Sometimes it’s easy to strive too hard to find new meanings in
the old familiar Christmas story. The symbology is in some senses
profound but also so obvious, and in some ways so simple, that it
can seem hackneyed, especially in our modern, jaded world. The
impulse is either to give mere lip service to the Christmas message
or, for those with a different cast of mind, to try to complicate
it in search of some great new insight.
In the latter frame of mind, I found myself writing this, based
on a visit on location earlier this month….
In an 1100-year-old church in Basel, Switzerland
lies the tomb of Desiderius
Erasmus, a sage of the ages, described on his tombstone as
“incomparable in every discipline; kind, and erudite….” The great
“Christian humanist” of the 16th Century labored for
decades to reform the Catholic Church without open schism, to find
common ground rather than sow discord, to promote learning and
piety but not disputatious scholasticism or pietistic exuberance.
The church itself, a former cathedral, is stunningly beautiful but
dark and dim, whispering its centuries of sanctity through every
reverent piece of woodwork or engraving….
Bosh. Blind alley. Never mind the lovely Christmas festival
occurring right outside the Basel Münster that was supposed to
serve as a thematic bridge between Erasmus and new insights on the
theology of Christmas. This ponderous theme was going nowhere.
Trying another approach….
Seven years after being given up for dead, the city of New
Orleans is
thriving. Its restaurants are full, its public schools are
vastly improved, its streets are clean, and its economy for three
straight quarters has been the most rapidly expansive in the
country. On Wednesday night on the edge of the Garden District in
this reborn city, at the Trinity Episcopal School Festival of
Lessons and Carols, some 320 students celebrated the anniversary of
another birth in a time of trial…..
Oh, please. Trite, forced, maudlin, bathetic. Cue up
the “mists of time” and the encomiums to “sacred mysteries,” and
leave no cliché unvisited. Trinity sixth graders could produce
prose more incisive than that.
So then the next approach was about how not even the tornado
that whipped through part of Mobile, Alabama on Thursday morning
can kill the spirit of Christmas…. Or maybe it should be about how
the collapse of “fiscal cliff” discussions in Washington shows the
evanescence of human institutions in comparison with the permanence
of the Love introduced to the world in a manger….
Stuff and nonsense. Tommyrot. Cotton candy. (At this point,
Charlie Brown asks if anybody can tell him the true
meaning of Christmas. The Grinch hears the singing from Who-Ville
even after he has stolen all his presents. The Misfit Toys on their
island start sniffling that another Christmas is about to pass them
by….) Dime-store windows have deeper meanings than such
treacle.
So then it’s back to Erasmus. Surely he wrote something
insightful about the Nativity, right? In all his disputations with
Martin Luther, in all his communications with his dear friend St.
Thomas More, in all his homiletics or satire or theologizing,
surely the great Church apologist propounded some great analysis of
the Virgin, the stable, the shepherds, or the Magi.
Alas, the tomes on a college theology major’s bookshelf produce
no such Erasmian wisdom. Nor do hours of Internet searches. The
16th century didn’t feature widespread celebration of Santa Claus
or Macy’s, and Christmas wasn’t exactly at the center of cultural
or theological life. Easter, yes. Resurrection, yes. Sin,
perdition, sacraments, salvation, redemption: Of course. But
Christmas wasn’t a particularly huge focus, one famous
sermon by Erasmus’ erstwhile sparring partner Luther
notwithstanding.
But… but… but Erasmus did write this, in his famous
Paraclesis, which was his preface to a new edition of the
Bible:
Why do we not all ponder within ourselves that this must be a
new and wonderful kind of philosophy since, in order to transmit it
to mortals, He who was God became man, He who was immortal became
mortal, He who was in the heart of the Father descended to Earth?
It must be a great matter, and in no sense a commonplace one,
whatever it is, because that wondrous Author came to teach after so
many families of distinguished philosophers, after so many
remarkable prophets.… The mysteries of kings, perhaps, are better
concealed, but Christ wishes his mysteries published as openly as
possible.
So it is a “great matter” which we are blessed to be taught, but
one that should be “published as openly as possible.”
And what is the nature of this “great matter”? Well, wrote
Erasmus, it is in the life of Christ himself, and the imitative
life of all who would follow him, to behave in such a way that
“riches should be disdained, that the Christian should not put his
trust in the supports of this world but must rely entirely on
heaven… [that] those who mourn are blessed and should not be
deplored, and that death should even be desired by the devout,
since it is nothing other than a passage to immortality. And if
anyone under the inspiration of the spirit of Christ preaches this
kind of doctrine, inculcates it, exhorts, incites, and encourages
men to it, he is truly a theologian, even if he should be a common
laborer or weaver.”
Just as this is a God who does not merely remain aloft (and
unapproachable) in the heavens, but instead “descended to Earth,”
His great message is likewise one not reserved only for erudite
theologians or scholars but instead accessible to all,
understandable by all, livable by all. We should not scoff at the
simplicity and the familiarity of the Christmas story, nor at the
easy accessibility of its themes of rebirth; as Erasmus wrote in
the same section of his Paraclesis, “nothing may stand
forth with greater certainty than the truth itself, whose
expression is the more powerful, the simpler it is.” (Emphasis
added.)
And: “The sun itself is not as common and accessible as is
Christ’s teaching. It keeps no one at a distance, unless a person,
begrudging himself, keeps himself away.”
So we have a God making Himself accessible, yet we ourselves
strive for more complex meanings and scoff at the familiarity of
the themes. We therefore err: It is not the story or the
traditional interpretations of it that are hackneyed; what is
hackneyed, what is trite, is the modern dissatisfaction with the
quiet glory of an event at once simple and profound.
Riding around New Orleans after the Festival of Lessons and
Carols, what one sees is not a new or more complicated
city, but a revitalized city within the same familiar street grid
beneath the same familiar oaks alongside the same, familiar river
of currents powerful and deep. And that is good.
As Trinity middle-school students have done every year since
1960, as Linus has done in the TV special every year since 1965, a
Trinity student this year stepped to the church lectern and
read:
8 And there were in the same country shepherds
abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
9 And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them,
and the glory of the Lord shone round about them; and they were
sore afraid.
10 And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for,
behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to
all people…..
And the church went entirely dark, except for bright
back-lighting behind the glorious stained glass window above the
altar, and in that darkness a church full of students, parents,
faculty and alumni sang of a silent night, a holy night, where all
was calm and all was bright. There needed be no great erudition
there, no complicated insight. The message isn’t exclusive; it is a
universal one, which shall be – which is offered to – all
people.
“This philosophy,” wrote Erasmus, “unlettered as it appears to
these very objectors, has drawn the highest princes of the world
and so many kingdoms and peoples to its laws, an achievement which
the power of tyrants and the erudition of philosophers cannot
claim.”
But we, we even in our mod cocoons, are invited to claim it. We
claim it, Erasmus said, by living it. To repeat: We need only
celebrate “the truth itself, whose expression is the more powerful,
the simpler it is.”
A blessed Christmas to all. Simply blessed.
