The Woman with the Zodiac in Her Hair and a Dragon

I had, subconsciously, edited Satan out of the Nativity accounts. It was an honest oversight; I wasn’t intentionally revising my theology to be cool, hip, and twentieth century. There was that time I was at the wrong end of an exorcism. And the Evangelical subculture had wore me out by promoting Satan to some kind of quasi-deity capable of reading minds, being everywhere at once, and custom tailoring temptations for each and every person.

The truth is that Satan doesn’t need these comic book powers to hurt humanity. Sin is uncomplicated and banal. Sin is the lack of a conversation between God and people. The history of sin goes like this:

God had created Adam and Eve to live in a close relationship with him. God scheduled a walk with the first couple in the garden of Paradise. If there was something that Adam and Eve needed to know about a plant or an animal, God was just a single conversation away. If Adam and Eve needed to know if a certain behavior was right or wrong, they just needed to ask God. This dependent 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 from God.

The apple was bitten and Adam and Eve got their wish. Their severed their lifeline to God and served out their days alienated from the great friendship. And they learned that without this great 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 bruise the head of the serpent. The snake would draw the first blood, but his attack would not be fatal. The Chosen one would respond by crushing the snake’s skull into soft mush. Adam and Eve were judged, but God gave them future hope; their offspring would not be doomed forever. Eve mistakenly thought that relief would come soon and name her third son was named “Seth”, which sounds like the Hebrew word for “chosen.”

…

I had cut the antagonist out of Christmas, and with him all the conflict, making the story unintelligible and an inspired response nearly impossible. I would not have realized this, I don’t think, without recently discovering principles of story structure.

There’s a brilliant writer, Susan E. Isaacs who wrote this book, Angry Conversations with God. I was so impressed with the writing that I contacted her and asked her for advice (don’t blame my pedestrian writing on her). Susan was generous with her time and pointed me to some books about story structure. I enjoy fiction but didn’t realize that under the hood of a great novel there are host of rules and principles that must be honored. I learned that unless there’s a great conflict the hero has to over come you don’t have much of a story. So, every great story needs a formidable antagonist.

Just consider the classic holiday tales. Cut the Grinch out of the Dr. Seuss book and you’re left with all the Whos in Whoville contently singing their days a way. You’d leave the theater as soon as you could stuff down the last of your Milk Duds. A Christmas Carol wouldn’t work without Scrooge.  It’s a Wonderful Life without Mr. Potter becomes a feel-good segment at the end of the evening news: “Do-gooder helps struggling neighbors finance their home.” You’d have a warm feeling until the clip of the beagle that texted 911 and saved his master distracted you.

This is exactly what I did with the Christmas narratives. By scrubbing Satan from the story, Christmas stopped being the drama of God-incarnate invading a sin-scarred planet to begin wrestle the control of it away from Satan. Christmas became the story of child birth, which is a beautiful thing; and although this was one that was filled with inconveniences, annoyances, and curiosities, it’s not an epic story. Without the conflict between God and Satan, Christmas is merely a scene that you could contain inside the rounded walls of a snow globe; you could pick it up every so often, give it a good shake and admire it, but you’d put it back on the shelf for another year. A Satan-less Christmas has all the emotional intensity of Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph, and all the other twenty-two minute cartoon narratives that our neutered account of Christmas can’t seem to overpower.

There’s a wild account of the Christmas story in the last book of the Bible, Revelation. Revelation is a trippy, far-out book filled with vivid imagery; to the point that it would be fair to speculate that the author dropped a lot of acid. John retells the Christmas story with a certain psychedelic sensibility. John tells there was this woman with the zodiac caught up in her hair who was about to give birth to a son. This boy would grow up to rule all the nations of the world with an iron scepter. And there was this horned dragon who wore crowns atop each of his seven heads. The dragon must have been some kind of ruler because he felt threatened by the news of this coming king. The dragon stalked the woman, waiting for the child to be born, so he could devour the baby. Naturally, the woman fled. The dragon grabbed stars from the sky and threw them at her, forcing her to hide in the wilderness. It took an archangel and his army to drive the dragon away. The woman managed to have her child, who was prophesied to some day rule the nations with an iron scepter. And the child was spirited off to Heaven until the day he would fulfill the prophecy. I suspect if you put this story up against Frosty on TV, it would win in the ratings every time. Kids intuitively know a good story when they see one.

I wondered if my experience with Christmas would change if I could figure out that heel stomp.