Thursday, December 23, 2010

Why December 25th?

Why do we celebrate Christmas just a few days after the winter solstice when almost no one thinks that Jesus was born on December 25th?

An important clue lies in the Gospel of Mark.

Mark? You say. The author of Mark didn’t even write about the birth of Jesus.

Exactly: this earliest of the surviving gospels doesn’t mention anything about Jesus’ birth. Sometime after Mark was written, theological questions about the incarnation arose: What does it mean for God to become incarnate?

The authors of Matthew, Luke, and the non-canonical gospel of James each chimed in with DIFFERENT accounts of a miraculous birth of the baby Jesus.  (The author of John went a different way, emphasizing the eternality of Christ (as opposed to the birth of Jesus)—he only refers to the “Word” becoming “flesh.”)

This is to say that the account of the birth of Jesus (i.e. Christmas) is the answer to a theological problem about what the incarnation MEANS. As theological commentary, the placement of Christmas on December 25th is a reference to a familiar theme. It is an allusion to pagan notions because those were the common parlance, tropes, and memes of the day.

Co-opting solstice celebrations is not theft or borrowing, but the use of something familiar to explain something unfamiliar.   

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