Away With the Manger!

Holiday Reflections of a Christian Who Almost Hates Christmas

He doesn't even cry. There's a clue. "Away in a manger the sweet baby wakes; the little Lord Jesus no crying He makes." No wonder women especially received Him with hosannas as the long-awaited Lord of Glory. Everyone should have such an agreeable boy child! The Nativity narratives satisfy pretty much everyone: from haute bourgeois art lovers to homeless folk, unwed mothers, anxious dads, lovers of animals, even astrologers. They don't satisfy me, however, because in this culture they sweeten and sugarcoat a revolutionary message. Even the way heavenly portents are sugarcoated is problematic. Yes, peace on earth and divine goodwill to all persons of peace--but it's a peace with justice that is intended.

If it weren't for the buried justice message, I might be for chucking the whole thing. But the peace-with-justice angle seems to me worth clinging to and elaborating. Both Matthew and Luke give us a hint of that part. Matthew has the Star in the East bringing Mesopotamian magi to Bethlehem, while Luke has the skies ablaze with Heavenly Host proclaiming Gloria in excelcis deo! Both writers mean to create an anti-imperial counterpoint to the apotheosis of Caesar Augustus. Everybody in that early Roman imperial time understood that major astral portents accompanied the birth of Somebody Important. And everybody in Rome-immiserated Palestine also have understood the need for some powerful astral countersignifying, because while the Emperor Augustus brought a kind of peace it was hardly a peace with justice. So the portents invented by Matthew and Luke are plainly meant to suggest that this little baby boy will became the kind of peace-with-justice troublemaker that Jesus of Nazareth actually turned out to be.

Almost no American preachers will be taking the peace-with-justice angle in this year's Christmas sermons, however. There are two reasons for this. First, the Roman Empire ended up co-opting an insurgent Christianity in the early 4th century (a very long story--you might want to Google "Constantine" or ""James Carroll") so that Western Christianity itself became a mainly empire-affirming creed. Second, today's American preachers all live under a Roman-modeled American Empire and thus tend to accept its premises and pretenses with little or no dissent. In Bush's America it takes a gutsy preacher indeed to evoke the original context of oppressive empire for the birth of a messiah: literally, one who comes to rule in righteousness.

Everything spoken from our pulpits this year, as every year, is likely to be about stillness, beauty, heavenly joy descending, and (of course) a peaceable kingdom signified by the beasts that have gathered in a stable lowly, creating what would have been welcome animal heat for a very young unwed mom, the embarrassed father, and her haloed and hallowed baby boy. Only a cur would find want to take away the pleasures of these texts, images, and traditions.

Let me be that cur for just a moment. I don't think ethical Christianity would suffer greatly if the fairytale birth narratives were done away with. They are, after all, what grammarians would call "back-formations": stories added to round out the life of Jesus by people writing 60 to 100 years after his highly public death. The earliest gospel--Mark--omits any birth narrative and begins instead with a radical young rabbi embracing the outcasts. That is the major message, after all.

I do like Christmas music. I do like the posada tradition, I like the shepherds, the Three Kings, even those lowly beasts. All of it notwithstanding, I say away with the manger if it keeps people from growing up and seeing the grown-up Jesus in mortal conflict with Imperial Authority.

(And by the way, does anyone even know what a manger is? I do, but that's another story.)