“It’s the most wonderful time of the year” for religion-bashers, and Christianity in particular. Christmas offers such people an opportunity to “debunk” it on two main bases. One is the presence of supernatural elements in the story, like angels and a wandering star, as we’ve just heard (as we heard at Midnight Mass). I’m sure such people are equally enraged when they watch films based on true stories and find discrepancies between the hard facts and how they are presented in those movies. Most of us, though, understand that storytelling uses the means specific to a particular medium to convey the message. Books work in the reader’s imagination, so they must use literary devices to spur it. Their big-screen adaptations replace the reader’s imagination to a great extent with “ready-meal” moving images combined with sound, so they must use different means to keep the audience engaged. We have all stumbled upon poorly written books or badly made movies, so we know it’s not easy to produce captivating art. The other way of “debunking” Christmas is the claim that it effectively replaced various ancient winter solstice celebrations, like Saturnalia, a Roman festival celebrated between 17 and 23 December. Sometimes, it’s presented as a sort of secret plot by the Church authorities in the early ages to deliberately “christen” a pagan festival. This kind of Christmas denunciation surfaces each year in the run-up to the festivities as if it has just been unmasked. In fact, in Scotland, Christmas was legally banned on similar grounds between 1640 and 1712 and became a public holiday only in 1958. The unspoken assumption for such “debunking” is that any “genuine” religious celebrations and rituals must be something completely new, unseen and unheard of before. I’m happy to help such people by stating that virtually all festivals, in any religion, predate their religious incarnation.
That word is the key to understanding the Christian faith. It’s derived from the Latin word “incarnatus,” meaning “in the flesh.” The closest and more familiar English word is “embodiment,” which refers to when something or someone takes on a particular form or shape. The Christian doctrine refers to the mystery “that God became flesh, that God assumed a human nature and became a man in the form of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the second person of the Trinity. Christ was truly God and truly man.” St John’s gospel described it more concisely: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (1:14). Well, there was no shortage of mythological gods, goddesses and deities who took on the human form, mainly for nefarious reasons of deceiving and exploiting humans. How was Jesus’ incarnation different? Utterly is the answer. The use of the human form by those mythical deities can be described as a disguise, a temporary, short-lived dressing-up, not dissimilar to actors in the theatre. The Son of God becoming man was on an incomparably different level. He wasn’t role-playing a human being; he became one. Let me illustrate this with a real-life example.
Since I arrived in Scotland almost 20 years ago, I’ve made a lot of effort to be part of this country and local community. I’ve learned its history, learned the language to a certain level of fluency, and acquired British citizenship. I’ve got to know its culture, heritage and landscape. Essentially, I’ve made Scotland my home and feel a deep connection with this country. Despite all that, I will never be considered “Scottish” on a par with those who have been born and raised here. I don’t say that begrudgingly, but as a matter of fact. Why is that so? Our individual and collective identities result from life-long intricate relationships, influences, impacts, experiences, and so on. These are so complex that it’s impossible to unravel them, even less so to replicate them in someone else’s life. Consequently, I can only be accepted as an adopted Scot; incidentally, that’s absolutely fine. It’s a bit similar – though in reverse – to the incarnation of the Son of God. St Paul described it rather well: “When the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman.” (Galatians 4:4). At a specific moment in time in history, in a geographically, culturally and ethnically specific place, God became man and was brought up in a Jewish family of first century Palestine. In the process of growing up, he experienced all those intricate influences I mentioned before and had become a fully-fledged Jewish adult man when he started his public ministry. In other words, the incarnation of the Son of God wasn’t limited to its carnal aspect but embraced the entirety of human life, including a pre-existing culture with its rituals, traditions and beliefs – the latter in both religious and non-religious sense.
Since time immemorial, people have developed specific ways of dealing with the unpredictable realities and challenges of everyday life. It’s a continuous process, and nowadays, it is probably best illustrated by an ever-evolving crop of superstitions people cling to. So, when people converted to a new Christian faith, they did it with their indisposable cultural baggage. The new religion transformed or added the meaning of old traditions and rituals while keeping their form. The early Church faced the dilemma of whether to stick rigidly with the contemporary Jewish traditions and rituals and impose them on new, non-Jewish converts. Inspired by the Holy Spirit, the first-ever Church Council decided otherwise, and it became a template for adopting local cultures and traditions when the Gospel reached new peoples and territories. In such a way, the Incarnate Son of God, Jesus Christ, is one of us, whether we are Scottish, English, Irish, Polish, Italian, Nigerian, Filipino… you name it. He is your Lord; He is your brother.
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