What’s Christmas Without a Good Fight?
Featured, Meditations — By Larry Shallenberger on November 7, 2009 at 11:35 pm
I know. You still haven’t thrown out that fruit fly-infested jack-o-lantern and I’m offering you another Christmas meditation. By the time Black Friday rolls around you’ll wanting to weave the shopping flyers into a rope with which to hang either yourself or me. It won’t matter.
Please humor me. I’m still working on this Christmas book and that’s where all my brain cells are focused. I’m writing this book in an attempt to figure out why Christmas has had little to no hold on my imagination for years. That’s a horrid thing for a pastor to admit. I’m not proud of it. But I think I’m getting closer to the heart of the problem: There’s no snake in our Nativity sets. We’ve got ceramic wise men, sheep, and angels but no serpents. That’s a big problem. Give me a moment to explain.
What would the holiday classic “It’s a Wonderful Life Be” without the miserly Mr. Potter? Just drab documentary about some forgettable do-gooder. Lose the Grinch and your favorite Dr. Suess movie would be filled with insufferably happy Whos singing happy Who songs in Whoville. It would make for an amusing Youtube clip but not a lasting movie. “A Christmas Carol” without Scrooge? Unthinkable. Every good story needs a strong antagonist.
Somehow we’ve scrubbed a very real one out of the Christmas narrative.
God had created Adam and Eve to live in a close relationship with him. They had a scheduled walk in the garden of Paradise. If there was something that Adam and Eve needed to know and a plant of an animal they could ask God. If they needed to know if a certain behavior was right or wrong, they just needed to ask God. This dependant relationship was important to God, because there was a special tree in the Garden—The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God knew if Adam and Eve ate from this tree that they would have an awareness of morality without needed to be constant dialogue with him. And this lack of dialogue was a death sentence. Adam and Eve were designed for connection to God—their love, and creativity, and connection to creation and each other was all designed to flow out of this relationship.
And we see Satan, in this moment, tempting Adam and Eve to make their claim for independence from God. They could bite the magic apple and break their tether to God. They would know morality independent of God.
The apple was bitten and Adam and Eve got their wish. Their severed their life line to God and served out their days alienated from their Great Friendship. And they learned that without this Friendship they had lost the ability to sort out their other relationships with each other. An immediate division cropped up between man and woman where there was once intimacy. Their relationship with the once fertile earth changed. Coaxing vegetation out of the grudging soil became a seasonal battle. Adam and Eve didn’t know it, but they cut the cosmic umbilical cord that connected all of humanity to God. In that moment the human race was set adrift from God. God’s cursed Satan for his treachery with and judged him with a righteous irony. Satan’s deceit separated humanity from God. God’s judgment attached Satan’s fate with that of God-the-Son with these words:
“I will put enmity between you and the woman,
between your offspring and her offspring’
he will bruise your head,
and you will bruise his heel.”
Genesis 3:15b
From that moment both Eve and Satan were waiting for the birth of the special child that would confront Satan. The snake would bruise the heel of the anointed child, but the Chosen One would crush the head of the serpent. Adam and Eve were judged but God was giving them future hope—the future generations would not be doomed forever. Incarnation set the stage for this conflict.
So I submit that we add a snake to each of our Nativity sets. Jesus didn’t come to be cooed at, or held, or even worshiped. He came to kill a snake and reconnect humanity with their Creator. Take the snake out of the story and there’s not enough conflict to hold our interest.
4 Comments
I agree. I think we take the gospel out of Christmas a lot of the time. I’m actually surprised even though the gospel has been taken out of many things throughout the years. People like drama, yet many times we take love and war out of the Christmas story and only remember the birth story as it appeared by the human eye. This is the story of our salvation! Revelations 12 depicts the epic battle between God, as the Christ child, and Satan, as a red dragon. Perhaps this was the version the angels saw. Beautiful.
Thanks for this.
I wonder if the christmas story is told to show the humanity (i.e. the imperfection) of God comming to earth. It plays out like a bad sit-com, where everything that can go wrong will, and yet we have a happy ending – We have a child concieved out of wed-lock (negitive turn), then Joseph tried to end the engagement (negitive turn), angels come and save the marriage (positive turn), then there’s a census called when Mary is 8 months pregnant and they’re called to travel (another negitive turn). Then as they get into Bethlehem all the rooms are full (negitive turn), then Mary goes into Labour (extreme negitive turn, as they’re away from much of the family, and have no room to stay). Then the rest of the story all magically works out (child is born safely, placed in a manger (cute) while the animals quietly coo over him, and then gifts are brought for the baby-shower). The conflicts, while big for the characters in their life, are quite small in regards to most of the naritive of the bible. Its as if the point really is to be that God didn’t come in fan-fare and perfect child-birth, but came through all that Humanity has to deal with. Nothing ground-breaking or fancy, just the simple plain occurances of every-day life.
You left out the Slaughter of the Innocents (catastrophic turn)– instead of Jesus dying for people, people–babies–are dieing for him. There is struggle that comes with the humanity of the situation, and there’s struggle that comes with the powerful being threatened by the Christ.
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