“Truly He taught us to love one another; His law is Love, and His gospel is Peace; Chains shall he break, for the slave is our brother, And in his name, all oppression shall cease.”
Christmas is my favorite time of the year, and it is also one of my favorite holidays. The reason for this is simple. Christmas is the time of the year, were 2.5 billion Christians around the world come together to celebrate a story that changed the world as we know it. In Christian theology, there is an apocalyptic expectation that makes our faith one of visions and hope. Popular movies and sensationalized theologies have taken the true meaning of the word apocalypse and have turned it into a fire and brimstone expectation. However, the truth of the matter is that when it comes to the birth of Christ, that event itself is one with an apocalyptic reality, a break in history, which is the true meaning of the word.
In the theological imagination of the Gospel writers, the birth of Christ signifies a shift in human consciousness. The story of Jesus’s birth is one that turns the world upside down and sets the tone for the next 2000 years. In this story, the fullness of Love, the Vision of God for humanity, is born not in the grandeur of a lavish palace. Love came into the world in the womb of an unwed mother, in a stable next to the animals of the field, and alongside those who at that time, and today, are viewed as “the least of these.” In the time of oppressive Empires and Kingdoms, a new king and a new kingdom came into the world, not to oppress, but to liberate the world from the self-destructive loops of the human condition. For Christ, through Jesus, is the reflection of the fullness of God’s Love, which exist inside us all.
It is that messianic hope that makes “Oh Holy Night” my favorite Christmas song, for the words that are written on top, speaks to the reality that in Jesus, the Universe itself, the fullness of the indescribable One, became meshed into the fullness of our humanity. So even if you see the story of Christmas as a work of fiction from the prophetic imaginations of the Gospel writers. The fact that the story of Christ’s birth still resonates with a quarter of the world’s population, and serves as an inspiration to all of those who are oppressed by the Empires of our time, that reality speaks to the larger “Truth” that exist in the human prophetic imagination. For whether the story of Christmas literally happened or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that Christmas is a time for people to come together with family and friends, share in the joy of gift-giving, and celebrate the story of a child, whose life, death, and spiritual resurrection, changed the world then and continues to serve as an example of what a fully awakened human looks like.
So this Christmas, let us embrace the fullness of the prophetic imagination of the Gospel writers, and strive to make 2020 the year that we reflect the fullness of Christ inside us all so that the realities of the Kingdom of God can become a reality for all creation.
Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas
Harold Marrero
Pastor for No Reservations Group Miami
