Keeping Christmas in Perspective

"Hey! I’ll see you on Christmas Eve!" a friend of mine said enthusiastically. You know I’m a “Chreaster,” she said. (That means she definitely attends worship on Christmas and Easter.) I said, “Great! I’ll see you there.”

On another occasion, someone asked me, “Which one is bigger for you? Christmas or Easter?” Well, if he had asked me that when I was growing up I would have said Christmas. A new bike, football, fishing pole and Easy Bake Oven beats hardboiled eggs and chocolate bunnies any day. But Jesus ruined all that for me as I got to know him better.

Turns out, Christmas isn’t the holy epicenter of the Christian faith after all. It’s just that our culture has figured out how to make money off Christmas better than any other Christian holy day.

Think about it. How come there aren’t Epiphany or Pentecost cards?

Epiphany (January 6) is actually an older holiday (“holy day”) than Christmas. This day focused on the “manifestation” or epiphany of God made flesh in Jesus. So it included remembrance of the birth of Jesus, the visit of the three Magi, and all of Jesus' childhood events, up to his baptism in the Jordan by John the Baptist. The Roman winter celebration called the festival of the unconquered sun (a pagan worship celebration of the sun god Sol Invictus) was established by Emperor Aurelian on December 25 in 274 AD and eventually Christians took this Roman pagan holiday hostage through reinterpretation. Since Christians believed that Jesus was the son of God, God incarnate and the one true “unconquered son,” it made since to celebrate his birth (instead of a pagan god) on December 25. And so, by the 4th century Christmas was officially on the Christian calendar in an attempt to resist Roman enculturation.

Pentecost is also older than Christmas because it has its roots in ancient Israel. It was a Jewish harvest celebration giving thanks for God providing food and more notably the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures called the Pentateuch. It happened to be during the festival of Pentecost just following Jesus’ resurrection that God poured out his spirit upon the church (see Acts 2) to give what otherwise would have been a bunch of clueless cowards the ability to proclaim the resurrected Jesus with power.
Consider this too. The earliest New Testament writings (Mark and the Letters of Paul) do not even mention Jesus’ birth. However, they all proclaim Jesus death and resurrection. That is because without the story of Easter there is no church, there is no hope and no Christmas.

Christmas is a special day for our faith, to be sure. But let’s keep it in perspective. Christmas is not the holy epicenter of the Christian faith (as stated in a recent Orlando Sentinel article). It has arguably become the epicenter of the retail economy in the United States. But if we’re looking for an epicenter of the Christian faith, we need to look at Jesus’ death and resurrection (Easter). Apart from Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, what we have in Christmas is a great story and an excuse to make money – nothing truly transformational.

So, Merry Christmas, but the best is yet to come!