Christmas can be a glorious time! The glittering lights and beautiful music, the story of the shining star and the glorias of the angels make it a time when all our senses are overwhelmed with beauty and magical joy.
In the midst of all that, sometimes it might be difficult to remember that we are celebrating an actual birth, not just the start of an era of human history which now runs longer than 2,000 years. It takes some doing, but if we can contemplate the Christ child being born in the equivalent of a garage, while his parents were out of town on urgent business, we might be able to get in touch with his humanity a little bit. Why is this important?
To see Jesus as a human being, one who struggled with the world just as we do, is a very healthy thing. As theologians have pointed out for centuries, Jesus redeems us because he is one of us. We are pretty used to making an effort to be especially aware of Jesus' humanity during Lent as we contemplate his Passion and death. Knowing that he faced the horror of physical and psychological pain, and the stark and brutal loneliness of death, makes Christ a fellow traveler who understands and shares our own pain.
But are we as accustomed to seeing Jesus' humanity at the beginning of his life, at his birth? Probably not, yet the opportunity is there. The birth celebrations of Christmas are followed in many traditions with a consciousness of a new start to our lives at the new year, a clean slate in which we can write new and wonderful things. As the calendar changes, we feel we have a second chance; we can right what has been wrong. This tradition of New Year's resolutions provides a moment for us to look at how this child Jesus, who has newly joined us on the earth, does something remarkable through his life: He teaches us how to be human.
Jesus teaches us to be human by facing the very questions of the world that we face. Even in the span of 2,000 years, to be human has changed very little; it is a high-wire act, a difficult undertaking which provides us as many failures as it does triumphs.
The first thing that we must note is that in becoming human Jesus took on existence, he left the realm of heaven, where he had existed always as part of the Trinity and came to be Emmanuel, "God with us." What are the timeless human questions that Jesus faced?
For this we need to go further than psychology, and we are lucky to have the guidance of the great theologian Paul Tillich. Tillich, who was writing in the 1960s, had the benefit of studying the best of psychology before adding a deeper layer, a layer of human existence that became visible to him with Jesus as guide.
What questions did the world begin to ask of Jesus, and also asks of us? Tillich tells us that very early in our existence we face the question of how to be an individual or a member of a community. The tyrants of history and the destructive mobs are extreme examples of this question gone wrong.
In Jesus we see a perfect balance of being both. We see Jesus as a strong individual standing up in his very home Synagogue in Nazareth and proclaiming the arriving kingdom of God while even his family opposed him. Jesus was inner-directed, he knew who he was, and he knew when the community's priorities needed to be questioned and challenged. "The Sabbath," he reminded them, "was made for persons, not persons for the Sabbath."
Yet Jesus balanced this individuality with a very strong sense of community. He did not go about preaching alone, but always with his disciples around him. One gets a sense that their presence and their questions were an important part of the lessons that Jesus taught. Jesus thought so much of community that he wanted to make certain no one was excluded, not the tax collector, not the Samaritan, not the women. Community for Jesus stretched from the elders in the Temple who taught him the Jewish traditions, to the lilies of the field who were dressed regally by God.
Individuality or community? If we answer this question of existence too much from either side of the equation we will lose our balance, we will become oppressed or oppressor. Jesus unified these, so that these two sensibilities helped each other; the individual worked prophetically for the good of the community, and the community supported the individual.
Tillich identified a second question: Will we be most interested in the rules or in the changes? In the form of something or in its dynamism? If we look at Jesus, we once more see him confronting this issue.
The form of something is that which gives our environment coherence. In Jesus' world form came from the Jewish tradition, from the rules that had been handed down generation after generation, from the boundaries that defined the way his world functioned. Yet, at the same time, Jesus was very aware of the need for dynamism, he knew that something static and unchanging was dead. Perhaps some of the leaders were happy with the status quo, with the great inequality between rich and poor in his time, with accommodating themselves to their Roman rulers as long as they were left alone. This did not sit right with Jesus. From the earliest moments in his public ministry, we see him questioning, challenging, asking for change and repentance.
Yes, form --- the rules, the traditions --- are important to give life continuity and direction, but, they need to be questioned always, they need to be addressed to see if they continue to bear fruit, to deliver on the promises they make and if they don't --- they need to change. Jesus put this question of rigidity vs. change at the service of a better world, of the building of the Reign of God; both the old and the new would be welcomed by Jesus in the measure in which they glorified God.
Finally, Tillich identified a third question that goes to the very heart of this time of renewal for the church and for our lives, the question of destiny or freedom. Destiny is the sum of everything that has shaped us, molded us, affected us and our world; destiny is all that which seems as if it cannot change, as if it will never change. Freedom is the opposite, it is that radical autonomy God gave us to be free to decide how we live and who we are.
How do we see this tension between destiny and freedom playing out in Jesus? If we read the accounts of the birth of Jesus, the prophecies, the witnesses of the angels and shepherds, his destiny seems very well defined. He is the promised one, the Messiah, he has come to liberate his people. Yet Jesus, like us, is free to choose to live this life or not. He is unsure of what he is to do at the wedding in Cana when he tells his mother his time has not yet come. We can imagine him often disappointed with his disciples and their inability to understand what he was trying to tell them.
His destiny of Messiah, which seemed so palpable during his triumphant entry into Jerusalem, disappeared when the authorities turned on him. Jesus in his freedom chose a new destiny. At Gethsemane, the star of Bethlehem was a distant memory, and in its stead in front of him was a cup of suffering which he wanted gone. When he embraced it in freedom, when he chose to die in faithfulness to the Father who had sent him, Jesus fulfilled his destiny. All that had happened before had prepared him for both, the life he was to live and also the deep sense of freedom he had to take upon himself in order to choose God over a safe, yet meaningless life.
Individuality vs. community, rules vs. change, destiny vs. freedom. In coming to be one of us, Jesus took on these most fundamental of human questions; he struggled with them, he lived through them, and he showed us how we can live through them, too. May the slate of the New Year on which we write our lives have as its very first line the name of our brother who taught us how to live, Jesus the Christ. I wish you a very blessed New Year. Cecilia González-Andrieu writes from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.
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