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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.
(Originally published 12/23/2004)
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1 comment:
Buckley was supposed to be the ultimate conservative, and a staunch Catholic, and yet he seemed to take neither his faith nor his political beliefs seriously. I once heard him dismiss a question about conspiracies with a sneering reference to “the devil theory” — as if, in fact, there were no devil and he played no role in the history of man. A perplexing perspective for a true believer in conservatism or Christianity. If Screwtape is right and the devil’s great accomplishment in the 20th Century was to convince people that he doesn’t exist, what are we to make of commentators such as Buckley who belittled believers in the devil theory?
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