As Christmas draws nearer and homes and businesses become more decorated with the symbols of the holiday, I believe it is good for us to pause and reflect on why we do what we do this time of year. Is it simply for traditions’ sake, or is there a more significant meaning?
J.I. Packer wrote, “All Christians are at once beneficiaries and victims of tradition—beneficiaries, who receive nurturing truth and wisdom from God’s faithfulness in past generations; victims, who now take for granted things that need to be questioned, thus treating as divine absolutes patterns of belief and behavior that should be seen as human, provisional, and relative. We are all beneficiaries of good, wise, and sound tradition and victims of poor, unwise, and unsound traditions.”
Last time we learned that the many and varied traditions that we associate with Christmas in America today are from a variety of nations and faith systems and ethnicities, and that some of them have their roots in pagan religions dating back a couple of thousand years. We also learned that the desire of Christians to see pagans as well as their practices redeemed has long been a very real part of the Christian faith and mission. We saw how that was the primary reasoning behind the move to designate December 25th as the birthday of Jesus when no one knew when it really was for sure.
Today we are going to look at some of the traditions that make up the Christmas holiday here in America as well as in most of the First-World industrialized nations. Let’s begin with the Nativity.
The Nativity is the truest and purest representation of what Christmas is to be about – the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. We get our description of the event from Luke 2:1-20, and from Matthew 1:18-2:12.
Most scholars believe that Jesus was born between 6 and 4 BC based on Luke’s timetable and what we know from extra-biblical historical sources. We read in Luke 2:1-2, “Now in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus, that a census be taken of all the inhabited earth. This was the first census taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria.”
We know that Herod died in 4 BC and that, according to Matthew 2:16-23, Herod ordered the death of all male children in Bethlehem up to age two, that Joseph – who had been warned in a dream to take “the Child and His mother and flee to Egypt (2:13)” – now was told in a dream by an angel that those who sought to kill the Child were dead so it was time to return to the land of Israel. So, the birth of Jesus had to be before 4 BC and during the “first census taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria.”
Extra-biblical history tells us that Publius Sulpicius Quirinius was a close advisor and intimate political ally of three of the Caesar’s: Augustus, Tiberius and Caius. Augustus was the ruling Caesar at the time Luke is writing about in our passage for today.
Quirinius, which is translated as Cyrenius in the King James Version, was first the military commander in Syria, and then was made the political leader of Syria. The census referred to in today’s passage in Luke was ordered by Augustus to be conducted in 8 BC, but was not completed until 6 BC. Every fourteen years, by edict of Caesar Augustus, there was a census to be taken of all of the people within the provinces of Roman rule. The second census in Palestine occurred in 6 AD, while Quirinius was the political or civil governor, and is referred to once again by Luke, this time in Acts 5:37.
A great deal is actually known about this man, but suffice it to say that his greatest claim to fame – unbeknownst to him – was that his name will forever be associated with the birth of the Savior.
So, Quirinius is one of the governors (the military one) in Syria, which also had jurisdiction over the region of Judea, and the first census is conducted during that time. Why do you think Luke included such specific information for Theophilus, the man to whom Luke addresses both his gospel and the Book of Acts? Look back at Luke 1:1-4, and you will find that Luke’s goal was to ensure the Theophilus would be able to know “the exact truth” about the things he had been taught about Jesus Christ.
This census being taken when it was, while Augustus Caesar was on the throne and Quirinius was military governor of Syria, was pinpointable to an exact historical event for the people of that day. In our day we do not have the same exact reference point, but we can know the date within a couple of years.
Why do you think God made this date so unclear? Could it perhaps be for the simple reason that He did not want us to get too focused on it? Perhaps He knew that our tendency would be to focus our and grace and mercy at a specific time of year instead of the whole year through and wanted to help us avoid that. What other reasons do you think He might have had?
In any case, the familiar scene we know of as “The Nativity”, with Joseph and Mary and the Baby Jesus and the shepherds and wise men and animals and the manger and all of that, none of that was ever done until the 1223 nativity celebration of St. Francis of Assisi. It was he who staged the first “Nativity Scene,” which was a living nativity with live people and animals.
The word “nativity” simply means, “Birth, especially the place, conditions, or circumstances of being born.” Saint Bonaventure described this first Nativity scene:
“That this might not seem an innovation, he [Saint Francis] sought and obtained license from the supreme pontiff, and they made ready a manger, and bale hay, together with an ox and an ass, he brought unto the place…The man of God [Saint Francis] filled with tender love, stood before the manger, bathed in tears, and overflowing with joy. Solemn masses were celebrated over the manger, Francis the Levite of Christ chanting the Holy Gospel.”
By the end of that century, most of Europe had embraced and begun incorporating the nativity crèche (day nursery) in their Christmas celebrations, either with carved figurines or with a living crèche as at the first.
The evolution of the Nativity went something like this: during the Renaissance period spanning the 14th through the 16th centuries, the Nativity crèche became enhanced with extravagantly landscaped backgrounds and rich pageantry. But by the 17th and 18th centuries the trappings had become so extraordinarily ornate that the spectacle had pretty much eclipsed the spiritual significance of the event.
Through the 19th and 20th centuries things balanced out somewhat until the 1960’s and 1970’s when secular humanism and an anti-Christian bias began attempting to remove Christ from Christmas, especially on “public” property. It seems that the only parts of the public not allowed to use public property are the Christians.
The Christmas nativity is still popular among Christians today and there are still a great many churchyards and private homes that display a wide variety of manger scenes. They have with figures that are large or small, elaborate or simple, brightly colored or simple silhouettes. There are some churches still today that do what are known as “Living Nativity” scenes, just like that very first one created by Saint Francis almost 800 years ago.
What’s the most popular symbol of Christmas these days? The Christmas tree.
Christmas trees are probably the most widespread of the Christmas traditions that we employ today. Each year approximately 25- to 30-million evergreen trees are harvested and sold in the United States alone. This accounts for about one-third of the Christmas trees used in American homes. Artificial trees make up the balance, and about 30-33% of American homes have no Christmas tree at all. The reasons vary.
Where did this idea of cutting down and evergreen tree come from? Some claim that pagans began the practice thousands of years ago. That isn’t really accurate.
During the Roman celebration of the feast of Saturnalia, pagans decorated their homes with boughs clipped from evergreen trees and shrubs. They also decorated living trees with bits of metal and replicas of their God, Bacchus, who was their fertility god. Drunken orgies were a big part of his celebrations. They gave small trees to their friends as New Year’s gifts.
The modern practice comes from Germany. Legend has it that one Christmas Eve in 8th century Germany, the missionary, Saint Boniface, an English monk who organized Germany’s and France’s Churches, stopped a pagan human sacrifice by slamming his fist into the sacrificial sacred oak tree and felling it with that blow; in its place grew a tiny fir, which he said was the Tree of Life representing eternal life in Christ.
Another legend says that Martin Luther, founder of the Reformation, was walking through the woods one clear and cold Christmas Eve when the starlight glimmering through the trees awed him so much that he wanted to recreate the sight for his family; so he cut down a small tree, took it home and put candles in its branches to imitate what he had seen in the forest.
The first modern-day mention of this practice comes from Strasburg, Germany, in 1605. Germans decorated their trees with dolls, sweets, apples and wafers, gold foil, and paper roses. When German immigrants began flooding into America in the 1700’s, they brought the custom of the Christmas tree with them. Once here their decorations became animal cookies, apples, strings of popcorn and brightly colored paper. The Moravians put lighted candles in the branches of their trees and later in their windows as early as 1752.
The Pilgrims and the Puritans who first settled in America banned the pagan practices associated with Christmas. In fact, Christmas wasn’t even permitted to be celebrated until the early 1800’s.
Christmas trees appeared in Philadelphia, Rochester, Richmond, Cambridge, and Cleveland between 1832 and 1851. The first retail Christmas tree lot in the United States was started in 1851 in New York by a man named Mark Carr. In 1856, President Franklin Pierce was the first American President to have a Christmas tree placed in the White House. President Coolidge began the annual National Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony on the White House lawn in 1923.
In 1841, Prince Albert used a Christmas tree at Windsor Castle. The tree was decorated with candles, sweets, fruit and gingerbread as an official symbol of the season and it was used as the backdrop for the family portrait done that year.
By the 1890’s manufacturers were producing ornaments in Germany for American and European trees. By the early part of the twentieth century, after the invention of the electric bulb, community trees began appearing all over North America.
So, with all of this convoluted history, what do the Nativity and the Christmas tree symbolize for us today?
The Nativity symbolizes what it has since its inception: the portrayal of one of the most significant events in human history – the birth of Jesus Christ, Son of God and Savior of mankind.
The Christmas tree symbolizes the Christian faith because its shape points toward Heaven, and its evergreen foliage reminds us of eternal life. The Angel or the star on top remind us, of course, of either the announcement to the shepherds that “a Savior has been born this day in the City of David a savior, who is Christ the Lord”, or of the star that guided the Magi to the birthplace of that same Savior. We’ll speak more of them at another time.
For now, consider this: the evergreen tree and the pine tree grow tall and strong in the forest and withstand the hardships of wind and rain and snow and heat and drought, symbolizing long-suffering, steadfastness and endurance, just like the character of Jesus Himself. The pine and the evergreen have a natural strength in the face of adversity that makes them ideal symbols for all who will become strong through suffering and who will hold fast to their faith and to their promises in spite of every opposition.
They do not die and fade away as other trees do at this time of year, just as Christ did not weaken and grow faint when His life was at its lowest ebb. These evergreens are a living and ever-present physical, tangible reminded to us of the eternal life that Jesus bought for us by His death on the cross and His resurrection from the dead.
As you look upon all of the Christmas trees that you will see this season, look beyond the decorations and lights and gifts beneath them. Look at the simple tree buried beneath and recall the simple carpenter who stayed the course set for Him by Almighty God, through whom we have the greatest gifts of all – grace, mercy, peace, forgiveness, hope, and eternal life with our Lord and our God. Amen!
Let’s pray.
