Is This The Month? Is This The Happy Morn?
Tonight was going to be a very clever post about the realized eschatology of “Happy Xmas/War Is Over” and Milton’s Nativity Ode. I do not have this in me. Suffice it to say that war and its personal analogues continue and most people are losing. Wanting the eschaton has not brought it closer.
Perhaps, as with the proclamation of liberty, Lennon and Milton are stating simple facts. The clever post was going to say that Milton sees the Advent of Christ as a temporal collapse birthing God’s kingdom here until he remembers his theology of Easter and the unfinished work still thereafter. At Christmas, though, he rushes to say “war is over” before withdrawing, displaced like his catalog of old gods by the inscrutable birth of God’s-self in time.
I don’t know what good it does to say these things. I don’t know that it does any. I know that I hope and that I’m moved by the poetry of the manger-born.
Today when I was shopping I saw a child, maybe four years old, saying over and over to his mother “Baby Jesus has to die on the cross. Baby Jesus has to die on the cross.” This is what stopped Milton from seeing it all done at Christmas; the morbid poignance of a child repeating his home-school gospel catechism, the weird blood-cult calculus of his grown peer’s crucifixion.
And so it seemed to me that the four-year-old was not just proclaiming a kerygma. It seemed also like a warning. ”You have to die on the cross, Baby Jesus. I think you need to know this.”
My God, really, what the hell is going on here? “You have to die on the cross, Baby Jesus. I think you need to know this. You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, I’m telling you why…”
As Advent ends I’m at a loss, though if pressed to answer what Christianity has contributed to the history of the world, I’d still answer with words from “O Holy Night”: the thrill of hope, that the soul knows its worth, that “truly he taught us to love one another, his law is love and his gospel is peace/Chains shall he break for the slave is our brother/In his name all oppression shall cease….”
Notice the tenses in the lyric, though: He (past tense) taught us. The slave (now) is our brother. Chains (someday) shall he break. The eschaton is realized neither in Christ’s cradle nor grave. We live in some interim of de facto freedom and de jure struggle. The slave, now, is our brother, but he’s still a slave until chains are broken. The resolution of Christmas is too academic. And what about Easter? The vindicated, risen Christ does not bring his kingdom even after clear triumph. Away to the clouds, but why? Why the Ascension? To make room for us? And what do we do with this room?
And so this is Christmas. What have we done with the room?
I struggle with this too … I have such a different perspective on faith, Christianity, the Gospel, the Bible, and what Christ was truly doing and why than I did when I first came to this in college. I miss looking at it the way I did then – as a child (indeed, perhaps the way we’re told to enter the kingdom of heaven), but I can’t go back because He has shown me other things … or maybe I have seen them despite what He wants. I usually answer my own “why?” with a Calvinist “because” and my “now what?” with a failsafe “love,” but I think that’s my own tendency to resist complexity and confrontation.
Damn you’re good, friend. I really like these little essays.
Happy Xmas!
Thanks for taking time to reflect, to wonder, to question, to cry out and to remember…Light shining in the darkness…pray this is your Christmas gift.
One day, you’re going to have to collect your advent thoughts into a book. I’ll be the first to buy it and share it with others!
When I think of Advent and Christmas, I think of the beginning of a 33 year journey for Jesus–phase 1 in the redemption plan. Maybe it’s similar to the allied armies securing a beach head on the Normandy coast in 1944–mission accomplished, but now on to the next in a long series of missions.
As I understand it, Advent and Christmas show Christ’s love for us; his 33 years on earth show his patient determination on our behalf; his death again demonstrates his love for us while freeing us from the power and penalty of sin; his resurrection shows his power over sin and death; and his acension tells us heaven is a real place and he’s waiting there for us.
Obviously, there’s still a lot wrong with this broken, screwed-up world, and complete redemption awaits his second Advent, but as you said, we now have “the thrill of hope!” And those in this “weary world” who believe have a reason to rejoice! And so this is Christmas!