This Is War

“The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.”

Jesus Christ

The interior of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem

Any agnostic or atheist whose childhood has known a real Christmas has ever afterwards, whether he likes it or not, an association in his mind between two ideas that most of mankind must regard as remote from each other; the idea of a baby and the idea of unknown strength that sustains the stars.

GK Chesterton, ‘The God in the Cave’

We are all haunted by the mysterious notion that God was once a Baby.

We see it in our love for the small stuff of the world, our veneration of childhood (the ancient world had no such conception), and our strange belief in the holiness of certain places and people.

By the Incarnation, God had sanctified human flesh and the human world. But this was also therefore a declaration of war against much evil, darkness, bitterness and ugliness, for the world's true destiny is glory and beauty.

We do not go too far in saying that in some mysterious way our civilization was born with the Child on Christmas Day. God was no longer outside the world, but in a dark corner of it, and this seed would grow into a broad tree, whose shade and fruit we still enjoy, even as we take an axe to it.

There have always been stories about gods appearing as humans. But this was a different story altogether. The Jews were monotheists. They did not believe in gods. They believed in an eternal, transcendent I AM. At least some of them still did. And for an infinite being to appear in a mother's arms was a twist in their story, as unexpected, and as unwelcome, as the Messiah being killed by the Gentiles on a cross.

GK Chesterton noted that the whole story could be explained by the three sets of visitors to Bethlehem that first Christmas.

1. The Shepherds

For Chesterton, the shepherds represented that healthy and humane paganism which had sustained the world for centuries - belief in household gods, the magic of the seasons, a vague personality shining through all nature... It was this paganism that had triumphed over the demon worshipping, child sacrificing sea-lords of Phoenicia and Carthage in the shape of the Greek-influenced Roman Empire: a paganism that was, however, already withering away.

And what these shepherds saw that night was something that would not overturn that tradition, but rather fulfil it, and purify it:

Yes, the pagans were right that the secret of the world somehow lay in birth and death, in seeds and crops; yes, they were right that gods must be local, that the material world is somehow linked to the divine - but what they could never have foreseen is the fulfillment of these notions in the Creator as a human baby.

In this sense, the old pagans were superior to the philosophers of the age who had increasingly grown sceptical of any notion of truth or goodness. As a star guided them to a dirty old stable, they did not find a young Plato in his Academy, a young politician forming a republic - no, it was "a place of dreams come true" - and "[since] that hour no mythologies have been made in the world." The myths of the local gods had come true - there would be no need of them anymore.

2. The Magi

Chesterton writes of the Wise Men:

That truth that is tradition has wisely remembered them almost as unknown quantities, as mysterious as their mysterious and melodious names; Melchior, Caspar, Balthazar. But there came with them all that world of wisdom that had watched the stars in Chaldea and the sun in Persia; and we shall not be wrong if we see in them the same curiosity that moves all the sages. They would stand for the same human ideal if their names had really been Confucius or Pythagoras or Plato. They were those who sought not tales but the truth of things; and since their thirst for truth was itself a thirst for God, they also have had their reward.

But after all these learned men would have come to learn. They would have come to complete their conceptions with something they had not yet conceived; even to balance their imperfect universe with something they might once have contradicted. Buddha would have come from his impersonal paradise to worship a person. Confucius would have come from his temples of ancestor-worship to worship a child.

The Magi found the personal root of all philosophy: the Great Mind made small enough to hold, to touch, to worship.

3. The Roman Soldiers

We often choose to forget the third, darker force in the old story. Their images don’t fit very well on a Christmas card. They are the Roman soldiers sent to slaughter King Herod’s young rival.

Herod was the half-Jewish puppet king of the Roman empire. And for a brief moment he restored the worship of demons to his land when he sacrificed the infant baby boys - the Holy Innocents - to his fading rule and power.

He killed them hoping to include Jesus in the blood bath. “The demons also, in that first festival of Christmas, feasted after their own fashion.”

But that tradition, of the god-king asking for blood to placate the darkness surrounding his throne, would fade away with the dawn of Christendom. In fact, the animal sacrifices of the Jews would disappear themselves within a few decades, never to return.

4. The Fourth Group of Visitors

But there is also a fourth group of visitors every Christmas - us. Every year, we find ourselves in the shadow of the same story - the story of the Creator as a Baby, clinging to his Mother’s arms. Even subconsciously, to whatever small degree, we take comfort in its subtle implications of the universe as a holy and human place.

“As the strange kings fade into a far country and the mountains resound no more with the feet of the shepherds; and only the night and the cavern lie in fold upon fold over something more human than humanity,” it requires some contemplative effort on our part to look once more beyond our deep and dreamless sleep, into the dark streets of Bethlehem where shineth the Everlasting Light.

That Light still declares War on the Darkness, and the Darkness has neither overcome nor understood it. This Light is our inheritance, if only we pay it homage.