The Meaning of Christmas
by A.W. Tozer, Warfare Of The Spirit, Chapter 22
EVERYWHERE, EVERYWHERE,
CHRISTMAS TONIGHT!—Phillips
Brooks.
That there were in the world
multiplied millions who had never heard of Christmas did not matter to our poet
for the purpose of his poem. He was expressing an emotional fact, not a
statistical one.
Throughout the Western world we
tend to follow the poet and approach Christmas emotionally instead of
factually. It is the romance of Christmas that gives it its extraordinary
appeal to that relatively small number of persons of the earth’s population who
regularly celebrate it.
So completely are we carried
away by the excitement of this midwinter festival that we are apt to forget
that its romantic appeal is the least significant thing about it. The theology
of Christmas too easily gets lost under the gay wrappings, yet apart from its
theological meaning it really has none at all. A half
dozen doctrinally sound carols serve to keep alive the great deep truth of the
Incarnation, but aside from these, popular Christmas music is void of any real
lasting truth. The English mouse that was not even stirring, the German Tannenbaum
so fair and lovely and the American red-nosed reindeer that has nothing to
recommend it have pretty well taken over in Christmas poetry and song. These
along with merry old St. Nicholas have about displaced Christian theology.
We must not forget that the
Church is the custodian of a truth so grave and urgent that its importance can not be overemphasized, and so vast and incomprehensible
that even an apostle did not try to explain it; rather it burst forth from him
as an astonished exclamation:
Beyond all question, the mystery of godliness is great:
He appeared in a body,
was vindicated by the Spirit,
was seen by angels,
was preached among the nations;
was believed on in the world,
(1 Timothy 3:16)
This is what the Church is
trying to say to mankind but her voice these days is thin and weak and scarcely
heard amid the commercialized clangor of “Silent Night.”
It does seem strange that so
many persons become excited about Christmas and so few stop to inquire into its
meaning; but I suppose this odd phenomenon is quite in harmony with our
unfortunate human habit of magnifying trivialities and ignoring matters of
greatest import. The same man who will check his tires and consult his road map
with utmost care before starting on a journey may travel for a lifetime on the
way that knows no return and never once pause to ask whether or not he is
headed in the right direction.
The Christmas message, when
stripped of its pagan overtones, is relatively simple: God is come to earth in
the form of man. Around this one dogma the whole question of meaning revolves.
God did come or He did not; He is come or He is not, and the vast accumulation
of sentimental notions and romantic practices that go to make up our modern
Christmas cannot give evidence on one side or the other.
Certain religious teachers in
apostolic times refused to believe that Jesus was actually God come in the
flesh. They were willing to exhaust the language of unctuous flattery to
describe His glorious manhood, but they would have none of His deity. Their
basic philosophy forbade them to believe that there could ever be a union of
God and human flesh.Matter, they said, is essentially
evil. God who is impeccably holy could never allow Himself contact with evil.
Human flesh is matter, therefore God is not come in
the flesh.
Certainly it would not be
difficult to refute this negative teaching. One would only need to demonstrate
the error of the major premise, the essential sinfulness of matter, and the
whole thing would collapse. But that would be to match reason against reason
and take the mystery of godliness out of the realm of faith and make of it
merely another religious philosophy. Then we would have rationalism with a thin
Christian veneer. How long before the veneer wore off and we had only rationalism?
While faith contains an element
of reason, it is essentially moral rather than intellectual. In the New
Testament unbelief is a sin, and this could not be so if belief were no more
than a verdict based upon evidence. There is nothing unreasonable about the
Christian message, but its appeal is not primarily to reason. At a specific
time in a certain place God became flesh, but the transcendence of Christ over
the human conscience is not historic; it is intimate, direct and personal.
Christ’s coming to Bethlehem’s
manger was in harmony with the primary fact of His secret presence in the world
in preincarnate times as the Light that lighteth every man. The sum of the New Testament teaching
about this is that Christ’s claims are self-validating and will be rejected
only by those who love evil. Whenever Christ is preached in the power of the
Spirit, a judgment seat is erected and each hearer stands to be judged by his
response to the message. His moral responsibility is not to a lesson in
religious history but to the divine Person who now confronts him.
“Everywhere,
everywhere, Christmas tonight.” But Christmas either means more than is popularly supposed or it
means nothing. We had better decide.