The Christmas story is subversive, so we try to render it safe and saccharine. Contrast the idea of God as some great, all-powerful Being in the sky with the icon of the helpless baby in the manger. The former, many imagine, micro-manages all the details of our lives and the nightly news; the other needs his diaper changed. The Christmas story takes God off his high throne in the firmaments and puts him into a crib, surrounded by animals, wrapped in dirty rags, and in grave danger. The reversal is staggering. The incarnate God enters the world as a baby!
The Baby Jesus is an archetype in evolution's long progression through an unbroken chain of babies. From an evolutionary perspective, there must continue to be babies, and these babies must survive long enough to themselves reproduce. Moreover, human offspring require many years of selfless devotion by adults, as children arrive unfinished, vulnerable, and powerless. Survival and reproduction are paramount, and as such, deeply imprinted in our minds-brains-bodies-cultures.
Life, however, is more than mere survival and reproduction. Jesus puts a question mark over the existence of what we hold most true, good, and beautiful in the human drama. As such, the actual story of Christmas is filled with existential terror. There is nothing kitschy here. God is born the bastard child of Mary into poverty and oppression. Jesus will soon be the only child to survive the great massacre of Bethlehem.
We are also survivors. We are the lucky babies who grew up. We feel a tinge of guilt that we expiate in this season of giving. Looking backward, we see happenstance in our births and in the world. While we got this far, we know our luck won't last forever. Like Jesus, our death is always a certainty from the day we are born.
Still, life is addictive--a series of intermittent rewards with predictable and unpredictable pleasures and pains. We want more. Childlike anticipation overshoots the reality of Christmas morn. The hype leaves us feeling unsatisfied, ready to try again next year. Christmas harnesses our outsized expectations and infinite desires.
We humans display an unreasonable and sometimes wonderful expectation that life should be better than it is, and that we should be better people than we actually are. This spiritual hunger for life lived more abundantly is whence many of us seek and perhaps find God-by-whatever-name.
It turns out, however, that God needs us much more than we need him. Like the baby, God needs us especially in the laboring and the rearing, in bringing forth many instantiations of good, beautiful, and true things in the world. Incarnation is a kind of bottom-up creativity. In order to survive, these daily creations need help along the way. The newly born need peace in the world and good will to all. The angels proclaim - survive, thrive, adapt, evolve!
The Christmas story can be read independently of what one believes about Christianity. It can be read as a story that promotes values and behaviors conducive to survival and reproduction. It does so through complex biocultural evolutionary pathways that now also promote retail sales and endless repetition of seasonal songs in the shopping mall nearest you. Sacred stories may not be true, not in the sense that history and science are true, but they seem always to be profound.
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Rev. Jesse Jackson: The real Christmas story
A Christmas Meditation - Chattering Mind
Bethlehem's Treasure: A Christmas Meditation
Christmas Meditation - campus.udayton.edu campus.udayton.edu
You'll get more of the idea of the meaning of Christmas from watching National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation than you will from reading this article