Christmas seems to be a controversy for some as well.. There are some who think Christmas should be disassociated from religion – one fire station in the US had to take down a Nativity scene that they put up when it was deemed to “promote” one religion over another.. while others want to ban Santa because the character is a “stooge of corporate interests and commercialism”. Then there are the debates of whether Santa Claus is a derivation of Kris Kindl or St Nicholas. Of course, all of this is nothing new. It happens all the time.
You won’t find any mention of Christmas in the Bible. The early Christians did not celebrate Christmas because their primary focus was on Jesus’s life, crucifixion and, particularly, His resurrection. For two centuries after Christ’s birth, no one knew, and few people cared exactly when He was born. In those early times, Death days were important. Birthdays weren’t. Even the early Church deliberately played down His divinity and birth.
It wasn’t until around 200AD that a day was set aside to mark the birthday of Christ. The identification of the birth date of Christ did not at first inspire feasting or celebration. But, for some reason. the Christmas celebrations grew from a day of fasting and praying to a season of banqueting and celebration of pagan rituals in some parts of the world.
Christmas was not invented to satisfy the retailers.. nor was it invented to make sure little children were good for a few weeks so that they could receive oodles of gifts. To Christians, Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. It doesn’t really matter that Jesus is unlikely to have been born on the 25th of December. For Christians, it is a celebration of the Incarnation of the Word.
In some ways, modern Christmas celebrations seem at odds with the mission of the man from Nazareth. The commercial Christmas philosophy is often about greed and indulgence but Christ’s message is about learning to give of ourselves.
What matters most to believers is that the Christ child was born, probably in a stable (maybe it was a cave or some other hovel) in the poorest of conditions one night about 2000 years ago somewhere in what is now the state of Israel. And that changed the world.
IMHO, that is the real point of any celebration this week.
- adrian t
