A Devotion from Rodney Clapp

Let the Pagans Have the Holiday

It is time to recognize that a new tradition has been added to Christmas. As surely as trees and

lights and reindeer, December now brings Christian complaints about the secularization of the

holiday. T-shirts and posters and preachers declare, “Jesus Is the Reason for the Season,” but

their protests are drowned in the commercial deluge.

Christmas is ruled not from Jerusalem or Rome or Wheaton or any other religious center,

but from Madison Avenue and Wall Street. In a revealing symbolic act, President George Bush

two years ago inaugurated the season not, mind you, in a church, but in a shopping mall. There

he bought some socks and reminded Americans their true Christmas responsibility is not

veneration but consumption.

To some, Christmas also seems less Christian because many of the nation’s institutions are

less and less willing to prop up the church. So some disgruntled believers—misguidedly, by my

estimate—do battle with various courthouses that no longer allow creches on their lawns.

Sometimes outsiders glimpse our own dilemma more acutely than we can. Last Christmas,

Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman wrote an article in Cross Currents entitled, “Being a Jew at Christmas

Time.” In it he observed, “There is nothing wrong with sleigh bells, Bing Crosby, and Christmas

pudding, but I should hope Christians would want more than just that, and as Christmas

becomes more and more secularized, I am not sure they get it.” He went on: “In the end, the

problem of Christmas is not mine any more than Christmas itself is. The real Christmas

challenge belongs to Christians: how to take Christmas out of the secularized public domain and

move it back into the religious sphere once again.”

The rabbi is right on both counts. For Christians, Christmas definitely loses something—in

fact, loses its core—as it gets more and more secular. But the solution is not to worry over

courthouse creches: The real Christmas challenge belongs to Christians. The church and not city

hall is charged with witnessing to the gospel and remembering to the world the birth of Jesus

Christ.

Here I want to suggest that Christians may best reclaim Christmas, indirectly, by first

reclaiming Easter. Ours is an ironic faith, one that trains its adherents to see strength in

weakness. The irony at hand could be that a secularizing culture has shown us something

important by devaluing Christmas. In a way, Christians have valued Christmas too much and in

the wrong way. I defer again to Hoffman, who writes,

Historians tell us that Christmas was not always the cultural fulcrum that balances

Christian life. There was a time when Christians knew that the paschal mystery of death

and resurrection was the center of Christian faith. It was Easter that really mattered, not

Christmas. Only in the consumer-conscious nineteenth century did Christmas overtake

Easter, becoming the centerpiece of popular piety. Madison Avenue marketed the

change, and then colluded with the entertainment industry to boost Christmas to its

current calendrical prominence.

The Bible, of course, knows nothing of the designated holidays we call Easter or Christmas. But

each holiday celebrates particular events, and there can be no doubt which set of events

receives the most scriptural emphasis.

It is well known that all four Gospels build toward and focus on the events leading up to and

including what we commemorate at Easter. One-quarter to one-half the chapters in each of the

four Gospels deal with Easter events. Clearly, the gospel traditions see these as the crucial

episodes, the events that identify and ratify Jesus as God’s Messiah. In fact, two of the four

Gospels (Mark and John) have no birth, or Christmas, narratives. This means certain of the

earliest Christian communities knew no Christmas (at least, not from their basic texts). To put it

another way, we could be Christians without the stories of Christmas, but not without the

stories of Easter.

The rest of the New Testament does not deviate from this pattern. The earliest recorded

Christian sermon (in Acts 2) proclaims the Easter message of the world’s Savior crucified and

then raised by Israel’s God. And what can we say of Paul, who nowhere speaks of Jesus’ birth,

but everywhere heralds “Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2) and warns that “if Christ has

not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (15:14)?

To this day, Christian worship is marked by Easter more than by Christmas. Consider the

sacraments (or ordinances, if you prefer). Baptism is baptism into Christ’s crucifixion and

resurrection. As Paul writes, “We have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just

as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness

of life” (Rom 6:4). Celebrating the Eucharist, or Communion, includes rich themes drawing both

from Christ’s passion and his resurrection. And of course, we gather to worship on the day of

the Lord’s rising, so that Christians for centuries have thought of each Sunday as a “little

Easter.”

The recovery of Easter as our pivotal holy day may best be served by a recovery of the

Christian calendar, complete with the cycle of seasons that recall the gospel from Advent to

Christmas to Epiphany to Lent to Easter and Pentecost. The calendar, like the gospel narrative,

builds toward and pivots around the focal events of Christ’s passion and Easter. Recognizing the

liturgical year is a large step toward seeing Easter as the main Christian holiday.

In calling Christians to return to the Christian calendar and return Easter to its rightful

prominence, I am not implying that the events of Christmas are trivial or untrue. The nativity

stories help us to remember key and glorious truths, such as the Incarnation. But surely Easter,

and not the Christmas on which we modern Western Christians focus most of our attention, is

the “fulcrum that balances Christian life.”

Christmas celebrated without the events of Easter overshadowing is too easily

sentimentalized and secularized. A baby in a manger, angels hovering overhead, cattle lowing

nearby—surely this idyllic world needs no redemption. A dechristianized Christmas is the

ultimate Pelagian holiday; for at what other time of the year can we seem so certain that,

merely with good feelings and good will, humanity can save itself? Annually, in fact, newspaper

editorials and television commentators say exactly that, pleading that all the world needs is to

spread Christmas cheer through the year.

But Easter—Easter is on the other side of a cross with nails, of confrontation and beatings

and death, and then, only then, resurrection and new life. Christmas we can too easily teach to

our kids (and ourselves) without blinking, free of strain or discomfort (provided we gloss, as we

usually do, such details as Herod’s slaughter of the innocents). Easter is harder, for it requires

facing death, the shortcomings of the disciples, the bloody lengths God must go to in order to

rescue a confused, hateful world from itself.

All of this is to say we have worried about Christmas too much. Christians in an indifferent

and even hostile society need to learn cultural jujitsu—to sometimes let the culture push at

points where it wants to, and there collapse of its own momentum. This is especially important

in our cultural situation, where resistance is so easily itself turned into a marketable

commodity. T-shirts and bumper stickers proclaiming “Jesus Is the Reason for the Season”

make the message itself into a consumer item.

So let the pagans have Christmas as their most significant holiday. Easter is the central

Christian holiday. And when we are known for our Easter, then we will have our Christmas back.