Guest Post by Dr. Scott Masson
It is that time of year when the cultures of Christmas past, Christmas present, and even Christmas future converge upon our family celebrations. While there is always a sense of anticipation at what will come underneath the tree, for Christians the greatest gift of Christmas has already been unwrapped, and its message remains evergreen. The Gospel of Matthew explains that the prophet Isaiah’s words were fulfilled in Jesus’ birth: “Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,” which is translated, “God with us.” (Matt. 1:23)
It was the day Love came down.
I have yet to see the latest installment in the Star Wars series, the futuristic film released this Christmas present. My hope is that its plotline has improved upon Episode one, in which George Lucas revealed that the unfathomable mysteries of the Force lay in a microscopic material cause: Darth Vader’s mother had conceived a son, not by a man, but by the mysterious power of the midi-chlorians that inhabit and flow through all of life.
Most fans were, like me, underwhelmed. It was not simply the time wasted exploring what the audience already knew, that the child of this virgin birth could not be ‘the chosen one’ prophesied of old who would bring harmony to the universe. It was borne of the frustration that a vital element of dramatic necessity had been removed. There was now an irrational cause behind a universe of hope and meaning.
To be fair to Mr. Lucas, conceiving of the mystery of life in a dramatically plausible way is no small task. The poets of old balked at it. And yet like so many of his generation, modern technology has made the path of wonder look so easy, so mundane. Technological advance has fostered the vain narrative of moral and civilizational advance, as if the one entailed the other. Technology has shaped the intellectual habit that in our generation we can reimagine the hopes and fears of all the years. John Lennon expressed it at its easy best, “Imagine there’s no heaven… above us only sky… nothing to live or die for and no religion too.”
While such hopes of earthly paradise are real, it is a saccharine vision of love and peace, and happy endings.
For if above us there is truly only sky, and no transcendent Creator, then it is also true that there is no more meaning to the words of Lennon’s song than in the changes of its chords, which themselves possess no harmony outside a pre-existent universe of meaning where they sound ’right ’. The idea of harmony, after all, does not gibe with a blind confluence of atoms, even when massaged by mysterious forces called natural laws, convenient processes, or even ’the Force’ caused by midi-chlorians.
Such explanations do not produce the kind of world we actually live in; nor do they even appeal to our hopes and fears. They signify nothing. There is nothing to live or die for.
But the dramatic appeal of Star Wars, such as it has, depends on the fact that there is something to live and die for. The characters in it love something good in their universe, and they are willing to fight for it and for those whom they love.
It comes down to love. So what does this have to do with God and Christmas?
“All sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that ‘God is love,’” writes C. S. Lewis, “But they seem not to notice that the words ‘God is love’ have no real meaning unless God contains at least two persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love.”
A long time ago in a Galilee far, far away, the message of Christmas is that the three-personal being of God, whose eternal nature is love, took on flesh and became a man. Out of love for mankind, the Father sent His only Son to become Immanuel, God with us.
And because the God of Love is fully personal, in His very humility in becoming man we are exalted with the dignity of being persons. As technology increasingly empowers our world to diminish and cheapen human life, we should remember that God thought that we were worth living and dying for.
Scott Masson (Ph.D., Durham) is Associate Professor of English Literature at Tyndale University, Toronto, and a Senior Fellow at the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity.
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