On Xmas, Jesus Checked His Privilege

Here we now, as December comes upon us, open another Xmas season, to remind ourselves of the ideals—human and divine—that ought to guide our lives.

Because I am not a Christian, what I might say about the Christian ethos must admit the absence of an insider’s sympathy.  Even so, Mormon that I am, I grew up with the Christian story, thinking of it as my own as much as anyone else’s.  Anyway, if the story of Jesus is not for all humankind, we ought to have boxed it up and stored it long ago.

At the heart of the Jesus story is the god who could, but wouldn’t.  The unfathomable sovereign of creation, goes the tale, came into creation not only as a toothless baby, wailing wordless and simple, but came as a homeless bastard, wriggling himself to sleep in the filth of animals.  When he finally came to own language, the mighty lord of the cosmos, whose very word brought forth galaxies and snuffed them out, told the people who were willing to hang around with a ratty vagabond that divinity and humanity shone more brightly through humility than through majesty.  And, to sharpen the point, the god who could have wasted the planet, would not do it, but died, suffering, miserable, and almost all alone, on a stick, with the spit of the powerful still in his eyes.

You don’t have to believe in god or incarnation to appreciate that story’s message.

There is a resurrection, of course, to renew our hope in a glorious end to a tale that, otherwise, brings us all to tragedy.  But this happy ending does not change god’s capitulation.  Where power almighty might have hurled itself at its recalcitrant creation—if not with justification, then with impunity, anyway—instead, all the strength of all reality’s suns said I will not.

If the Jesus story says anything that matters, it must be first that people with power will get into heaven last, and the loudly religious about it, last of all.  Not even god goes into heaven by privilege.  Surely, the efforts we have made for two thousand years to make the Jesus story excuse our exertion of authority over the powerless are a blasphemy beside which such sins as adultery mean nothing (as the Son of [Wo]Man said so plainly).

But never mind the next life, which makes no difference to this one, and set aside the traditional Christian god who seems less concerned with blasphemy than we mortals are.  The story of Jesus confronts us with the brutal fact that people with power will always abuse it and to the worst extent possible, because they can.  The empowered will, therefore, own this life, to everyone else’s sorrow.

Nevertheless—and Nietzsche’s critique of goodness notwithstanding—the abuse of power, which amounts to the worship of might, makes slaves of the powerful, as Bertrand Russell wrote, to Time and Death, whose greater might they cannot deny.  Freedom, the philosopher argued, in an oh-so-Jesusy-way, comes from surrendering one’s claims on a private happiness—claims that hurt the powerless, who have not the strength to deny you.

“If Power is bad, as it seems to be, let us reject it from our hearts,” wrote Russell, who must be acknowledged as one of the truest Christians the world has known.  Although we can—some of us—with right or impunity, anyway, judge our fellows, push them to the side, shape for them a space away in order to secure our own place, take from them whatever ennobles them, dress them in inferiority, accuse them, rob them, silence them, imprison them, shoot them, and forget them, let us once, at least, this month, follow the Christian god and say, instead, I will not.

It’s the season of giving.  Maybe we don’t need to fret so much over the commercialization of a sacred moment.  Spend money until you’re sick.  Eat until you hate your parents.  Build a shrine of Yule logs and bow down before Santa and Rankin-Bass.  And, then, perhaps, those of us who have some can give up our power.  At the risk of sounding much more maudlin than I am wont: after the xenophobia, homophobia, and racism in which those of us who can have indulged ourselves this past year, we could say no to ourselves this month and make this the best Christmas ever.