What we celebrate at Christmas is not the birth of a particularly sweet and harmless baby, nor even the welcome possibility of having a few extra drinks in the middle of winter. We celebrate a set of discoveries about God and about humanity. Or, as Christians have regularly said, not so much discoveries, as revelations. We are shown something about God, that the God we believe in is not a God who has to be lured down from heaven, by being very, very polite to him, or behaving extra well. We are dealing with a God who can’t help himself overflowing, boiling over into the world he has made; a God who cannot give less than the life that is the divine life. We are dealing, in other words, with a God who doesn’t have to be persuaded to be interested in us.
One way of keeping a Christian Christmas might be to look at what relics there are, in our minds and hearts, of an approach to God which still believes that God is essentially rather bored with us, rather removed from us, and always in need of being kept sweet. However long you’ve been a Christian, or however long you’ve been looking wistfully at Christianity from outside, that’s something that keeps obstinately coming back. I speak as a sinner to sinners, you understand. That’s deeply etched in our minds, the mythology of a God who somehow has to be persuaded to be on our side. You might as well try to persuade a waterfall to be wet.
But there’s more: the way in which that overflow impacts upon us is not by force, or command; it’s by a solidarity, an identification so deep, so serious and total, that we could only say, when we see Jesus, we see God, and we see therefore a God who values our humanity beyond all imagining.
So the second question about how we keep a Christian Christmas, is to ask some awkward questions about how we value human lives: how we value the lives immediately around us, how we value the lives that impact upon us in negative or dangerous and difficult ways, how we value the lives that appear not to be especially significant or effective or efficient …
We ought to be looking with speechless amazement at every human face: God thought this face was worth everything. God thought this person was worth everything. God thought, God thinks, that there is no gift or risk too great to bring full life and joy to this person. And God thought, and thinks, that this person can reflect something of the massive generosity that is God’s own act and nature. It’s possibly the hardest thing in the Christian faith to accept or understand, that radical sense that wherever we turn, we see a humanity God has believed to be supremely worthwhile.
Of course, day by day we make our little judgments, and we take our sides. We think, unthinkingly, that such-and-such a life is obviously less worthwhile than another. We think the lives of our enemies are less worthwhile than the lives of our friends. And while there are monumentally difficult decisions to make in our world — about the use of force, about defense and war and the like — the one thing the Christian has to be sure of is that wherever we turn, the human life we see is a life as valuable as ours. If our actions diminish or destroy it, that is nothing for triumph and all for tragedy.