The importance of Christmas as it was

Midwestern Seminary in Kansas City has a large collection of nativity scenes from different cultures displayed in its library this time of year. It’s pretty interesting. People who hear the gospel project the characters into their own familiar settings. Race, dress, structures, landscape all vary in the different representations. For many of the world’s peoples, the diversity of Earth’s population is impossible to imagine. Our culture did that for years when pictorial representations of biblical characters appeared to be from northern Europe?blue eyes, auburn hair, pale skin and the like.

I find no fault in the variety of Midwestern’s display. People imagine according to their own experience since the Scriptures did not come with divinely inspired photographs. Those who do understand the cultural setting of the Scriptures should be held to a different standard, though. We are dealing with historical people and events. We should do nothing that might give people the idea they are merely symbolic.

Manger scenes are not cultural icons like Santa Claus. I know there was a Saint Nicholas but he wasn’t the big guy in the red coat and white beard. That is purely a modern American image. The fact that we now see Anglo, Black, Hispanic, Asian, and female Santas is no source of concern. Santa Claus represents whatever your community or family wishes.

But Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the animals, the angels, and the eastern magi were historical?fixed in time and space. If the donkey was gray, he was not white or black or brown. The people, except the magi, were Semitic and thus it was unlikely they were blond, blue-eyed, or Asian. It matters.

Some who would cloud the details of history have an agenda. They embrace selected details about Jesus’ birth, his teaching, and his death. They deny or spiritualize his resurrection. They want peace on Earth, good will toward men. They want to believe in some hopeful Buddhist way that the lion will lie down with the lamb. Thus we get science fiction or fantasy that projects a peaceful and unified world. Children’s stories show a reality without predators or prey. Bears and monkeys and lions and warthogs do elaborate dance numbers together instead of eating one another. What is this except a hopeless dream?

A godly instinct yearns for a peaceful kingdom but a rebellious heart despises the King and his law. We must hate such shortcuts. They give false hope and encourage the worship of outcomes rather than the coming Lord.

The Christmas story is often subject to revisionism, even by those among us who mean no harm. It’s important that we don’t imagine the principals in the biblical narrative as cuddly innocents, for example. I shudder at manger scenes filled with big-eyed child-like shepherds, and animals, and magi. These are products of a society that knows the difference but that doesn’t find the reality as charming as chubby cherubim floating over the stable.

The shepherds were rough outdoorsmen, not easily impressed I’d guess. Heavenly messengers were and said something that made an impression on them, though. The animals were smelly livestock?meat and wool and milk on the hoof. Joseph was a logger?strong, resolute, and given charge over the infant Messiah. Baby Jesus was fully a human baby (and fully God) who cried like babies do.

The rough and realistic truth of the Nativity is of a piece with the Passion story. To downplay the gritty humanity of the biblical characters in the gospel story is to suck some meaning from the great story. The plain, almost desperate conditions of Jesus’ birth give us a veiled insight into the degree that the Son condescended when he took human form.

We cannot imagine the limitations he accepted except as we can imagine the infinite characteristics of God or his tri-unity. The poverty of his circumstances and the commonness of the newborn King’s attendants give us a small, comprehensible vision of it?if we don’t bathe and shave the shepherds or give the cows a sense of rhythm (“the ox and lamb kept time, bar-rump-a-pum-bum”).

On the other end, we cannot begin to grasp the magnitude of Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross. The separation that occurred in the godhead when he took on our sin is the most awesome event of eternity to that point (trumped only by what occurred three days later). For us to get anything of that, the trial had to be horribly unfair, the beatings uncommonly brutal, the cross heavy, his companions vile, and his death excruciating. These are not the things that Jesus dreaded but they are crucial to startle us with the significance of that day. Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” served us well in this cause. To show us the spiritual violence of the Crucifixion, we need to see his humanity brutalized in a way that was shocking and sickening.

Realism honors God in a way that unrestrained imagination cannot. A story in which the characters, even personified animals or invented creatures, behave as real persons might show us something true. It is not necessary the author have a consciously biblical intent so long as what he says about the world is biblical so far as it goes. Utopian imaginations, on the other hand, imply a means to obtain paradise. Simplistic versions seem to be based on the thought that we can just decide to be better. More commonly, it is assumed that evolution or education will take us there. This is unbiblical, counter-intuitive and outside observable reality. The desire for perfection is fine; the biblical understanding of its obtaining is a non-negotiable, and beyond the comprehension of those outside of Christ.