Here is the 2020 edition of my Christmas post.
First off, if your Christmas is a little rocky, or maybe not all you hoped it would be, good news -- you're not left out, you're right in there with the first Christmas! That one was as rocky as it gets. As we mentioned at the start of Advent, Joseph wasn't the glowing saint of paintings and icons, he was a working guy with a pregnant wife about to give birth, in town to follow the law and get counted in the census ordered by the Roman Emperor, with all the hotels full and no place to put his family up but a stable for animals, and after the baby was born they had to put him in a feeding trough for animals (that's what a manger is), and pretty soon they'll have to high-tail it out of town into another part of the Roman Empire due to local persecution. Christ knows all about when Christmas isn't so merry, or happy.
And that's just for starters. In addition to the many other things remarkable about Christmas, it is so rich in significance for the Christian faith that over time the church has evolved, unlike any other feast in the church calendar, three distinct masses, or divine services, at three distinct times of the day to contain it all. And, after that the celebration continues for twelve days!
Jesus' Birthday?
We'll get to the twelve days later. Here. the word Christmas is exactly this, a contraction of Christ's Mass. The first appearance of the word in English, Old English, to be exact, that survives is from 1038, Cristes maesse, which became Christemasse in Middle English, and now Christmas.25 December is not Jesus' date of birth. The actual date is unknown. Scripture does not record it according to any calendar, although context clues would suggest sometime in about what we call October. But we just don't know, though many theories abound. From which I think it is safe to conclude that the exact and actual date of Jesus' birth is not important since if it were God would have seen that it got recorded in Scripture.
Another Winter Solstice Thing Like the Others?
So why 25 December? Because it's nine months, the period of human gestation, after 25 March, which for reasons we'll get into in later posts was traditionally held to be the date Jesus' conception. And it's pretty cool how that worked out for December. In the larger culture around the Hebrews in which Christianity first took hold, both the day and the general time of year already had religious significance. In a world ruled by Rome, every year at the time of the winter solstice was the Saturnalia. What's a Saturnalia? Originally it was held on 17 December and later expanded to one week. Saturn, known as Cronus to the Greeks, was the son of Heaven, Uranus, and Earth, Gaia. Saturn took power from his father Uranus/Heaven and castrated him. But a prophecy arose that a child of Saturn's would one day overthrow him, so to prevent this Saturn ate his children.
That's right, ate his children. But Saturn's wife, Opis, known to the Greeks as Rhea, hid their sixth child Jupiter, known to the Greeks as Zeus, on Crete and gave Saturn a big rock in a blanket instead. Yeah, he ate it. Jupiter/Zeus thus survived and, with his five brothers and six sisters, all called Olympians from their hang out Mount Olympus, did indeed overthrow Saturn/Cronus and his own five brothers and six sisters, all twelve called Titans. (If you're hearing modern words like Titanic and Olympics in here, you're right.)
Now in the Greek version of this story the losing Titans got sent to Hell, well, Tartarus actually, meaning a deep place. But in the Roman version Saturn escaped the rule of Jupiter/Zeus and the Olympians and went to Rome where he established a rule of perfect peace called the Golden Age. In memory of this perfect age, Romans celebrated Saturnalia, when no war could be fought, no business conducted, slaves ate with their masters, and everybody set aside the usual rules of propriety for eating, drinking, gift giving and even getting naked in public.
Right after this came Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, The Day of Birth of the Unconquered Sun, celebrated on 25 December, which in the calendar of the time was winter solstice, the day with the shortest daylight hours of the year, demonstrating that darkness cannot completely overcome light. A number of the early Christian Fathers, St Cyprian among them, spoke of the parallel that Jesus the Son of God and Light of the World was born on the same day as the physical sun and light of the world, neither to be overcome by the forces of darkness.
In addition, other religions in the Roman world had a god's birthday on 25 December, for example the Babylonian sex goddess Ishtar, and the Persian mediator god Mithras, whose mystery cult was popular in the Roman army and carried throughout the Empire. On top of that, the barbarians living to the north of the formal boundaries of the Roman world (sorry, Germanic types) where Winter is harsher had their own winter solstice observances. Most notably, Yule.
The word Yule has come to be more or less a synonym for Christmas, but that it literally co-incidental, Yule and Christmas are unconnected celebrations that just happen at roughly the same time. Yule is well attested in Old Norse, including the Edda (i.e the Prose, or Younger, Edda), also by the great English C8 historian (and Benedictine!) Bede, and farther back than that, to C4. The earliest references indicate a two-month period on either side of Winter Solstice, in which the word occurs, connected to Odin, who is generally the leader of the Wild Hunt in the sky, seeing who's ready for the coming Winter and who's not, with much combined feasting and sacrifice, the blood of the animals offered to this or that god for this or that favour, the meat eaten. And watch out for those draugar, again-walkers from the dead.
We see a faint echo of Yule in the word Yuletide, Yule logs, and as we saw in the St Nicholas post, Santa Claus flying around. So it can look like the whole Christmas thing originated with the Christian Church adopting and adapting familiar material from the world around them, Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, Saturnalia, Yule and the widespread observance of Winter Solstice, to create a time of celebration for the birth of Jesus. Is that it then? Is Christmas and the observances that go with it simply another step in the evolution of stories about the sun and light not going away but coming back, gods getting born and golden ages, another recasting of universal human themes -- maybe just like Christianity itself?
Missa in festo Nativitatis Domini. (Don't worry, I'll explain.)
Don't think so. But also I don't think it is at all necessary to become defensive about the fact that other new life and new light stories pre-existed it, or to insist that Christmas was entirely independent of them, or (yeah, I know, too many ors) to fasten on to one or the other of the many attempts to theologise, like Cyprian, the date of 25 December.
Consider: What did Saturn do? Here's a god who had kids all right -- then ate them to prevent them from doing to him what he did to his own father. In contrast to the stories Man makes up about gods, the story God reveals to Man is just the opposite! Man is a creation, not a child, of God, lost in his own nonsense, some of which he encapsulates in mythology and some of which he considers the latest of enlightened thinking, each new version replacing the last. Man who will thus destroy himself, to avoid which, God becomes Man in Jesus, whose body and blood will be given for our salvation on the Cross that the creation of God may become children of God, and in the mass he gives that body and blood as the pledge of that salvation.
Consider: A child of God who does not overthrow his father but lives in perfect submission to his will; a child of God who does not banish his father's rule but proclaims his kingdom; a God who does not eat his child in fear but gives him to us in love so we could eat his body and blood as the food of eternal life, a real golden age to come; a mother who has to hide her newborn son not from God but from Man for his survival. And the imagery of light, not validating all sun god myths but demonstrating that even in its fallen and broken state Creation still shows that the Creator will not be overcome no matter how the darkness gathers.
Consider: The Divine comes to Man, not in a Wild Hunt but in an Incarnation, the sacrifice being not the blood of animals, not even those prescribed in the Law of Moses, and not human sacrifice, but the sacrifice of God made Man, his body and blood for the sins of Man, historically at Calvary and sacramentally presented to us in Holy Communion as the pledge of that salvation.
These pre-Christian observances are not the real roots and story of Christmas, but rather aspects of God's truth written into both Man and Nature even in its fallen state, which we now see in retrospect point to the truth we could not see in prospect, as we look forward and try to make sense of our situation, so, God reveals it to us. The Christmas liturgy will exactly sum this up in the Introit, the introductory Scripture passages, for the first mass of Christmas: Quare fremuerunt gentes, et populi meditati sunt inania? Huh?
Hopes and Fears.
OK I'll translate. The ESV gives it as: Why do the nations rage, and the peoples plot in vain? That's ok, but there's more to it than that. What's translated "rage" is that, but not so much with the connotation of anger but of grumbling, complaining, growling, howling, roaring; we don't have a word that comes from the root verb, fremo. And see "meditate" in there? That's where it comes from, plot yes, but in the sense of thinking on, contemplating, pondering, planning, devising. And coming up with what? Inania, that's what. See "inane" in there? That's it -- inane stuff, empty, hollow, worthless.
We sense something's off, not right, not what it could be, and we come up with ways to fix it. The NASB translation gives it pretty well: Why are the nations in an uproar, and the peoples devising a vain thing? We try to make sense of our situation and based on the sense we see devise answers and solutions, which may for a time seem good but in time lead to more or further problems. We have some sense of this, and it's expressed in Winter Solstice celebrations and in much else too, but "Christmas" provides an entirely different answer than they do.
That answer is summed up in words written by Phillips Brooks, an Episcopalian priest in Philadelphia, who wrote a poem for his church in 1868 which Lewis Redner, a local realtor who was the parish organist, set to a tune he heard on awakening in the night and harmonised earlier the morning it was to be rehearsed. Neither of them thought it would be anything after that year's service, but it has become among the most popular of Christmas hymns or carols, O Little Town of Bethlehem. The line goes:
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee to-night.
That's it. The hopes and fears expressed in the various myths and stories around Winter Solstice expressive of Man's awareness of his human condition meet to-night in what is held out as God's revelation of the answer and solution. We call this coming of God into Man's flesh the Incarnation, from the Latin that means exactly that, to become in the flesh. To be born. For which another word is Nativity, from the Latin to be born. That's actually the liturgical name for this feast, not Christmas, the Nativity. Christ comes into Creation, into the flesh, is born into our world, on three levels: his historical birth in the flesh as a human baby, his spiritual birth in the hearts and souls of those justified by faith because of Christ, and his eternal birth or generation from the Father in the Godhead.
Consequently, the church celebrates a mass for each of these three, as it prepared for them in Advent.
The First Mass of Christ's Mass, at midnight.
The Historical Birth in Bethlehem.
Introit Psalm 2:7. Psalm verse 2:1.
Collect
O God, Who hast made this most sacred night to shine forth with the brightness of the true Light, grant, we beseech Thee, that we may enjoy His happiness in heaven, the mystery of whose light we have known upon earth.
Epistle Titus 2:11-15.
Gospel Luke 2:1-14.
The Second Mass of Christ's Mass, at dawn.
The Spiritual Birth in the Believer.
Introit Isaiah 9:2,6. Psalm verse 92:1 Septuagint, 93:1 Hebrew.
Collect
Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, that we, who are filled with the new light of Thy Incarnate Word, may show forth in our works that which by faith shineth in our minds.
Epistle Titus 3:4-7.
Gospel Luke 2:15-20.
The Third Mass of Christ's Mass, during the day.
The Eternal Generation in the Trinity.
Introit Isaiah 9:6. Psalm verse 97:1 Septuagint, 98:1 Hebrew.
Collect
Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, that the new birth of Thine only begotten Son in the flesh may deliver us who are held by the old bondage under the yoke of sin.
Epistle Hebrews 1:1-12.
Gospel John 1:1-14
May I take this opportunity to wish all who visit this blog Merry Christmas, Feliz Navidad, Fröhliche Weinachten!
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