Griffin Internet Syndicate, 12/23/2004 —
As always in our time, Christmas is provoking dissent from people who don’t
want Christian symbols on public property or Christmas carols sung in public
schools.
Many Christians find this annoying and churlish. Some even feel
that Christianity is being persecuted.
The columnist Michelle Malkin writes, “We are under attack by
Secularist Grinches Gone Wild.” Pat Buchanan goes so far as to speak of “hate
crimes” against Christians.
I disagree. In some parts of the world, from Sudan to China,
Christians really are being persecuted, even murdered. But what is going on in
America’s symbolic opposition to Christianity is something different.
Sometimes I think the anti-Christian forces take Christ more
seriously than most nominal Christians do. The Western world, including many of
those who consider themselves Christians, has turned Christmas into a bland
holiday of mere niceness. If you don’t get into the spirit, you’re likely to be
called a Scrooge.
The natural reaction to Christ is to reject him. He said so. In
fact, when he was taken to the Temple as an infant, St. Simeon prophesied that
he would be a center of contention. Later he predicted his own death and told
his followers they must expect persecution too.
His bitterest enemies weren’t atheists; they were the most
religious men of his age, the Pharisees, who considered his claims blasphemous
— as, by their lights, they were.
Nice? That’s hardly the word for Jesus. He performed miracles of
love and mercy, but he also warned of eternal damnation, attacked and insulted
the Pharisees, and could rebuke even people who adored him in words that can
only make us cringe.
To many, he was a threat. He still is. We honor him more by
acknowledging his explosive presence than by making him a mere symbol of nice
manners. At every step of his ministry, he made enemies and brought his
crucifixion closer. People weren’t crucified for being nice.
The negative witnesses
Some people think you can take Christ’s “teachings” and ignore
his miracles as if they were fables. But this is to confuse the Sermon on the
Mount with the Democratic Party platform. Chief among his teachings was his
claim to be God’s son: “I and the Father are one.” “Nobody comes to the Father
except through me.”
His teachings are inseparable from his miracles; in fact, his
teachings themselves are miraculous. Nobody had ever made such claims before,
enraging pious Pharisees and baffling his pious disciples at the same time.
After feeding thousands with the miraculous loaves and fishes, he announced
that he himself was “the bread of life.” Unless you ate his flesh and drank his
blood, he warned, you have no life in you.
This amazing teaching was too much. It cost him many of his
disciples on the spot. He didn’t try to coax them back by explaining that he
was only speaking figuratively, because he wasn’t. He was foretelling the Last
Supper.
At virtually every step of his ministry, Christ accompanied his
words with miracles. And the remarkable thing is that his enemies disputed the
words rather than the miracles. Of the wonders he performed, there was no
doubt; they attracted, and were witnessed by, large crowds. It was their
meaning that was controversial.
The blind saw, the deaf heard, cripples walked, lepers were healed.
Where did he get the power to do these things? From God or the devil? He used
them to certify his power to forgive sins, the claim his critics — enemies,
rather — first found outrageous.
His claims still reverberate. The Gospels attest the total coherence
of his mission, the perfect harmony between his words and his deeds, even the
careful order of his progressive self-disclosure. His modern enemies, many of
them professed Christians, don’t try to disprove the miracles; they simply
assume he never performed them. And now some of them assume he never spoke many
of the words the Gospels record him as saying.
This skeptical attack floors me. The poet Tennyson remarked that
Christ’s greatest miracle was his personality. Could anyone else — the four
simple authors of the Gospels, for example — have made him up, and put such
resonant words in his mouth? “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words
will not pass away.” That’s another claim that seems to be holding up pretty
well.
Such a strong, indeed unique, personality could only meet strong
— and unique — resistance. This is why Christians shouldn’t resent the natural
resistance of those who refuse to celebrate his birth. In their way, those
people are his witnesses too.
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This article is contained in the Sobran anthology, Subtracting Christianity: Essay on American Culture and Society,
published by FGF Books, which is available to be shipped to you in time for
Christmas.
