“TANNENBAUM”
AND TINSEL
(Christmas Myth and Fact)
G.K.Chesterton,
that humanist and wit, was asked to write some words on the flyleaf of a
child’s book, and after a moment of thought he wrote these lines:
“Stand up and keep your childishness,
With all its shrieks and strictures.
And
don’t believe in anything
That
can’t be told in pictures.”
And Lewis Carroll has Alice saying, “What
is the use of a book without pictures or conversations.”
The
Christmas story is told in the most vivid colour pictures: bright angels
carolling “Glory”, startled shepherds hurtling downhill to see the babe, exotic
magicians (“magi”) riding in from the East on bouncy camels. Take that bit
about the shepherds, that notorious bunch of congenital liars. Through that
cameo God was thought to be telling his people that the much awaited Messiah
would have the caring qualities of a shepherd; a shepherding king who would put
the finishing touches to his ancestor David who was guarding his father’s flock
when summoned to kingship. When the shepherd had seen and worshipped the Infant
Messiah they had something new to talk about. The gospel says that “everyone
who heard it was astonished at what the shepherds said to them.”
Understandably, since they were hearing the good news from the mouths of
inveterate fibsters !
Believers
know the story well and have often let their sentimentality enhance the
details. Painters, hymn-writers and poets have helped to make the baby Jesus
narrative as familiar as the accounts of Christ’s death and resurrection. The
Bible’s picturesque language to describe the birth of Jesus is quite different
from the workaday talk of people. We use language to make the literal
statements to convey precise information, like the Mumbai Mail will get into
Howrah Station at the scheduled 7.20 a.m.(a modern miracle !), like there’s a
traffic snarl on Main Street, like there was an uproar in the Lok Sabha
yesterday (ho hum). This language is literally and easily understood, with a
clear reference to the business of living. Most of our language is factual,
prosaic and unimaginative, the sort of medium to cope with daily events. We
want to know when the train is going to arrive, or what took place in the Lok
Sabha. But what happens when we try using language literally to describe extraordinary experiences or extraordinary
people ? If you were asked to describe a
friend, and you answered, “He’s a gem”, literally understood, you would take
your friend to a jeweller to be valued. Or if you describe a particular dish as
“out of this world”, literally understood, are we to think you went into orbit
to taste it ? When we want to talk about people or experiences that have made an
impact on us, literal language is utterly inadequate, and to try testing what
is said in literal terms is absurd.
So if
we are going to read the Christmas story properly, we must be able to tell the
difference between the precise information and the picturesque language in
which it comes wrapped. The Christmas story is as simple as it is stunning; and
a common carol has it:
“The
Maker of the stars and sea
Became a child on earth for me.”
The common language we would use to describe the
arrival of a train or the price of a cup of tea cannot begin to do justice to that. The language of the Bible is often
like the language of poetry or classical music that needs imagination or
acquired taste to be relished. Unfortunately, our age is not so much of imagination
as of precision. In this computer wonky world everything is reduced to exact
data, and the idiot box has taken over our fancy-free function. So, what hope
for the Christmas story ? None at all, unless it is understood that what was
written with imagination must be grasped with imagination. And then the fact of
the Babe Messiah enfleshing the God of help and healing could make sense.
So why
pack the myths and metaphors of Christ’s coming away with the Christmas tree
and tinsel ? First of all there is a time for revelling in the myth and a time
for facing the truth. If we carry the myth into our precise world we would be
tempted to rhapsodise the message of Christmas as other-worldly: angels and
shepherds with no mud on their boots, and “the little Lord Jesus, no crying he
makes” (which would certainly make his parents rush him to the post-natal
clinic in a panic !). Bishop Hugh Montefiore once started his Christmas sermon
with the startling question: “What would have happened if Mary had had a miscarriage
or if Joseph had stood the baby on its head ?” If we take what Christmas was
all about seriously and don’t let the vivid pictures say it all for us, then
Christmas is about God taking the risk of coming among men and women without
any insurance. God’s willingness to run risks for the sake of one risky delight
called Christmas might boggle our minds. So God risked miscarriage, disease and
death. And he got a very cruel death, and that on a day that some people have
since dubbed “Good” Friday. Incarnation is not without its price, because the
incarnation of God means what it has always meant - something messy, noisy,
smelly, bloody and painful. And that is the real world where we live, the world
of every man and woman whose common denominator is suffering. So long as people
want to imagine that the reality of God’s world can be restricted to a
candyfloss realm of myth and make up, the message of God’s coming among people
can be dismissed as something that “don’t belong here.” Perhaps the colourful
pictures that people the Christmas story are needed, but only because they
dress up a soul shattering truth.
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