Paul's Christmas Carol
mp3
Do you ever wonder if we’ve got Christmas seriously wrong? I don’t mean whether Jesus really was born of a virgin, or whether there really was a guiding star, or whether the angels really did appear to Mary, Joseph and the shepherds. I’m confident of those things – but I’m not so confident about the way we celebrate the birth of the Messiah.
Let’s be honest. What is the following week going to involve? For the majority of us, there will be copious amounts of eating, drinking, partying, celebrating and giving and receiving of presents. Now I’ve nothing against these things, not least because I’ll be enthusiastically engaged in them all myself, and also because Jesus was clear that Christianity is about a celebration of life. When he wanted an image of heaven, he chose a wedding banquet as his theme (Matthew 22; Luke 14). So I don’t think Jesus has a problem with a bit of eating and drinking.
But is that what Christmas is about? In Philippians 2, Paul recites one of the earliest carols. It begins, ‘Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant.’ Theologians debate the precise meaning of these verses, but one thing they all agree on is that some sense of self-emptying is present in them. The technical theological term for this is kenosis. It speaks of Christ’s ‘giving up’ or ‘self-denial’ for the sake of others.
If Christmas means anything, then surely it means this. Yet is that what we find? No doubt many of us will have bought goats or toilets for some of our friends and family. Perhaps some will have given up their time and helped feed the homeless and the poor. But I suspect it will remain the case that for most of us, consumption rather than sacrifice will be the order of the day.
Yet when in Luke 12:33 Jesus encourages us to give to the poor, it is not out of our excess, but rather by selling what we already have, and presumably want. When was the last time any of us actually did that – sold something we owned and wanted (or even ‘needed’) in order to give to the poor? That is self-giving for the sake of others, that is kenosis.
So, I worry. I worry that in all the tinsel, the lights, the wrapping paper, the food and wine, we have all completely missed it. That if Jesus were to return today, his word would not be ‘good and faithful servant’, but ‘weep and wail you rich people because of the misery that is coming upon you’ (James 5:1).
I worry that we’ve traded the God of Jesus Christ for the ‘god’ of consumption and I worry that somehow we’ve turned a message of self-denial into one of self-filling. Maybe, just maybe, we need a serious re-think.
Have a blessed Christmas.
From the FNT team.
Justin Thacker, Head of Theology
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Friday Night Theology will return on January 11th, 2008.
