By Father Thomas Esposito, O. Cist.
Special to The Texas Catholic
The days are darkest in late December. Our calendar year ends with the briefest appearances of sunlight. The wintry chill that covers so many lands, the leafless trees, and the absence of flowers and plants all provide a hint of death at work in the sleeping earth.
Critics of Christianity have long accused us of baptizing the pagan celebration of the winter solstice by observing Dec. 25 as the birth of Jesus. This charge is launched to discredit Christmas specifically, and the Christian faith broadly, as a familiar pagan story clothed with a new name. Indeed, a mosaic in the necropolis beneath St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome seems to depict Jesus, radiant in a chariot, as Sol Invictus, the sun god making his daily run across the sky.
But there is no need to refute such a claim; it is quite possible that Dec. 25 was strategically selected with the winter solstice in mind. That does not, of course, invalidate Christmas or equate the Christian faith with the beliefs of Stonehenge druids or the Germanic tribes who celebrated Yule. Pagans, after all, searched for light, however dimly it might have shone on them; they desired to understand themselves within a transcendent framework, evident in their selfish deities and fascinating but frightening mythologies.
It is necessary, however, to affirm that Jesus is not an updated Nordic or Syrian or Roman sun god; the Christian claim is that he supplants all such gods and, as the Creator through whom the sun was made, is indeed the true “light bearer” who never sets. He is also the perfection of humanity, embodying “the hopes and fears of all the years” in which human heathens have groped in search of their beginning and end. And the Church, the Body of Christ, is the expert in humanity, whose life and sacraments reveal what we, Jew and Gentile alike, are made from and for: communion, reconciliation, joy, and love. The Church exists because God the Father, who is Father because of the Son, has made us “worthy to share the inheritance of the saints in light” (Col 1:12). We need this light, this hope, precisely at this dusky end of the year; indeed, of the present age, one that ever more darkens our intellects and extinguishes our desires for any pursuit beyond power and pleasure.
It is by this, our faint human light, that we can perceive a joyful and radiant dawn. Paul’s letter to Titus includes a profound framing of the Christmas mystery:
“But when the kindness and generous love of God our savior appeared, not because of any righteous deeds we had done but because of his mercy, he saved us through the bath of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he richly poured out on us through Jesus Christ our savior, so that we might be justified by his grace and become heirs in hope of eternal life” (Ti 3:4-7).
“Generous love” is a loose translation of the Greek “philanthrōpia,” literally, “love of/for humanity;” and the Latin Vulgate renders “philanthrōpia” astoundingly as “humanitas,” “humanity.” In Jesus, the philanthropy and humanity of God our savior have truly appeared; the eternal God, “who dwells in unapproachable light” (1 Tm 6:16), has packaged that light within the bright eyes of a tender child.
And why? The Incarnation unveils God to us in our own flesh; the birth of Jesus allows us to see the infinite luminosity of divine love without blinding us. That the infinite God would abbreviate his eternal Word in Jesus Christ, in our humanity, calling us “out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Pt 2:9), is cause for unspeakable joy. The prophet saw this centuries ago, however darkly, when he gave his people then, and us today, the following hope:
“Your dead shall live; their corpses shall rise! / Awake and sing, you who lie in the dust! / For your dew is a dew of light, / and you cause the land of shades to give birth” (Is 26:19).
Father Thomas Esposito, O. Cist., is a monk at the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Dallas and teaches in the theology department at the University of Dallas.
