HOPE: THE MEANING OF CHRISTMAS

    There is a lot of sinning going on in this world of ours, a lot of it, too much of it: wars, genocide, massive poverty and disease, the horrible AIDS pandemic, to name only a few. Sometimes it almost seems overwhelming. Sometimes it seems as if there is no hope and no way out. What is worse, so much of this can be stopped, can be prevented, if we only had the will. We have the means. We simply do not seem to have the will.

    It is depressing. It is also tempting to fix the blame. When we do, what we discover is that the blame is not generic but specific. Sin may be quite generic but it is committed by a specific person upon another specific person. Each sin is some particular person’s fault. We have been taught to hate the sin but not the sinner, which almost begs the question of how then can we address the sin if we cannot address the sinner?

    C. S. Lewis in his Mere Christianity: “For a long time I used to think this is a silly, straw-splitting distinction: How could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life – namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There has never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact, the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.

    “Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is in any way possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.”

    In spite of the horrible sins that are being committed every day, there has to be hope. Is that not what Christmas is all about? The world has always been a mess. That is what human sinfulness does: it makes a mess of everything and everyone. The world is so messed up that we are tempted to throw up our hands and simply give up. So it is a good thing that God did not give up on us. God sent his son to remind us that we can eliminate sin and suffering if we only have the will. Lion and lamb can lie down together if we want to find the way.

    Of course, the way has already been laid out for us: Jesus’ way, the way of the cross. That way means saying “no” to personal selfishness and “no” to those who would use others for their own pleasure and gain. It means saying “yes” to living with less so that others will at least have some. Christmas reminds us that in spite of it all, there is hope: the bad that there is does not have to be. If we want to and with God’s promised grace, we can end all wars and feed the hungry and clothe the naked and cure disease (Matthew 25!); we can make the world better, one person at a time, starting with ourselves.

    May we all have a Blessed and Hopeful and, perhaps, a Little-Disconcerting Christmas!                           WJP