Sunday Devotions: Christmas Continues
Luke 3, Revelation 11
I have a hard time letting go of Christmas. And not just because I’m too lazy to take down our tree in a timely fashion. (We once left it up into February.) I love its tastes and traditions, its songs and scriptures so much that I wish Christianity’s shortest season could linger just a week or two longer.
Not that Epiphany doesn’t offer its own joys, but I think we can move past the “good news of great joy” of Christmas too quickly. As if the promise of “peace on Earth and good will to men” is like our decorations and cookies: utterly appropriate for the season, then out of place the rest of the year; both beautiful and true in the moment, but not all that useful once we return to a joyless reality offering precious little good news.
Oddly, what brought all this to mind this year was a Netflix drama called Black Doves, featuring Keira Knightley as Helen Webb, a politician’s wife who’s actually spying on him for the shadowy titular group. Although it was released in early December and set amid the bustling run-up to Christmas in London, there’s not much peace or good will in Black Doves.
I won’t try to sum up all the machinations from the six episodes produced so far, but suffice it to say that there’s plenty of mayhem and murder. After surviving a bloody showdown at the series’ climax, Helen meets her handler, Reed, during a Christmas Eve service at a historic church. As a choir sings “Once in Royal David’s City,” Reed — an older woman who wraps presents while issuing dire threats over the phone — calmly fills in all the details of the byzantine conspiracies that Helen has only partially understood. It encapsulates a theme of the series: no one — not even the killers who are its heroes and villains, let alone the ordinary people who sometimes get hurt by their battles — understands what’s really going on.
“Gosh, it’s beautiful, isn’t it?”, remarks Reed, as the choir moves on to the carol that is also the title of that episode. “Say what you want about the Christians, but they can write a tune.” It comes off as gently derisive, a snide comment on the words that Reed and Webb have paused to take in:
Our God, heaven cannot hold Him
Nor earth sustain,
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When He comes to reign…
Indeed, “In the Bleak Midwinter” is the title of that episode. But Reed would have you believe that the forces of bleakness have actually prevailed, that the beauty of Christmas is a pretty unreality that we should be embarrassed to display for too long or to take too seriously when there’s money to be made and schemes to be hatched — at least until we reach our inevitable, likely violent end.
It’s a seductive vision, appealing to the world-wearied parts of our souls that want to conclude that there is no truth, only power — no hope, only disillusionment. “One day you'll realize that the world is not run how you think it is,” the corrupt prime minister tells Helen’s idealistic husband. “You'll come to find out, quite quickly actually, that almost nothing that you believed in is what it appears to be.”
He’s right, but not in the way he thinks. The enduring message of Christmas — which can’t be boxed away like our artificial tree or filed away like my cookie recipes — is that the world is no longer governed in the way that such people think it is. Life is no longer the zero-sum game of calculation and manipulation that he believes it to be.
Ordinarily, I’m irritated when the lectionary edits out part of a passage. But I think it’s actually appropriate that today we skip past the following verses in Luke’s account of Jesus’ baptism: “Herod the ruler, who had been rebuked by [John the Baptist] because of Herodias, his brother’s wife, and because of all the evil things that Herod had done, added to them all by shutting up John in prison” (Luke 3:19-20). For while Herod will eventually do even worse to John, it makes no difference: “one more powerful than” both John and Herod is already coming (v 16), the beloved Son of God (v 22), whose wheat-and-chaff-separating judgment will bring justice (v 17).
We may have put away the unreal beauty of Christmas for another year. But don’t be fooled: the power in which the Herods of any age believe has no hold on us in this or any year of our Lord Jesus Christ. For, in the words of a scripture famously set to another of those lovely tunes Christians are so good at: “The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign forever and ever” (Rev 11:15, KJV).
Next week’s lectionary readings: Psalm 36:5-10; Isaiah 62:1-5; John 2:1-11; 1 Corinthians 12:1-11.