The Real Meaning of Christmas
The Christmas story is about learning how to be human, about kneeling before a newborn infant who is helpless, vulnerable, despised, and poor. It is about inverting the world’s values.
The following is a brief excerpt from a recent episode of The Chris Hedges Report, by Chris Hedges:
In the early 1980s, I was in a refugee camp for Guatemalans who had fled the war into Honduras. It was a cold, dreary winter afternoon. The peasant farmers and their families, living in filth and mud, were decorating their tents with strips of colored paper. That night, they said, they would celebrate the flight of Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus to Egypt to escape the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem ordered by Herod. The celebration is known as the Day of the Holy Innocents. “Why is this such an important day?” I asked. “It was on this day that Christ became a refugee,” a farmer answered. Now, I knew the passage from Matthew about the flight to Egypt by heart. I had heard my father, a Presbyterian minister, read it in services every Christmas in the farm town in upstate New York where I grew up. But it took an illiterate farmer who had fled in fear with his wife and children from the murderous rampages of the Guatemalan army and death squads, who no doubt counted friends, even relatives, among the dead, a man who had lost everything he owned, to explain it to me. The story of Christmas, like the story of the crucifixion, in which Jesus is abandoned by his disciples, attacked by the mob, condemned to death by the state, placed on death row and executed, is not written for the oppressors. It is written for the oppressed. And what is quaint and picturesque to those who live in privilege is visceral and empowering to those the world condemns. Jesus was not a Roman citizen. He lived under Roman occupation. The Romans were white. Jesus was a person of color. And the Romans, who peddled their own version of white supremacy, nailed people of color to crosses. The Romans killed Jesus as an insurrectionist, a revolutionary. They feared the radicalism of the Christian gospel, and they were right to fear it. The Roman state saw Jesus the way the American state saw Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. And then, like now, prophets were killed. Christmas is not about the virgin birth. It is not about angels. It is not even about a historical Jesus. To debate these topics is to engage in a theological trivial pursuit. The Christmas story is about learning how to be human, about kneeling before a newborn infant who is helpless, vulnerable, despised, and poor. It is about inverting the world’s values. It is about understanding that the religious life and this life can be lived with or without a religious creed. It calls on us to protect and nurture the least among us, those demonized and rejected.
