Solidarity: the meaning of Christmas

Emmanuel. God with us. That is the meaning of Christmas. Jesus was born to show us God’s solidarity with us. Specifically, he was born in a manger to show God’s solidarity with people who are born in mangers. Why was it necessary for Jesus to come to Earth? Christian theologians tend to answer this question in the abstract, saying something like humanity had been created in the image of God, but God’s image has been corrupted by sin, so God needed to become human in Jesus to restore this image. But when we read the account of Jesus’ life in the four gospels, there is a very specific way in which Jesus restored the image of God to humanity. And it starts with him taking the form of a helpless baby in need of our solidarity. God’s strategy for restoring his image among humanity is to put himself in need of our solidarity so that we will extend the same solidarity to all who share the same need as the divinely helpless manger baby. The image of God is restored among humanity when all of humanity from shepherds to kings kneel in homage to the world’s manger babies.

Thomas Merton writes about God’s strategy of invoking our solidarity through Jesus’ birth in his book Raids on the Unspeakable:

Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because He cannot be at home in it, because He is out of place in it, and yet He must be in it, His place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in the world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst… It is in these that He hides Himself, for whom there is no room. [72-73]

Jesus shows us God’s true nature by taking his place “with those others for whom there is no room,” this group the apostle Paul called “the despised ones” (1 Cor 1:28), whom Jon Sobrino describes as “the pueblo crucificado,” those who don’t just sin like everybody else does but who are deemed categorically sinful by the religious insiders. As we read through the gospels about Jesus’ deeds, interrupting worship in the synagogue to heal on the Sabbath, eating and drinking with unclean tax collectors, praising a prostitute for showing greater hospitality than the host of a dinner party, what we learn is that the way to honor God is not to build barbed wire fences around his table so that nothing impure will enter into his presence, but to get our hands dirty loving and welcoming people whom the world has deemed unclean.

It never ceases to amaze me how so many Christians completely miss the point of Jesus’ message. God is not invested in maintaining an abstract order that somehow “honors” His “holiness.” He is way less interested in whether we “tithe [our] mint, dill, and cummin” than in whether we “have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith” (Matthew 23:23). As Micah 6:8 says: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” The reason we worship God and eschew idols is not because God is emotionally needy and egotistical, but because worshiping God is the only way we can be made just and merciful and humble for other people. If that sounds too “humanist” to you, that’s because God is the ultimate humanist. He proves it through Jesus’ birth.

Who are the people in our world that “do not belong,” who are “discredited” and “denied the status of persons”? Those are the people to whom the manger baby calls us to show our solidarity. Christmas is their triumph and vindication.