father to the world, and since this is why he came, it makes sense that he devotes his life to this end. And it is this revelation about who God is that liberates us in a multiplicity of ways.