An Incarnational Christmas
Here's to a Merry Christmas.
Welcome back to The Burnett Breakdown. I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving and is having a wonderful Advent season. Only 5 more days to Christmas! I think everyone in your life would appreciate a link to The Burnett Breakdown as a Christmas present, at no cost to you - the perfect gift.
The Incarnation
When talking about the Christmas season, there is obviously no other place to start than the event in which the entire season is founded upon and the most significant event in world history: the incarnation. In the incarnation, the Word of God took on the flesh of human nature to save humans from death.
In “On the Incarnation of the Word” - probably the most significant writing on the incarnation outside of the Bible - St. Athanasius wrote:
“Thus, taking a body like our own, because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, He surrendered His body to death instead of all, and offered it to the Father. This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because, having fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men. This He did that He might turn again to incorruption men who had turned back to corruption, and make them alive through death by the appropriation of His body and by the grace of His resurrection. Thus He would make death to disappear from them as utterly as straw from fire.
Now, I think most churches make it clear that the death in which Christ saves us from is not just a physical death but a kind of spiritual death. We will still physically die and our soul will depart from our body even after the incarnation and death of Jesus.
But, I think one of the most important aspects of this salvation from death that many Christians miss is that our bodies will one day be resurrected. Our souls will be reunited with our bodies and we will once again live soul and body together in a perfected condition.
Christianity does not just put an important emphasis on the immaterial, spiritual world but the material world as well. This is in stark contrast with the heresy of Gnosticism, predominant during the time of the early church, which made the claim that the material world was created by an inferior being and therefore was evil. Christianity teaches that everything which exists, material and immaterial, was created by an inherently good God, meaning the material world is also good.
The consequence of sin shattered the goodness of both the material and immaterial world leading Jesus to come to redeem both. Paul makes this clear in Romans 6:5; 12-13 when he writes:
“For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his… let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourself to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.”
A stark separation of “spiritual” and “material” as if they are opposed is not an accurate reflection of reality. In fact, Paul in Chapter 12 of Romans writes that our “spiritual worship” is “to present [y]our bodies as a living sacrifice.” Our spiritual reality and our material reality, while distinct entities, are intrinsically linked.
The Rub
There’s a rub in all of this though. That is that God is a spirit and not a material being. This means that when sin ruptured everything, our disordered souls led to disordered desires (to be clear, sin is the real “rub” not that God is a spirit). Chief among these disordered desires was the elevation of that which is created (the material world) over the Creator (God who is a spirit) as Romans 1 says. Whether it is the Israelites forming material items into idols or our modern secular, materialist culture, the fallen human condition is constantly elevating the material world to an improper place.
The consequence of this is the dishonoring of our bodies as we use them to fulfill our disordered passions in all sorts of creative ways. We begin to use the material world in a self-centered, consumption-driven way, rather than as the means by which we were designed to love God. This is the condition from which God came to rescue us.
In the incarnation, Jesus took on flesh, the material world, to meet us where we were. Because our attention was already turned toward the material world, he came to us in that way.
Here is St. Athanasius again explaining this:
Men had turned from the contemplation of God above, and were looking for him in the opposite direction, down among created things and things of sense. The Savior of us all, the Word of God, in His great love took to Himself a body and moved as Man among men, meeting their senses, so to speak, halfway. He became Himself an object for the senses, so that those who were seeking God in sensible things might apprehend the Father through the works which He, the Word of God, did in the body. Human and human minded as men were, therefore, to whichever side they looked in the sensible world they found themselves taught the truth.
Rather than denigrate the material world and demand that humans look beyond it, God embodied it (literally) in the person of Jesus so that we would know him through it.
A Material Christmas
I know this is certainly a more theologically dense newsletter than most, but there is a point with all of this that I want to make. Too often, Christians, in order to emphasize the “real reason for the season,” will denigrate the material things of the season. My point in all of this is to say that this denigration is not necessary; rather, we can use the material things of the season as windows to God.
We can really appreciate and enjoy the time we spend with family recognizing that God created us to enjoy communion with others and that it is good. We can really appreciate and enjoy the food we eat recognizing that God created us with physical taste buds to enjoy flavors when He could have made food bland. We can enjoy the Christmas decorations, Christmas movies, Christmas music, and other Christmas traditions, because in light of the incarnation, they aren’t frivolous material things.
Because of sin, we can certainly use all of these things in ways that are frivolous or even as idols, but that is because of our own misaligned desires, not because of the things themselves. Failure to make this distinction will result in a puritanical removing of all things not deemed sufficiently “focused” on Christ.
It is certainly true that there are many people who do not recognize the spiritual significance of Christmas, but I think there is wisdom for us here in how we can use all of the Christmas season things that the world celebrates as a means to evangelize it.
The reality is that Christmas still captures a lot of attention in America, evident by the Christmas decorations and commercials showing up before Thanksgiving. For a long time, I just wrote this off as American commercialism seeking to profit off of a holiday that really belonged to the church. I’m sure this is true of many corporations and people in them, but I don’t think taking away the “corporate” nature of Christmas would result in people prioritizing Jesus. Instead, they would simply never think of Him.
Corporations can even make money off Christmas because it still holds a significant place in American culture. It garners a lot of attention. Rather than shunning this attention, this is my long-winded exhortation to embrace it with everything in light of the joy of the incarnation. As Jesus came not to shun the material world, we can give gifts, bake cookies, decorate our homes, watch Christmas movies, build gingerbread homes, come together as families etc. all oriented towards Christ with an eye towards being the hands and feet of Christ to our neighbors.
God Bless and Merry Christmas,
Hunter Burnett