Feeling the Christmas Blues?

Have you found it difficult to get into the holiday spirit this year? So overwhelming are the problems everywhere around us that many people are feeling the Christmas blues, unable to enjoy the festivities associated with this wondrous time. A friend of mine and his wife tried decorating their tree a few weeks ago but soon lost interest and stored the tree back in the attic. He told me their hearts were too heavy with grief for the Ukrainian people and the ongoing war in Israel and Gaza to celebrate.

© UNICEF/Tom Remp

I understand. It’s hard not to think of families, especially those with children, in these regions of the world who live in constant fear that they will never see the morning light. When I watch the nightly news or read the morning paper, I am filled with anger at those who cause such wanton destruction and death. How can I make merry when so many live in misery? I cannot flip my mental switch back and forth so quickly between the graphic images of bombed out buildings and little children lying motionless in rubble, and then merrily hang ornaments on a tree and sip eggnog with friends, with Christmas music softly playing in the background.

Isn’t this season of the year supposed to be about peace on earth and goodwill toward men? Why do we feel so far removed from the bucolic nativity in Bethlehem, where angels and shepherds peacefully adored the baby Jesus? It seems as though there are two completely different planets—the modern chaotic one and the serene biblical one. Was the biblical world of Mary and Joseph really so serene, so transparently full of divine presence?

I open my Bible and slowly begin to read the birth story of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel (Lk. 2). Almost immediately, I realize the picturesque scene we moderns so often envision of the holy family gathered around the tiny crib, with angels, wise men, and shepherds paying homage to the halo encircled child, portray how later generations of faith imagined the event. The actual birth, as the New Testament describes it, was all too common, even mundane. As one well-known biblical scholar has put it: “God was born on the road. The crib was a feed trough, and those who came to visit were shepherds, not kings”(The New Interpreter’s Bible, p. 67). If a camcorder had been running, it would have recorded a birth not unlike the countless births by poor peasant Judean women that had been going on for centuries.

Jesus, according to the New Testament, was granted no special privileges as the chosen one of God. He lived and died as an itinerant preacher from the lower classes of society, without even having a place to lay his head (Matt. 8:20).

The shepherds who left their flocks to visit the baby Jesus have been romantically idealized, but these herdsmen had no such celebrated status in their own day. They were simple men, deemed unclean by the religious authorities, and were prohibited from entering sacred places in the temple. We might equate them with the cowboys of the 19th century, a rough and rowdy bunch who drove cattle from market to market.

Then there were the magi who came from the east. They were not even Jews, and, as far as we know, worshipped a pantheon of gods. To make matters worse, they were magicians and astrologers, hardly suitable guests for a Jewish birth, at least by the standards of the religiously pious. We picture these unidentified mystery men as royalty, but in the culture of the day, among observant Jews, these visitors were pagans and were viewed with suspicion, if not open hostility.

Mary, too, has a celebrated place in the Christmas story, but I doubt she felt so majestic on the night she gave birth. A stable filled with the smell of animals and dung made her even more conscious that she had brought life into the world as an unmarried woman. In today’s culture, we have greater sensitivity and understanding for an unmarried mother, but in the first century such an event could result in the woman being stoned. Who would believe her story that God’s spirit had filled her womb? What would become of her? Would she and her child be put to death?

Mary has been so sentimentalized through the centuries that the church has largely ignored her age. According to most biblical scholars, she was only 13- or 14-years-old. No doubt she was filled with confusion, anxiety, and more than a little fear. Just past puberty, she had little understanding or knowledge of messianic promises, as women were not permitted to study Torah, and probably felt as though she were in a dream, or maybe nightmare. Reading the story two thousand years after the fact, with mountains of theological interpretations to guide us, has removed the scandal that Mary must have keenly experienced.

What about Joseph? A carpenter by trade, with minimal education, he deserves more credit than what the church has granted him through the ages. After all, he believed Mary’s story and was willing to stand by her. His reputation could easily have been ruined, and he risked becoming a pariah in his hometown by marrying a woman who had had a child out of wedlock. Talk about faith! Joseph is a poster child for what it means to believe in the promises of God.

To add an even more unsettling element to the first Christmas, the king in Jerusalem was paranoid to the extreme and decreed that all male infants in Bethlehem be killed. Mary and Joseph would soon have to flee to safety. The couple in the stable, who warmly and tenderly held their new born son, and who appear so serene in modern day depictions, must have had a thing or two on their minds beside good tidings of great joy, don’t you think?

On that holy night, when angels danced a heavenly jig and sang praises to the most high, scandal, confusion, poverty, rejection, evil, and death would shadow the chosen one of God. The angels may have sung joy to the world, but Mary and Joseph knew from the beginning, given their humble origins, their son would be a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief (Isa. 53:3).

The world of the past and the world of today are not so different after all. Today, not unlike two thousand years ago, the Christ child enters into a violent, chaotic and deeply troubled world. We yearn for “peace on earth goodwill toward men” (Lk. 2:14), but where can we find it? We decorate our trees, hang stockings by the fireplace, and sing carols by candlelight with conflicted thoughts. On the one hand, we see cruelty and immense suffering and wonder where the evidence of God’s presence is. On the other hand, we see, read, and hear about people who live remarkably unselfish lives, who honor Christmas all year long by making their corner of the world a better place. Doesn’t God’s presence live within these people? They take food to a neighbor who is sick. They visit a lonely shut-in. They find time to have lunch with a young person who has lost his way. Some even volunteer to work in the forgotten places where few dare to go, where the poor and the dying live out their lives.

The lives of such people shine light into an otherwise dark world. Like Mary, Joseph, the shepherds and wise men, and later, the tax-collectors, prostitutes and common folk, they have found meaning through the life, death, and resurrection of the one born in Bethlehem. They celebrate and honor Christmas to remind themselves that there is an alternative to greed, death, and destruction. Their lives bring light and love where there is darkness and death. Their love of God is tangibly expressed through their love for people.

You see, Christmas is not just about brightly lit trees, roaring fireplaces, gifts and toys and such. Not that these things are necessarily bad. In fact, there is a place for these festive traditions. Yet, Christmas is about so much more. Christmas tells us that God’s presence has come into our mixed-up and sick world, and can be experienced, if we just know where to look. The child born in a manger came to show us a better way to be human, a way without war and destruction. It is simple, really, but so profound—love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself.

When I finally finished reading Luke’s version of the birth of Jesus, I sipped coffee and thought about that first Christmas. Maybe I had it all wrong. We celebrate Christmas, not because all is right in the world, but because God’s presence continues to be present in our highly dysfunctional world through the lives of ordinary but extraordinary people—like shepherds, wise men, a young teenage girl and a simple man who believed. And like the woman down the street who volunteers her time at a shelter for runaways, and a highly respected Dallas surgeon who treats uninsured patients for free during his off days, and, well, the list goes on. Countless people, who have embraced the way of the babe born in Bethlehem, are sharing divine presence in so many places. The gift of Christmas can be experienced in the most surprising places, even in the war torn areas of our world, places like Ukraine and Israel/Gaza. Christmas reminds us that hope, joy, peace, and love are all around us, in every hospital and funeral home, in every slum and ghetto, in every corner where the poor and downtrodden scratch out a living, wherever there is suffering and death, everywhere!

Shout it from the mountain tops! The light and love of Christmas is everywhere!

Merry Christmas!