What Christmas Means

Christmas or the 25th of December which Christians in West mark as birthday of Prophet Jesus (peace upon him), ever since it was instituted as such almost four centuries after the end of the Virgin-born Messiah’s mission by the newly converted Roman empire in order to replace a pagan festivity of Europe, has in the modern era lost its meanings, mainly because of the repressive un-Christian policies of western regimes.

Stay with us for excerpts from an article titled “What Christmas Means” written by Chris Hedges, former professor of Princeton University, US, and a missionary of the Presbyterian Christian sect.

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 and the infant Jesus to Egypt to escape the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem ordered by the Jewish king 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 Jesus became a refugee,” a farmer answered.

I knew Matthew’s biblical passage 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 the 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 last days of the Messiah, in which Jesus is abandoned by his disciples, attacked by the mob, condemned to death by the state, and placed on death row —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 almost as often as we finish them off with lethal injections, gun them down in the streets or lock them up in cages. The Romans wanted to kill 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 Jr.

The radicalism of the Christian Gospel would be muted, distorted and denied by the institutional church once it came to power in the third century. It would be perverted by court theologians, church leaders and, in the 20th century, fascists. It would be mangled by the heretics in the Christian right to sanctify the worst aspects of American imperialism and capitalism. The Bible unequivocally condemns the powerful. It is not a self-help manual to become rich. It does not bless America or any other nation. It was written for the powerless, for those the theologian James Cone calls the crucified of the earth. It was written to give a voice to, and affirm the dignity of, those being crushed by malignant power and empire.

Undocumented parents living in mortal fear of being seized by immigration agents and being separated from their children, African-Americans living in the hellish violence of south Chicago, know the true meaning of Christmas. They feel what Mary and Joseph felt. Fear, even terror, is the foundation of Christmas.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright said in a sermon in Chicago in 2003: The United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Amerindian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains, the government put them in slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest-paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America—that’s in the Bible—for killing innocent people. God damn the US, for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn the US, as long as she tries to act like she is God, and she is supreme.”

This is what Reverend Wright said, and paid for his honesty. He spoke a core truth about the Gospel that few preachers dare to utter, lest their jobs and their status are jeopardized by the big donors in their congregations walking out. Preach the Gospel and you don’t last long in a cathedral or a well-heeled suburban church. The preachers there are skilled dissemblers. And this is why, in our moment of crisis, they have little to say. All institutions including the church, the theologian Paul Tillich reminded us, are inherently demonic. You can serve God or Mammon. You can’t serve both.

Writer James Baldwin said he left the pulpit to preach the Gospel. There is more Gospel in Baldwin than in most Sunday sermons or theological texts. Those who proclaim the Gospel are outcasts, including from the institutional church. They are often branded as heretics. They defy power. They stand with the oppressed. And when you stand with the oppressed you are treated like the oppressed.

“Being in jail on Christmas day is not just counter-cultural, but anti-cultural,” wrote the Rev. Daniel Berrigan from his cell on Christmas 1993, imprisoned for one of his many acts of civil disobedience. “The culture has no sense of Jesus’ spirit. People spend billions of dollars in an orgy of consumption, exchanging presents while ignoring the plight of the poor and the demands of discipleship. As George Anderson of St. Al’s says, ‘We cannot mark Christmas without remembering Jesus. Instead of marking this day with the cultural spirit of materialism, we sit here in poverty.”

Christmas is not about the 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—calls on us to protect and nurture the least among us, those demonized and rejected.

The Magi or the Wise Men from Persia – today’s Iran – who visited the newborn Jesus in Palestine, had turned their backs on their old world to embrace one that is obscure. There is no sudden epiphany. They become aliens in their own land, “with the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly.

In view of these facts it is clear that the US is in terminal decline. It is enveloped by radical evil. Its corporate systems of power and empire exploit and kill with impunity. Its perverted values champion cruelty, mendacity and greed. It bows before the idols of money and power. It is severed from the human. It, like Herod the Jewish king and the Roman Empire, damns the infant Jesus. There is nothing easy about faith. It demands we smash the idols that enslave us. It demands we die to the world. It demands self-sacrifice. It demands resistance. It calls us to see ourselves in the wretched of the earth. It separates us from all that is familiar. It knows that once we feel the suffering of others, we will act.

AS/MG