“Jesus is the Reason for the Season” is one of those slogans that tries too hard and that came upon the scene a few years ago now with its twin sibling “Put Christ Back into Christmas.” It has always felt to me like each is meant as a not-so-subtle forefinger wagged in the face of big, bad, secular society which has hijacked Christmas from us religious types. Oh, I’m buying the consumerism of Christmas indictment, but I’m not buying the inference of where the responsibility for it lies.
Rabbi Abraham Heschel’s observation about religion resonates with me and might be instructively transferable to Christians during the conjoined seasons of Advent and Christmas. Heschel wrote that instead of blaming “secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society” that it would be more honest “to blame religion for its own defeats” since its purveyors and presiders and people were responsible for religion becoming “irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid.” While a Christ last seen running for his life from the 21st century American version of Christmas makes for a good movie trailer, I suggest a better strategy than putting Christ back into Christmas is to put ourselves as Christians more consciously into Advent and more deeply into the mystery of the incarnation in and out of the season of Christmas.
Although the above slogan is a nice rhyme, it is not merely semantics to suggest Jesus is not the reason for the season. Jesus is the fullest embodiment of the season, the enfleshment of its central mystery and message. It is this mystery, this message of glad tidings, and the source to whom it points that is the real reason for the seasons and the cause for celebration.
The reason for the twinned seasons of Advent and Christmas is to recognize, respond to, and participate in the central unifying mystery of Christian faith, namely, God is with us. It is the undying insistence of Divine love — expressed as self-disclosure and solidarity, connection and communion — that is the reason for the original event that gave rise to this season and is cause to rejoice. Miryam of Nazareth is perhaps the truest symbol of the season as the one who agrees to body-forth the divine into the world so that Jesus could embody the extravagance, intimacy, and infinity of divine love not only for humanity but for the entire community of creation.
Some insist that we are the reason for the season, by which they mean humanity is depraved and sinful and in need of being saved. Here the good news of who God is is juxtaposed with the bad news of who we are. Here salvation (not to mention incarnation) tends to be viewed primarily through the lens of purification or rescue. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that Thomas Merton once took a photo of a large metal hook hanging no doubt from a heavy crane that was out of the picture. Merton wryly referred to this photo as “the only known photograph of God.” Merton’s metal hook mocks a mechanical understanding not only of salvation (reducing it to “being saved”) but also of the One Who Gives Life. Put crassly, this understanding would suggest all the rejoicing at Christmas is on account of “our sorry asses” being saved from the fires of hell by crane operator God (Later “asses” was translated to the more acceptable “skin” only to be translated later to the more spiritual sounding “soul”).That’s not just a skewed view, but way too small an understanding of the expanse of the mystery of the incarnation and salvation.
In this perspective, tucked behind all the “Rejoice! Rejoice!” refrains and all the Yuletide fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la’s, is the implied message that the incarnation is only happening because humans screwed up. This makes us something equivalent to the drunk teenager who ran dad’s new car into a telephone pole and who when sober enough called home from the town jail making God the rather reluctant if not livid ‘ol man that comes steaming and begrudgingly to bail the little miscreant out of jail (which rhymes with hell). We might call this view Incarnation as the Get Out of Jail Card. A nonreligious version of this interpretation is preserved in the well-known carol “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” which begins with the rather menacing words “You better watch out” and includes the creepy if not terrifying reminder that “He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good.” So, whether the Claus or the Christ, the naughty-and-nice seven year old is left to wonder, “Do I really want this not-so-jolly dude to show up at my place or not?”
A slightly different view, one favored by the 13th-century theologian and Friar John Duns Scotus, would suggest that the incarnation was neither evoked by nor contingent upon human sin. The incarnation would have happened regardless of human sin, Duns Scotus maintained. The first view above, and the more commonly heard rationale preached from most Christian pulpits, locates human sin as the motive force for salvation. That is, God saves (gives us life abundant and love eternal) because we have sinned. Duns Scotus insists God saves because God is love and the nature, motive force, and desire of love is to bring together the Lover and the beloved. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary defines reason as “a statement offered in explanation or justification; a rational ground or motive.” Asking what is the reason for the incarnation is not like asking what is the reason for an earthquake. The “reason for the season” of Christmas is the mystery of the incarnation, and the reason for the incarnation is not human sin but rather the lavishness of God’s love.
Duns Scotus’ understanding stresses that the incarnation commemorated at Christmas is an awe-infused, gratitude-laced celebration of the extravagant love that is indigenous to the divine heart. All the yuletide rejoicing is because God desires and delights in being with us. Always has and always will since the Trinity, the Beloved Community who is God, from before the existence of the universe has been the interaction of loving withness. God’s generous love and innate desire to be with us and with all of creation is the motive force of incarnation and salvation and does not hinge on human sin. In this view God deemed us to be of inestimable value, precious and rare, sacred and treasured. Here the deepest truth of who we are is not “sinners” but rather “God’s beloved”, that is, “the Ones Whom God Desires to be With and to Love.” Jesus, called Emmanuel, is the historical manifestation of Divine Love turned toward us, and the tangible embodiment of this original and eternal desire to be with us and with all creation.
In this view God indeed comes to save, to give life by embodying love, but the motivation, according to Duns Scotus, did not suddenly arise in the anno Domini of the Julian and Gregorian calendar but from before time when all there was was God. The impetus of the incarnation celebrated in a special way during Advent and Christmas is part of the one mystery beginning with the creation of the universe. Namely, the generosity within the Trinity — the Beloved Community — is turned toward the not-God and shared in the embodied particularity of Jesus who is the Christ.
Here the season of Christmas in which we especially participate in the incarnation and salvation is not a celebration of a new truth but the fullest and most vivid expression of a pre-existent and eternal truth about God: I AM WITH YOU. Jesus the Christ is the embodiment of this truth. And as the living reminder of another similar truth about God — GOD IS LOVE — and a truth about us and earthly existence: WE ARE NOT ALONE. Here salvation is the generous, enlivening, healing presence of God in Christ and Christmas the celebration of the other-centered heart of the Holy and Compassionate One.
What is often overlooked as we participate in Advent and Christmas is that salvation does not come by the personal, communal, or cosmic wiping away of all things bad, hurtful, unjust, or evil but rather in and through the incarnation of who God has always been. Salvation comes in and through accompaniment – as the beautiful story in Luke 19:1-10 shows when Jesus invites himself to the home of Zacchaeus the tax-collector and announces “Today salvation has come to this house.” Salvation is present in and through the withness of God. Jesus is the withness of God, or as theologian Monika Hellwig once wrote “the compassionate face of God.” Jesus (in Aramaic Yeshua, meaning something like “G-d is a saving cry”) is the bodied-forth, self-disclosure of the other-loving God. This means the incarnation and Christmas are celebrations of the withness and forness of God as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
PRACTICE: We would do well to retire the rather recent interrogative “are you saved” and instead give ourselves to participating in salvation here and now by transposing Jesus into this time and this place by being with and accompanying the most vulnerable and poor in our midst.
Note: This essay was revised in December 2016. and again in 2020
God’s Shalom and Saving Presence be with you, Dan