As the nights grow dark and the mercury drops in the thermometer, it’s a good excuse to curl up on the sofa and watch your favourite Christmas movie.
What is it that we love about the most popular Christmas movies? Perhaps it’s because they contain a message resonates with the deepest desires of our hearts. For example think of the message in …
- “It’s A Wonderful Life”: hope outlasts despair
- “Love Actually”: love overcomes all obstacles
- “Die Hard”: good defeats evil
Although these films are fiction, we all want to believe such things are possible in fact. And the good news is that all these things – and more – have come true in the birth of Jesus Christ that we celebrate at Christmas. The Christmas Nativity isn’t just another feel-good but made-up story; it’s ‘based on true events’.
However, for some people it’s hard to take seriously the reality of the Nativity. The scene of the divine son of God born in human form, lying in the manger, watched over by His virgin mother, visited by shepherds to whom the birth was announced by a choir of angels from the realms of glory, and later presented with gifts by the three kings from the orient – all of these events happening under a new blazing light in the heavens. It’s a beautiful and wonderful story, but is it just that: a made up fairy tale? Can we who live in the advanced 21st century world still believe in God, angels and a miracle baby born to a virgin?
Before answering that question, let me tell you about my favourite Christmas movie: A Miracle on 34th Street. It tells the story of a little girl who doesn’t believe in Santa Claus. Her broken-hearted divorced mother has raised her that way, not wanting her to grow up believing in things (like Santa or Real Love) only to end up disappointed when she discovers they don’t exist. However, all that begins to change when she meets a wonderful, kind, old man called Kris Kringle. He makes her start to question whether Santa might exist after all and be incarnate in the person of Kris Kringle.
To cut a long story short, to avoid being confined to a mental hospital for the rest of his life, Kris Kringle must prove in court that he is in fact Santa Claus. For example, the authorities challenge him to prove it by bringing in a reindeer and making it fly – but Kringle explains that’s impossible because they only fly on Christmas Eve. It all seems hopeless. But at the last possible moment, as the judge is about to rule against Kringle, the little girl gives him a Christmas card with a dollar bill inside it. She has circled on it the words “In God we trust”. Inspired by this, the judge announces that if the government can believe on the basis of faith, that God exists, then also the court can believe without evidence that Santa exists in the person of Kris Kringle. Everyone celebrates and the story ends happily ever after.
However, I’m troubled by the writers equating Santa with God – and relegating God to the category of things that people believe in the absence of supporting evidence. Essentially this film assumes that people who believe in God are guilty of wishful thinking. Although, to be honest, most secular people think the same way about religious people.
Our secular society thinks that way because we’re following in the footsteps of sceptics like the famous psychologist Sigmund Freud, who explained away religion as wish fulfilment. He dismisses religion as the projection of our desire for a father-figure to take care of us and protect us in the midst of the uncertainties and difficulties of life in this world.
However, it’s not only people who believe in God who can be accused of wishful thinking. Perhaps those who claim to be atheists or agnostics have their own subconscious wishful desire for there to be not to be a God, who has a will for our lives and to whom we will have to give an account for how we live.
All this to say that the wishful thinking criticism cannot take us very far. It cuts both ways – against both believers and non-believers in God.
Instead, what makes Christianity different from all the other belief systems and religions of the world, is that it doesn’t begin with us, our thoughts and wishes. Instead it begins outside of us, with things that really happened in history at the first Christmas.
We find the story of the first Christmas Nativity in Luke’s gospel. It was written by someone who carefully investigated and researched, speaking to the living eyewitnesses and gathering the evidence about Jesus. Still to this day it is a highly respected ancient historical source.
“In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. 2 This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria. 3 And all went to be registered, each to his own town. 4 And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the town of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, 5 to be registered with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. 6 And while they were there, the time came for her to give birth. 7 And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.”
Notice that Luke, acting as a historian, is careful to record for us a series of facts about the First Christmas…
Firstly he records the WHEN of Jesus’ birth. This isn’t a made up fictional story that begins with the words: “Once upon a time”. No this story begins during the global reign of Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus and the local administration of Governor Quirinius. Approximately, according to our modern calendars, this dates to around the year 4BC.
Secondly he records the WHERE of Jesus’ birth. This story isn’t set “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away”. Instead it took place in the little town of Bethlehem – a satellite village a few miles outside of the capital city of Jerusalem in the land of Israel. He wasn’t born in a royal palace, or in a swanky hotel, but in a place used for keeping animals.
Thirdly he records the HOW of Jesus’ birth. Luke tells us the familiar story re-enacted in countless school and church Nativity plays. We’re meant to notice that there was nothing ordinary about the birth of this child. In an earlier passage, Luke recorded how his mother was a virgin who conceived a child by the supernatural power of God. The Spirit of God was working in Mary’s empty womb, preparing a body for the Son of God to inhabit and be born into this world. In a later passage, Luke records how angels appeared to the locals, announcing the birth of Jesus and inviting them to come worship Him.
The only lingering question that this leaves us with is WHY was Jesus born? And the answer is LOVE!
The Nativity is a part of God’s great love story for the people of this world. The tragic part of this story is that God’s love is an unrequited loved. Within each of our hearts there is a deep suspicion and lack of fondness for God. We resent the idea that we owe God our allegiance and appreciation. We reject God as the giver of our lives and the author of the story of this world. Instead, we have stolen the divine author’s pen and insisted on writing on own script for life and being the author of our own destiny. The Bible calls this sin. Sadly, through sin, we’ve made a mess of ourselves and left a trail of misery across the pages of history.
Nevertheless, because God still loves us, He has written himself into the story of this world, to begin putting things right again. Seeing the confusion and chaos, the misery and meaningless, the injustice and inhumanity, Jesus stepped down into this world -becoming one of us – suffering as one of us – dying on the Cross for us and our sins – and history records the fact of His rising again from the grave demonstrating that evil and death need not have the last word in our story. That’s not wishful thinking. It’s true!
That was the life changing discovery of C.S. Lewis, while out one night walking with his Christian friend J.R.R. Tolkien (the author of The Lord of the Rings saga). Lewis was one of the leading thinkers of the era and a professor at Oxford University. His area of specialist study was medieval literature, but his deepest passion was ancient mythology. He experienced a conflict between his head and heart, reason and desire: “all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless”. But all that changed on this nighttime stroll along Addison’s Walk in Oxford.
Discussing Christianity and mythology, Lewis asserted that the gospel story of the dying and rising Jesus was like the other myths: “lies breathed through silver”. However, Tolkien replied: “they’re not all lies”. Instead, Lewis came to realise that evening that Christianity is “the true myth” – “the one that really happened”. That realisation changed his life and destiny forever. And it can change yours too this Christmas, if you are willing to believe it too.
