In 2003, the British Sunday Telegraph published the following Christmas editorial. The Telegraph was reacting to two things;
1) The media-hype surrounding the pop-singer Madonna, as she arrived in Britain for her wedding, and the baptism of her “love child”;
2) The increasing attempts of secular society to stop Christians celebrating Christmas as a religious event, on the grounds that it gives offence to non-Christians especially in Britain and the Unites States.
Last week’s pages were dominated by pictures of a mother, a father and a babe in arms. We may be repelled by the global glitz that surrounds this celebrity christening and wedding. Yet the universal, primeval appeal of the image calls to mind another family, in another time and another place. When the Madonna arrived in Bethlehem 2 000 years ago, heavily pregnant, accompanied only by her husband, Joseph, there were no television cameras, no paparazzi, no reporters. Indeed, the principal witness, whose memories are preserved in the gospel accounts, must have been the mother herself. The words of St. Luke — reveal the evangelists’ human source: “But Mary kept all those sayings, and pondered them in her heart.”
Partly because of the lack of witnesses, the precise factual basis of the Nativity always has been and doubtless will always be a matter for scholarly controversy. It is, however, beyond dispute that the birth of Jesus Christ was an event that took place at a particular point in time. Had The Daily Telegraph existed then, we might have reported the whole extraordinary story. Christianity, unlike some religions, is rooted in history; and the Incarnation, unlike some Christian doctrines, stands or falls on its historicity. We can gain an inkling of the Incarnation only if we approach it as Mary did, with humility and love. Even St. John’s account of how “the Word was made flesh”, sublime as it is, serves only to remind humanity of how intellectually unequal we are to this mystery: “And the light shines in darkness, and darkness comprehended it not… He was in the world, and the world by him was made, and the world knew him not.” At a time when genetic science and technology seem to have given mankind power over life and death, it is worth reminding ourselves that God chose to demonstrate his infinitely greater power in the person of a little child. Ours is the illusion of omnipotence; His is the unassuming reality.
For many people, including some Christians, the Incarnation has been, in St. Paul’s words, a stumbling block. How is it possible, they ask, for the divine to become human, for the eternal to become temporal? It is this rupture in the seamless continuum of time that marks out Christianity from the other biblical religions, and has inspired meditations ever since the first Christmas. On Boxing Day, 1945, C.S. Lewis replied to a query from his oldest friend, Arthur Greeves: “Something new really did happen at Bethlehem: not an interpretation but an event. God became Man…all time and all events in it, if we could see them at once and fully understand them, are a definition or a diagram of what God really is.”
Lewis contrasted Pythagoras, whose theorem has always been true even before he discovered it, with the Incarnation, which was far more than “a change in our knowledge”: “Though the union of God and Man in Christ is a timeless fact, in 50BC we hadn’t yet got to that bit of time in which it actually happened.”
Lewis’s was but one of countless attempts to express what cannot be expressed. Yet if we had to define the meaning of Christmas in order to celebrate it, then it would hardly be the most popular of festivals. What gives the story of the Nativity its own timeless allure is its tangible, concrete, visual reality. The manger, the shepherds, the wise men: all speak to us across the ages, in the angel’s words: “Glory to God on high, and peace on the earth: and unto men, rejoicing.”
[South Africans, like] the British, [from whose Sunday Telegraph this article is taken], have always rejoiced at Christmas, whether religious or not. Puritanical attempts to abolish Christmas have always foundered on our capacity to rejoice. There is nothing wrong (other than blandness) with secular formulations such as “Happy Holiday” or “Season’s Greetings”, but to impose them on Christians in the name of good manners [and “tolerance”] is gratuitous. It should not be offensive to those of other faiths, or those who have none, to be wished a Merry Christmas. That, indeed, is what we wish all our readers: a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
From the Editorial pages of the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph.
