Christmas Truth

One Advent Sunday morning, standing in a crowded narthex while the early worship service was letting out, I could not help overhearing an interchange between two fellow parishioners about the Sunday School class they had just attended:

What a downer! Here we were, primed and ready for Christmas, and our teacher suddenly decides to tell us that the Christmas story is just that --- only a story. That’ll make a nice conversation around the lunch table today! I sure hope the kids are getting a different version of things.

(Laughing) What can you expect from a religion professor?

This Christmas thing is really a pretty big deal for me. Did you know that I was baby Jesus in our church’s Christmas pageant when I was two months old? It took! I’ve been hooked on it ever since.

I’ve never been in one, but I’m just as hooked on pageants as you are. I get a lot out of seeing not only real live people up there on the stage, but people I know. They all make Jesus’ humanness so vivid to me.

When I was in that manger, I guess it didn’t matter a whole lot whether my Mom was a virgin or not.

Maybe it didn’t matter to the shepherds and the wise men either.

This brief conversation reminded me powerfully that what Christmas pageants do best is to keep the focus more on the baby and less on his mother. They prepare viewers to discover the Lord’s divinity by contemplating his weakness rather than his power, his dependence rather than his sovereignty, his entering into rather than his rising above the human condition, the flesh he became as well as the Logos he was. Certainly, the story of Mary’s conception and birth played an important role in shaping a particular but by no means universal understanding of Jesus’ divinity as present from the very beginning of his life as well as after the resurrection. Paradoxically, though --- and this is what I heard my two friends getting at that morning --- his divine nature is sometimes most evident in his acts of emptying himself of it. (Philippians 2:6-8)

Clearly, there is far more to the affirmation that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary than the description of occurrences on the plane of ordinary human history. At best, what the affirmation says can only hint at what it intends to mean. The faith that still gives rise to it is a faith that, when logic’s limits are reached, willingly relinquishes clarity for the sake of honoring mystery, in particular, the literally indescribable mystery that God Godself dwelt and dwells among us. It is the very transcendence of its subject (a unique Son of God) to its language (a humanly constructed proposal for others’ assent) that has made the doctrine of the virgin conception and birth so vulnerable to overly imaginative as well as overly literal renderings that sacrifice both historical accuracy and intellectual credibility.

All Christian beliefs convey more than the mere declarations of fact that are also embedded in them. Indisputably, for example, Jesus experienced terrible pain at the end of his life “under Pontius Pilate.” This fact is beyond reasonable dispute. That Jesus is “God’s only Son,” however, can neither be established nor disconfirmed by objective historical investigation of facts alone; this is a quite extra-ordinary “fact” that only faith can finally determine. Jesus’ name becomes Emmanuel only in the decision to allow ourselves to experience God’s presence in and through him.

The particular assertion that has been the subject of this column and the preceding one is that Jesus was conceived in a woman named Mary, an assertion in which is embedded at once a confession of faith in her virginity and in Jesus’ divine humanness. It is the confession, and not the assertion, that makes the difference to faith. Faith, and not fact, is what points to the ultimate ground of all existence, to the reason why there is anything at all and not just God, to the delight that the Creator takes in all the works of his hands, and to that love alone which binds and knits all things together. What the Christian tradition says about the meaning of Jesus’ conception has always transcended whatever facts the belief itself struggles to assert. Overly literal descriptions inevitably get in the way of those genuine encounters with God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit that are finally expressible, in St. Paul’s words, more by sighs than by words.