What have we gotten ourselves into? Am I really a follower of the Lord of Christmastide? Christmas is rarely associated with baptism. Yet there is a sense in which the Nativity is properly seen as the Son’s initiation, even before his encounter with John at the Jordan. As such, our gathering at the babe’s crib should rightly be filled with unease. Perhaps I am just growing old, but this year more than ever, Bethlehem has made me tremble.
I attended a range of services these past weeks, Episcopal and Catholic. Despite the differences in affect and word, song and sermon, I heard a common message, summed up in the Collect of the Incarnation: God becomes a human being so that we might become God. “Grant, we pray, that we may share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.” Whether in Athanasius, Leo, or Luther, the theme is lodged in the deepest tradition of the church.
The more I think about the message, though, the more it makes me shudder. To be sure, that God should take my nature, and thereby that I should be lifted into his, is a marvelous promise, at least in a grand and general way. But what does participation mean? The tenor of this year’s Christmastide was aimed at mostly moral and emotional ends: to be “like God” — as God has come to us in Jesus — is to do good, and to do so without fear of consequence. To work for and receive peace in a violent world. To dwell, in this fearless turning toward the good, in the ultimately triumphant current of love. In the face of Ukraine or the Middle East, polarized politics, climate disaster: Love wins. Peace is within our grasp.
Christmas preachers on the Marvelous Exchange are consistent here: to be lifted in God’s life is happy. It must, in the end and in the face of tough events, involve a profound satisfaction, marked by an infinitely joyous love. If true — and it is — it is also true that we have little sense, in our human frame, of what divine peace or joy — the great grail of our yearning hearts — may really feel like. Our hymnal cautions us here: “the peace of God, it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod.” The words come from the last verse of “They Cast Their Nets in Galilee.” We learn “it is no peace,” according to the hymn, from the first apostles who follow their Lord: St. John dies “homeless,” St. Peter is “crucified,” “head down.” Jesus promises peace, a gift that “filled” the heart “brimful,” but “broke it” too. The hymn ends by encouraging us to “pray for but one thing, the marvelous peace of God.” Pray, desire, grasp after it. It is marvelous, however, because it is, as God’s, not at all what you think. Marvel greatly at how the Lord offers his peace in a strange fashion, “not of this world” (John 14:27). To those who clamber to the edge of the manger, he says, “You do not know what you are asking” (Matt. 20:22).
All the sermons and prayers I heard at this year’s celebrations stressed the special need for peace at this time, as if 2024 were somehow worse than other years of other centuries. “They Cast Their Nets in Galilee” was written by William Alexander Percy (the novelist Walker Percy was his cousin/adopted son, orphaned by his mother’s suicide at a young age). For Percy, God’s peace seems to have been a realm of astounding encounter and upheaval. He had been a soldier in World War I and began his literary career with poems from those horrible years.
There is one from which phrases of his famous hymn seem to be echoes: “We knew the trumpet call of life; / We knew the call was not / to victory but strife. / … Yet we who fought, yea, we / Who died, out on the bloody sod, / We know beyond all doubt / In us there was a god. / Strong Spirit, who hast wrought / A fighting world for men, / Take us; like men we fought” (“Night Off Gallipoli,” 1920)
We are used to thinking of the World War I as the Great Disillusionment, its vast fields of pointless slaughter the occasion when an embarrassed God finally crept off the stage of Western civilization. There is some truth to this as a cultural judgment. But we also forget how, for many young men, the war was a uniquely profound struggle with what were, inarticulately, the most important matters of their existence. Hence, in a real way, the war was thrilling, in even a religious sense. Percy, in his still-admired memoir, Lanterns on the Levee (1941), explained: “To each man battle was horrible and innocent, despicable and divine, torture but so austere and exalted that it invested the lowliest rumpled, unshaven participant with a fierce dignity, an arrogant worth. Although you felt like a son-of-a-bitch, you knew you were a son of God. A battle is something you dread intolerably and for which you have always been homesick.”
Homesick for violence; though a violence that somehow draws out into full-throated expression the self’s God-given vitality. Perhaps there is a little of such a thrill, now divinely costumed, coming onto the world’s scene in the Nativity; it would take an intricate analysis to decipher it, something the season rarely supports, though it should.
Our festal calendars inevitably decouple events in the life of our Lord from their coherent place within his larger destiny. Over time, our repeated traversing of the liturgical year may embed that coherence within our hearts. So we hope. The hush, singularly penetrating light and voices of transcendent angels, the sense of wonder and delight that the Nativity, especially in Luke’s telling, expresses is, however, pregnant with a future. It is a future, we quickly learn, in which the child is the occasion of tremendous upheaval and sorrow, especially to those who love him most: “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against; (Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also,) that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed” (Luke 2:34-35). The sword is wielded over the course of the next three decades, from slaughtered innocents and their weeping mothers to the buffeting and finally deadly application of tools of torture by soldiers on the body of this Christmas child’s brief adulthood.
God became man, we say rightly. Yet the God we could become as a result is just and only just the “God who became man.” Not, certainly, the God who did not became man, or for a moment played with human likeness but then gave it up for better things. This God whom we become, whatever Jesus promises, is still the God who becomes Jesus; the God who goes to the place of wielded swords and worse. It is a disturbing thing to realize that the strong Spirit, striding through and falling within the folds of Flanders Field and Gallipoli, has just there set in motion the thrill of our lives and their endings. And that there, he bids us come to find our peace.
The mystery of Christmas totters on this precipice of distress. Nor should we imagine that no one noticed this before modern doubts were let loose from their cages by the winds of modern war. The most influential Gnostic of the West, Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), deliberately traced the edges of these themes — occasionally taking them head-on — and thereby, in his legacy at least, bequeathing Europe and then America with Krishna-like temptations. If God is to create at all, to move out from the unbounded and untethered mystery of the great Beyond Being that is God, then there can only be some great act of violence that takes place within the heart of God. “God against God,” as Boehme famously wrote. Human history follows this creative struggle, as a long tragedy of human willing against human willing, aimed finally at the death of all willing altogether and thus the return of peace. In such a universe, Jesus arrives in violence, and carries in his train the violent end to violence, a final hush after all the dust has settled.
Boehme the alchemist turned all this into a set of manipulable principles meant to fuel an incredible journey back into primordial stillness. Its metaphysically arcane details have made the fantasy a modern mainstay in the pharmacy of spiritual elixirs. The Boehmian Christmas is not all wrong, however. For the fact that we should, in Jesus, “become divine” is a far more troubling prospect, in purely Christian terms, than is Boehme’s science-fiction saga.
“God against God” fits orthodoxy better than it does Gnosticism: he who was without sin “becoming sin” (2 Cor. 5:21); he who was equal to God but emptied himself, becoming an obedient “slave” to death (Phil. 2:2-8); “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (Matt. 27:46). God against God, diving into the broken wreckage of history and bearing the sins of humankind that are spread across time and are even now still carefully being gathered into today’s ticking minutes.
The great 19th-century American reformed theologian William Shedd cautiously handled this strange reality when he called the Incarnation a “transaction in the depths of the Trinity” that “cost the infinite and adorable Trinity an effort, a sacrifice that is inconceivable and unutterable.” Shedd’s romanticism allowed him to insist on a God beyond emotion, but only in the sense that divine implacability did not so much exclude as contain and surpass the distraught and ultimately paltry affections of roiled human creatures. To call Christmas the inauguration of divine suffering is perhaps a category mistake; but that is only because the category of human suffering cannot comprehend the abyssal extent and form of its referent.
“I repent and grieve that I made humankind” (Gen. 6:6). So says God in the face of Adam’s first progeny. From the start, as it were. God then, in deluge and flood, both kills and renews those over whom he grieves. The story hovers over the rest of the Bible. For what becomes of this initial divine regret, infinite in scope and focus, yet, as we believe, now condensed into the flesh of the Messiah and borne into heaven through the very acts of resurrection and ascension? Pointing to this long trajectory, the incarnate Jesus urges us: “Come, follow me.” And if he indicates a destination, it cannot lie outside the “inconceivable” and the “unutterable” black hole of God’s redeeming heart, but only within its furthest corners. Thus, in the Marvelous Exchange of Christmas, Paul writes of the opportunity now given to “share” the sufferings of Christ and to become “conformable unto his death” (Phil. 3:10). And Paul eagerly runs after this goal, plunging into the furthest of divine participations, by “making up what is lacking” in his Lord’s “afflictions” (Col. 1:24). The promise of baptism.
“Become like me,” the child quietly hums in the stable. Should I not be made uneasy here? Soberly terrified? Terrifyingly thrilled? And just for that, clothe myself anew and swim (John 21:7), submerged and thrashing out toward a shore where now he stands, through waters he first entered and now holds fast (Rom. 6:3; 1 Pet. 3:21), in a darkness, as says the Lord, the Prince of Peace, that is like “swaddling clothes” (Job 38:8-10)?
The Rev. Ephraim Radner, PhD is Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology at Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto. The author of over a dozen books, Dr. Radner was previously rector of the Episcopal Church of the Ascension, Pueblo, Colorado. His range of pastoral experience includes Burundi, where he worked as a missionary, Haiti, inner-city Cleveland, and Connecticut.