What Christmas Really Is

What is Christmas, anyway? A blowout with all the trimmings? A riot of color and sentiment to decorate the otherwise drab year? A sham and fraud perpetrated upon mankind?

In Japan, where it is widely observed, Christmas has become almost altogether a thing of toys and tinsel, of songs and selling, stolidly secular in conception and appeal. In that educationally and industrially advanced nation, few people are shocked, apparently, when a Tokyo night club bills a striptease to the accompaniment of “Silent Night, Holy Night.”

For Western tastes, this is carrying matters a bit far. It smacks of the “Black Mass” intended to lampoon and desecrate the holy. The mere suggestion that the sacred song of Christmas could be associated with one of the lowest forms of entertainment jars our Western sensibilities. Why?

Yes, why? Where did the Japanese, with little or no Christian tradition of their own, pick up the idea of a completely secular Christmas, observed with no regard for its origins and with no particular interest in its religious significance? Yes, where?

Japanese businessmen know a good thing when they see it. Their penchant for imitating, and occasionally improving upon, the products of the West received recognition in a post-World War II British cartoon, depicting two executives of an English pottery firm engaged in puzzled examination of a letter, while one of them remarked: “Here is a gentleman from Japan who wants one of everything in our line.”

The flamboyant Christmas of Japan, however, did not come from England. It is a typically American product our friends across the Pacific borrowed along with the optical instruments, electronics, toys, textiles, pottery, and automobiles of the West. What they saw they took, adding a few embellishments of their own: a national holiday built upon legends and fairy tales: the Christ-child taking his place alongside Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, “Silent Night” and “O Come, All Ye Faithful” blared forth together with “Deck the Halls” and “White Christmas.”

Is this really Christmas in America? On the supposition that it is, the suggestion has been made, at least half seriously, that Christians abjure Christmas altogether, turning it over in entirety to the hucksters. Appearing to be in the finest Christian tradition of self-abnegation—and probably offered in that spirit, the proposal smacks of the dog-in-the-manger attitude popular among some Christians today, usually expressed with a shrug of the shoulders implying that nothing can be done in response to a hopeless situation except to abandon the field.

The real story of Christmas needs to be told. Catching the world with its head in the clouds or, as it more often does, down in the dumps, Christmas proclaims what our world desperately needs to hear and to take to heart!

It is a true story, confronting the unvarnished facts of life with the plain facts of history. The people of the Christmas story are real: Caesar Augustus, Cyrenius, Mary, Joseph, and, of course, the Child.

The news had come by angel messenger to a young Jewish virgin in the distant and somewhat despised north country that she was to be the mother of the world’s Redeemer. The announcement was not easy to take. Used to keeping her thoughts to herself, Mary must have wondered about the man to whom she was engaged to be married. What would he think?

Going off quietly to visit her cousin in the hill country of Judea, she took those months to think it all through for herself. There the whole plan became plain, as it would unfold, with the birth first of John and then of Jesus.

When it came time for the Child to be born, another event intervened to complicate the situation. What appears to have been the first general census of its kind in the entire Roman Empire was carried out at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, requiring a journey to the ancestral home in Bethlehem at this most inopportune time. Taxes cannot wait, for the world must go on.

The Most High is wakeful while the world sleeps. His government is at work, while people all unknowingly become part of a grand design that they probably would knowingly refuse to accept.

In the unlikeliest town and at the unlikeliest spot in that town, the Baby was born. Only shepherds heard the music of angelic choruses sweeping the skies. Only they came to worship.

In the jungle of international politics complicated by domestic conflict, where a rattlesnake sense of justice permits well-intentioned people to condone the killing of young children attending Sunday school, there is still God.

The Good News Of Christmas

God has come and is even now with us. Having appeared unexpectedly and decisively in his Son, he still comes with the good news of the Saviour though “the many” do not anticipate his coming. There is still God. “Fear not,” said the angel: “fear not, for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.”

God has come. This is the good news of Christmas! This is hard reality from which there is no escape. Who would want to escape from it?

Yes, who? Who turns away from the good and gracious God to follow his own self-chosen path? Who sees himself in a mirror and straightway goes his own way, forgetting what manner of man he really is? Who hears the Word of God, offering forgiveness of sin, life, and salvation to all in Christ the Saviour, but sees no necessity for taking it personally to heart? Who turns Christmas into a secular festival, good for merchants and for children?

God has not just come and gone. He is with us in Christ Emmanuel—himself God with us. He is with us, such as we are, in all his grace and glory, as Martin Luther said in Thesis 62 of his 95 Theses: “The true treasure of the Church is the Gospel of God’s grace and glory.” Who gratefully proclaims the good news of the grace of God, come to dwell with men in his own Son, our Lord Jesus Christ?

Without a good and gracious God, there is no hope for our world. The Apostle talks in the same breath of those who are without God and those who are without hope in the world.

A hopeless world without God is ceaselessly searching for a God who is no God at all, one who will be and will do what the world wants him to be and do—a kind of universal bellhop. The situation is similar to that of the girl who had jilted her faithful suitor because he was poor. Very unexpectedly he received a letter from her pleading for reconciliation and concluding with the words: “I love you very much.” There was a postscript: “Congratulations on the fifty thousand dollars you just inherited from your grandfather.”

The world does not really want what God has to give. As a matter of fact, it does not even want to know him as he is. The world just wants to get from God what it wants.

A World In Confusion

Having a distorted view of the Almighty, the world has a twisted conception of morality, of the standards by which it may be expected to live. Excuses are the order of the day, like that of a woman charged with forgery who naïvely pleaded innocent: “I’m not guilty; I burned the money.” Competition justifies almost anything. A book entitled How to Win at Golf needed only one word inside its cover: “Cheat!” Cruelty and hatred have a field day in a world aptly described by the little verse:

In a day of illusions

And utter confusions

Upon our delusions

We base our conclusions.

Among all the illusions, delusions, and confusions of our work-a-day world, Christmas happened. Not a pleasant little fairy tale, it was all dreadfully real: the mighty, incomprehensible, all-powerful Ancient of Days coming into the world, a helpless, homeless, hapless Baby.

God must be accepted as he came—heaven’s majesty clothed in earth’s humility: “You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that you through his poverty might be rich” (2 Cor. 8:9).

Christian faith rests its claim not on the splendor of its history nor even upon the brilliance of its theology, but on this quiet scene with a mother holding her Child and the angels talking to the shepherds. When the Church has done its best, still we must stand before a manger, lost in wonder and praise at the mystery of the Incarnation—God made manifest in the flesh.

Fear not! He is with us, mighty to save. Having met the last enemy, which is death, he is with us. The Bearer of our nature has passed from death to life, along with all who follow him in true faith; and the good news of Christmas is caroled by good and honest hearts:

O holy Child of Bethlehem,

Descend on us, we pray;

Cast out our sin and enter in,

Be born in us today.

We hear the Christmas angels

The great glad tidings tell;

Oh, come to us, abide with us,

Our Lord Emmanuel.

Dr. Oswald C. J. Hoffmann, a Lutheran (Missouri Synod) clergyman, is the preacher on the “International Lutheran Hour,” which is the most widely heard radio program in the world. The most recent of his books is Life Crucified. Dr. Hoffmann supervised the production of the films Martin Luther and Question Seven.

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