Though Christmas is the festival of light and is celebrated with many lights, it often seems to me that it is not much more than a shadow—the shadow of a Figure who has long since passed by.
It is true, of course, that even the cast shadow has in it a certain greatness. At any rate, it indicates the contours of a reality that even the unsentimental “man of today,” who prides himself upon his objectivity, somewhat shamefacedly calls love. At Christmas we are kind to one another, we emphasize the element of community, and enjoy ourselves. The antagonisms that keep thrusting themselves upon us are walled off for a few moments with air cushions, and for a short time the gentle law of kindness reigns.
The true greatness becomes evident when we consider what a miracle it is after all that these images of the shepherds, mother Mary seeking shelter, and the humble stable should be capable of transforming our whole point of view for even a few moments, that they should draw us out of the vicious circle of our daily routine and make us think of our suffering, forsaken, needy fellow men.
For a few moments we are troubled by the thought that anybody should be obliged to spend Christmas Eve without its lights on the lonely sea, that anybody should be walking the streets alone with nothing and nobody to call his own, not even a future. It is the greatness of this shadow that can arouse such sadness and concern.
But an irony, or better, a sadness that escapes into irony, appears when we measure the shadow by the original Figure who cast it.
For what is a love that no longer emanates from immediate contact with him who “is” love, but lives in us only as a kind of memory, a mere distant echo? Our everyday speech is sometimes capable of reducing this bizarre shadow of a vanished love and a fleeting joy to a grotesque caricature. I often think how absurd it is for us to say, “Have sunshine in your heart!” or “Wake up happy in the morning!” It is pathetic to see the yearnings that these expressions betray, but at the same time it is quite foolish to put them in the form of imperatives. How can I possibly go about getting the sun into my heart?
Obviously, the sun can be there in my heart only if it shines upon me and then the brightness in my heart is a reflection of it. But how in the world can I “produce” the sun?
A person who invents imperatives like these strikes me as being someone who has lost the real thing and finds himself walking around in the darkness where he is compelled to vegetate without love and without joy. So he says to himself: “I cannot live without these basic elements of human life; therefore I must produce them synthetically, namely, by an act of my will.” So he summons his heart to produce the sun. The futility of such an attempt is like the fool’s trying to catch sunlight in a sack.
When I am asked why as a Christian I celebrate Christmas, my first reply is that I do so because something has happened to me, and therefore—but only as I am receptive and give myself to it—something now can happen in me.
There is a Sun “that smiles at me,” and I can run out of the dark house of my life into the sunshine (as Luther once put it). I live by virtue of the miracle that God is not merely the mute and voiceless ground of the universe, but that he comes to me down in the depths. I see this in him who lay in the manger, a human child, and yet different from us all.
And even though at first I look upon it only as a lovely colored picture, seeing it with the wondering eyes of a child, who has no conception whatsoever of the problem of the personhood of God and the Trinity and the metaphysical problems of time and eternity, I see that he, whom “all the universe could not contain,” comes down into the world of little things, the little things of my life, into the world of homelessness and refugees, a world where there are lepers, lost sons, poor old ladies, and men and women who are afraid, a world in which men cheat and are cheated, in which men die and are killed.
Crib and cross: these are the nethermost extremes of life’s curve; no man can go any deeper than this; and he traversed it all. I do not need first to become godly and noble before I can have part in him. For there are no depths in my life where he has not already come to meet me, no depths to which he has not been able to give meaning by surrounding them with love and making them the place where he visits me and brings me back home.
Once it happened, once in the world’s history it happened, that someone came forward with the claim that he was the Son of God and the assertion “I and the Father are one,” and that he proved the legitimacy of that claim, not by acting like a supernatural being or stunning men with his wisdom or communicating knowledge of higher worlds, but rather by proving his claim through the depths to which he descended. A Son of God who defends his title with the arguments that he is the brother of even the poorest and the guilty and takes their burden upon himself: this is a fact one can only note, and shake one’s head in unbelief—or one must worship and adore. There is no other alternative. I must worship. That’s why I celebrate Christmas.
What, then, is the good of all the usual religious froth? What do these pious sentimentalities actually accomplish? Aren’t they really “opium”? What difference does it make if I see in God the Creator of the galaxies and solar systems and the microcosm of the atom? What is this God of macrocosm and microcosm to me if my conscience torments me, if I am repining in loneliness, if anxiety is strangling me? What good is that kind of a God to me, a poor wretch, a heap of misery, for whom nobody cares, whom people in the subway stare at without ever seeing?
The “loving Father above the starry skies” is up there in some monumental headquarters while I sit in a foxhole somewhere on this isolated front (cut off from all communication with the rear), somewhere on this trash heap, living in lodgings or a mansion, working at a stupid job that gives me misery or at an executive’s desk that is armored with two anterooms—what do I get out of it when someone says, “There is a Supreme Intelligence that conceived the creation of the world, devised the law of cause and effect, and maneuvered the planets into their orbits?” All I can say to that is, “Well, you don’t say! A rather bold idea, but almost too good to be true,” and go on reading my newspaper or turn on the television. For that certainly is not a message by which I could live.
But if someone says, “There is Someone who knows you, Someone who grieves when you go your own way, and it cost him something (namely, the whole expenditure of life between the crib and the cross!) to be the star to which you can look, the staff by which you can walk, the spring from which you can drink”—when someone says that to me, then I prick up my ears and listen. For if it is true, really true, that there is Someone who is interested in me and shares my lot, then this can suddenly change everything that I hoped for and feared before. This could mean a revolution in my life, at any rate a revolution in my judgment and knowledge of things.
In other words, I should say that all the atheists, nihilists, and agnostics are right at one point, and that is when they say that the course of history gives us no basis whatever for any knowledge of God and the so-called higher thoughts that govern our world. But Christmas teaches us that, if we wish to know God, we must in our relationship to the world begin at a completely different end, namely, that we do not argue from the structure of the world to God, but rather from the Child in the manger to the mystery of the world, to the mystery of the world in which the manger exists.
Then I see in this Child that in the background of this world there is a Father. I see that love reigns above and in the world, even when I cannot understand this governance, and I am tormented by the question of how God can permit such tragic things to happen.
But if the manifestation of love conquers me at one point, namely, where Jesus Christ walked this Earth and loved it, then I can trust that it will also be the message at those points in the story of life that I cannot understand. Even a child knows that his father is not playing tricks on him in a way that is seemingly incompatible with love. The highest love is almost always incognito, and therefore we must trust it.
Let me put it in the form of an illustration. If I look at a fine piece of fabric through a magnifying glass, I find that it is perfectly clear around the center of the glass, but around the edges it tends to become distorted. But this does not mislead me into thinking that the fabric itself is confused at this point. I know that this is caused by an optical illusion and therefore by the way in which I am looking at it. And so it is with the miracle of knowledge that is bestowed upon me by the Christmas event: If I see the world through the medium of the Good News, then the center is clear and bright.
There I see the miracle of the love that descends to the depths of life. On the periphery, however, beyond the Christmas light, confusion and distortion prevail. The ordered lines grow tangled, and the labyrinthine mysteries of life threaten to overwhelm us. Therefore our sight, which grows aberrant as it strays afield, must recover its perspective by returning to the thematic center. The extraordinary thing is that the mystery of life is not illuminated by a formula, but rather by another mystery, namely, the News, which can only be believed and yet is hardly believable, that God has become man and that now I am no longer alone in the darkness.
That’s why I celebrate Christmas.
The late theologian Helmut Thielicke was a highly respected preacher and writer. As a Lutheran pastor, he ministered in Germany both before and throughout World War II. He later taught at the University of Hamburg in West Germany.
