Christmas passed fairly uneventfully for me. It's too easy in the frenzy of good food of presents to forget to stop and really think about what we're celebrating. I think that's rather a shame really, as I think that the 'Christmas story' has enormous social significance. God squeezes himeself into human form, and is born a vulnerable baby, into a dirty, messed-up world, entrusting himself to his creations, who he knew would reject him and eventually kill him. He is born to a working-class teenage mother. He is attended by outcasts and foriegners, and fast becomes an asylum-seeker, when his parents flee genocide (in the name of state security) in his native country. If we let this truth permeate us it surely has to dynamically affect our worldview. Christmas may have been cutesyfied and commercialised until it seems nothing but a nice story involving animals and presents, but we must not let this induce us into trying to play down its significance.
At the risk of becoming the mother from Almost Famous, I would be very tempted to change the date of my celebration of Christmas to a date in September when I know it won't be commercialised. I hate the idea of big business profiting from my celebration of what should be such a socially significant story.
1 comment:
There are lots of aspects to the Christmas story that the way we celebrate Christmas does not bring out.
You might enjoy reading The Real Mary by Scot McKnight sometime. He talks about how subversive Mary's song (often called The Magnificat) is, to say that those in power will be overthrown. This is an example of something never brought out in the way the story is traditionally told.
Scot points out lots of interesting things about Mary. Also that Jesus' own way of looking at the world would have been very influenced by this remarkable woman who dared to sing a song like that, since she raised him and would have shared her hopes with him.
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