This is the hard part.  The final installment of my evaluation of Christmas is where I must make clear my measure of the Christ event.  Christmas entails more than the new-born infant, the manger scene so beloved by the religious oriented pitchman.  There’s profit in Christmas for the retailer as well as the religious and charitable organizations.  Who does not relish warm fuzzy feelings?  The infant Jesus solicits our sympathy.  Shepherds and wise men bow before him.  And then everyone goes their way and life returns to the tedium of the daily scrum for survival.  You and I well know that is the way it was and is.

Seems to me that Christmas includes the sweep of the entire story.  Baby Jesus becomes a mature adult, living under Roman occupation, –a colonial subject in a backwater country that presented security concerns for the occupying authority.  That is why I wanted to read the entire Gospel of John, as background material that captures the entire arc of the story, from manger to horrific execution for a crime that he did not commit.

What we have done with the originating historical events, the stories about those events, beginning with the synoptic Gospels, and the gospel of John, inclusive of all the stories without number which have been added since—matter more than the originating historical events.  The stories we have told, that we are telling matter most.  Is not the Cathedral at Reims, and Handel’s Messiah both later iterations, each a story in its own right?

This may be a troubling thought to entertain.  What I mean to say is, the stories we have told take precedence over the actual historical events (of which no first hand descriptions were made as far as we know).

Back to John’s text.

The strange and shuddering aspect of John’s story for me is his insistence that the demise of Jesus at the hands of the Roman overlord and his local proxies was a demonstration of Jesus’ unspeakable, ineffable transcendence over the generalized injustice entailed in Roman occupation, religious fanaticism, racism, disease, untimely death, etc.  Jesus in his manner of dying transcends the shit-storm of life as experienced by most of us. He overcomes by showing the impotence of divine help, the notion that there is a supernatural guarantee that “everything is going to work out.”  He shows by embracing the concrete painful minutiae of our individual circumstance, that nothing but love is the way forward, the only mode of action that is its-own-reward.  God is impotent, and love is the unshakable core of what is Real. We are left with no higher power watching over us.

We must not forget that democracies and tyrannies sacrifice lives, even innocent lives all the time, in order to shore up the status quo.  How many still volunteer to dive into the meat grinder of war–to show they are patriots?  But here one who is innocent, indeed one who is counter intuitively kind to outcasts, to the castoffs, is sacrificed for the sake of public order.  So far this is quite ordinary.  The problem comes when you consider that this individual by all accounts has expressed love, as the principle that underlies all that is Real.  He in fact is the ultimate revolutionary–and without a final, triumphant act of miraculous power to liberate himself, he dies as we all must die.  The manner of his death is another endorsement of his message:  The trump card in deck of Reality is not raw power, but love.

That last thought is enough to make one sweat…….

There is no Messianic figure that will or can lift the burden and the responsibility of life which entails suffering.  This cannot happen, and is a dead-end, simply an infantile expectation.  Parenthetically is not every political program, totalitarian or democratic— presented as a Messianic solution, a guarantee of a happy future?  I think so.  Our Democratic-Republican institutions will not save us. Nor will technology save us from what we are doing to Nature.  No Big Other will save us from what we want.

By Jesus lights we ought to look within, to wrestle with our own impediments to expressing a robust and pragmatic love.  A gestalt shift, a shift in our axis-of-being is called for.

Do I think that any of this has legs, or cash value today at the end of 2017?  I do not know.  The message makes sense to me.  I doubt that it makes sense to the majority of my fellow Americans because the “brand” of Christianity has been bastardized into its opposite.  By the lights of Fox News and the Evangelicals, “Christianity” is a full-throated endorsement of the racism, and growing economic injustice of the status quo.  Donald Trump is the Messiah de jure.  These are the Jesus-stories that we are now telling ourselves..

So we are back to square one.  Not unlike colonial subjects living in Nazareth under the rule of Caesar Augustus.