The Nonsense of Christmas— Part One

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 10:49 pm by Ben Witherington

The Nonsense of Christmas— Part One 2015-03-13T22:49:19-04:00 Ben Witherington

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Risking the possibility that I might be called Scrooge, I am going to muster up my courage and hope that it might be useful to do some demythologizing of Christmas. Christmas today is of course a time off from work where one tends to spend time with one’s birth family or extended birth family, having done far too much shopping, and then far too much eating, while spending time with those who are supposed to be our loved ones, and sometimes are.

That is what normally happens for many folks, though the boomerang effect of that approach is that: 1) those who have no family; or 2) those who have had abusive families; or 3) those who really don’t like or get along with their families, or 4) those (now a majority in the U.S) who are single and have no mate to celebrate Christmas with, find Christmas to be the most intolerable time of year. It is the time of year when you are reminded once again that broken relationships or no intimate relationships have ruled your past, and continue to haunt you. There is no Christmas cheer for those sorts of folks at Christmas, quite the opposite. But what if it is the case that we have made Christmas what it is not? What if Christmas is really not about over-spending and over-celebrating and over-eating with one’s physical family? What if Christmas is really about something else.

What if Christmas really is about the Incarnation, and the beginnings of the story of the family of faith, rather than the reaffirming of the stories about physical families? What if Christmas is not about sharing the offspring you have had in the last year but about sharing the Offspring which Mary had long ago? What if Christmas is meant to focus on Christ and indeed in a Godward direction in general? What if Christmas is primarily about celebratory worship and not primarily about physical family reunions? I would venture to say that if we celebrated the birth of Christ in a way that did indeed focus on what the NT says that is all about, then people who often feel alone, or lonely, or left out or reminded of past family failures would not need to feel those ways any more.

If the body of Christ really was a family, then physical family problems and dysfunctionality, while not disappearing, could take a back seat to the celebration of the forever family of the Lord. In other words, the nonsense that Christmas has evolved into— a time when we give ourselves all sorts of lavish gifts and hardly give Jesus and his people the time of day, except maybe on Christmas Eve, is not what Christmas is really all about. We will say more about this in our next post.

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December 5, 2014

A Diet of Worms

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December 7, 2014 The Nonsense of Christmas-- Part Two

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