Identifying as human has deadly implications

The incarnation and an execution impacts humanity.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

Head and shoulders image of a man with closed eyes, on his forehead is an ashen cross.

Josh Applegate on Unsplash.

Christmas makes no sense without Easter.

In Jesus of Nazareth, the Creator himself entered his creation to live among us. This is what Christians call the Incarnation. But why? What was the point of this identification with humanity? You might have expected these sorts of answers: he came to found the Christian religion, to teach us how to live and to gather a community of followers. These are true enough but look inside any church building or read any part of the New Testament, and you’ll find that another thing is the focus, something that makes Jesus different to any other founder of a religion. He came to die.

Jesus’ death is the climax of all four gospel stories. It is evident that the point of the narrative is there. The rest of the Bible’s New Testament spends more time describing the machinations that led to Jesus’ death than outlining what he taught. Does that mean it doesn’t matter what Jesus taught? Of course not: Jesus’ teachings matter tremendously to Christians. But his death matters still more.

No doubt you knew that. The first thing anyone learns about Christianity is its symbol, the cross on which Jesus was executed. One of the cruellest forms of capital punishment that has ever been legal, those executed on the cross were called ‘crucified’ – a word which still has its shuddering power even today. Crucifixion was a death reserved for the lowest of the low: common thieves, runaway slaves, rebels, and lawbreakers. Yet this particular death was the ultimate goal of Jesus’ life.

Why? What’s it all about? For Christians, Jesus’ crucifixion strikes at the very root of all that is wrong with the world. To understand it, first we have to understand what Christians believe about that.

If you fall into a pit you can’t climb out of, then lack of information is not your problem. Nor does it matter how many other people are in the pit with you: nobody down there can pull you or themselves out.

Everyone agrees the world in its current state is, to put it mildly, less than ideal. Most put it down to a lack of education, or to the stubborn foolishness of a few isolated individuals.

If you believe that people behave badly because they are ill-informed, then you might think the solution is to teach people what is right. You will put great faith in education: give people the information they need and they will change their ways.

Alternatively, if you believe ‘other’ people are the problem, you can focus your attention on opposing them, imprisoning them, or stripping them of power somehow. But Christians believe that the root of the problem is far deeper, such that these efforts only scratch the surface and will never be effective in the long run.

Christians believe that the whole of humanity has been damaged, cut off from its relationship to what matters by a primordial catastrophe that we call ‘the Fall’. Human beings are not simply ignorant, and the problem does not lie in lack of information, or education. The problem lies in our will, the part of us that chooses what is wrong even when we know full-well that it is wrong. And the problem is not just some people ‘over there’, conveniently set apart from me. Every single human being has been impacted. Including you. And me. Every one of us is part of the problem, which is why no one of us, however smart or well-informed we are, can be the solution. If you fall into a pit you can’t climb out of, then lack of information is not your problem. Nor does it matter how many other people are in the pit with you: nobody down there can pull you or themselves out. You need someone outside the pit who can reach down and grab hold of you.

That is why Christianity is more than a moral programme for self-improvement, or a set of spiritual practices comparable to those of other religions. According to Christians, the human race does not need another set of rules about how to live, or a formula to cultivate mindfulness and inner peace. We need a saviour: someone who does not share our fallen condition, but who can reach down and lift us to safety.

How far down did Jesus have to go? All the way to the bottom, which means death. Even the worst kind of death.

How did Jesus’ death save us? Christians have various theories about that. You may have heard the most common which uses law court imagery: we were guilty and sentenced capital punishment, but Jesus was punished instead so we don’t have to. Some people love this theory and live by it; others find it morally problematic and offensive. But the point is not the theory: the point is the reality to which it points. One way or another, by dying Jesus reconnected us to God and restored the broken relationship.

But it’s stranger still than that, because Jesus’ death is not the end. It was only the preliminary to something far more wonderful and transformative, a sign of a promise beyond our wildest hopes. By dying, Jesus defeated death itself and came back to life. If Christmas makes no sense without the cross, then the cross makes no sense without the resurrection. But more on that in my next article.

Essay

Christmas culture

Creed

13 December 2023

6 min read

The deep changes Christmas drives

From Longfellow’s deep peals of the bells, to Dickens’ Scrooge, to the miracle of No Man’s Land becoming common ground, conversions begins with Christmas.

Jared Stacy

Jared holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

A abstract image of red people-like shapes against a red background

Jr Korpa on Unsplash.

It was 1914, Christmas on the Western Front. Here, from trenches scarring the Belgian countryside, echoed not the sound of war, but carols—the song of soldiers, bold, vibrant, and clear.

Not every sector heard the sound. But Ernie Williams, of the 6th Battalion Cheshire Regiment, did. Across his sector, he heard a chorus of German carols converge with English. Even more miraculous: both sides emerged into No Man’s Land, shaking hands, taking pictures, exchanging gifts—enemies who, just hours earlier, were trading hot lead, now kicking a football back and forth.

The miraculous ceasefire was, at the time, both a media spectacle and a propaganda nightmare. The Daily Mirror published private letters from the front with details for a captivated public. The military high commands from both Christian nations worked to censor the story. The images of enemies together contradicted propaganda carefully crafted to demonise one other.

The men prosecuting the war from desks believed this epidemic of goodwill could extinguish fighting spirit. But they could never deny that at the front, one sector of No Man’s Land had been converted into common ground. Enemies met as converted men, if only for a moment—converted to a wider way of seeing and being, alive with possibilities for peace.

For a moment, enemies became what they really were, brothers—in defiance of their own Christian nations. This is, for us, a clear line of sight into the marked difference between the Spirit of Christ and the semblance that is Christendom. A Christmas conversion if there ever was one.

Scrooge has always pointed modern people towards Christmas conversion and its deeper economy, away from the business of bottom line towards brotherhood.

But this conversion on No Man’s Land makes the “Believe!” sign hung atop Macy’s Department Store in New York City seem shallow. The M&S Christmas advert, trite. Yet these are the conversions we know, the ones we experience year and year, season after season, without much consent or choice. It’s a manufactured conversion, not towards the brotherhood of humanity, but to the bottom line. Our coffee cups, converted from drab white to ruby red. Commercial jingles add sleigh bells. In all kinds of ways, daily life converts us towards a season of consumption called Christmas.

But who denies this? I’m stating the obvious: capitalism, materialism, consumerism. Every -ism a shoddy container of Christmas Spirit. We know this truth. We make it the moral of our stories. We’re moderns after all.

Grateful as ever to the Dickens, our benefactor of Christmas. Scrooge has always pointed modern people towards Christmas conversion and its deeper economy, away from the business of bottom line towards brotherhood. This deeper economy of concrete choice and the reality of conversion came straight from the mouth of Marley’s ghost, framed by an epiphany of regret:

“Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

The gap between knowledge and wisdom, theory and experience, is widest at this point. We thrill ourselves to watch Scrooge find that “everything could yield him pleasure”—like the Christmas morning churches with bells “ringing out the lustiest peals he had ever heard. Clash, clang, hammer; ding, dong, bell. Bell, dong, ding; hammer, clang, clash! Oh, glorious, glorious!” But is this our conversion?

If we’re honest, perhaps the bells of churches don’t always resound in our ears with hope, glad tidings, and peace. Our eyes and ears are on Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, Myanmar, on a world teetering, careening, towards another Christmas of contradiction—songs of peace on earth in a world at war with itself. In this chaos, church bells—if they’re heard at all— can be heard as a mockery of suffering, a maligning of the oppressed, a fanciful hope in a violent world.

It’s what Longfellow heard, an American contemporary of Dickens, during the American Civil War. Longfellow wrote the poem that would become a classic carol, 'I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day' in 1863, at the fever pitch of the war. At the time, a war that was only magnifying personal tragedy and crisis. He was both grieving the death of his wife while trapped in an excruciating period of waiting, to learn whether his wounded son, an officer in the Union, would live or die.

As he wrote, Longfellow found in himself the reality that disillusionment had given way to despair,

And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

We talk of Scrooge being damned at Christmas, less so of disillusionment and despair. But even so, despair rises like a tide in us. A cynicism confused with honesty, drawn out by the gravity of seemingly unrestrained cycles of violence, chaos, and evil.

Whether we be damned or despairing, we need conversion. And it’s here where we meet that truly decisive question: converted to what exactly? What draws us up out of damnation or despair? What sort of conversion turns No Man’s Land into common ground, enemies into a carolling chorus of converted men?

We see a glimmer as Longfellow goes on,

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”

From the deep peals of the bells, to the new man Scrooge, to the miracle of No Man’s Land becoming common ground, these are a fragmentary glimpse into the conversion that begins with Christmas but also outlasts it. It is the mystery and meaning and majesty at the heart of everything, incarnation: God With Us.

God’s solidarity with the weak is revealed in his becoming weak. His identifying with us as the demonstration of his love for us. His rejection by us never canceling out his love and its endless desire for reconciliation with us. These endless dimensions of incarnation, of an intrusion that startles the status quo, elicits nothing short of conversion.

Conversion is the only way to see and savour Christmas. A change marked by an expansive opening of wider vistas, a new way of seeing and living, the ushering in of new possibilities, of shattering the fatalities and necessities that claim to define and determine our lives, that keep us from changing since “that’s just the way things are.”

All this from a Jewish baby—not a precept, proposition, or program, but a person—born under the rule of Herod and Augustus, a person in whom our hopes and fears in our waitings and longings collides. He forever tells the truth that it is not the high command of Christian nations or the glitz of luxury that builds common ground, but the weakness of God, a God in a cradle in the world that is no man’s land. This person is the mystery and meaning and majesty that creates the common ground where enemies are made brothers, the person in whom God and man commune with peace on earth, good will to men.