On The Third Day Of Christmas

In comparison to Holy Week–Palm Sunday, Good Friday and Easter–the commercialization of Christmas is easy to understand. It is a season filled with palatable symbols: a star in the darkness, a baby, a manger, a chorus of angels. It is a time of romance, of fireplaces and gifts, of dinner and wine and wassail and roasting chestnuts. It is a time of hope and even nostalgia, where peace on earth and good will toward men is most keenly felt in blessed assurances and gentle salutations. It is a season of beginnings, of birth and rebirth, of flocks of sheep and how a little child shall lead them.

It is easy to celebrate giving, sharing, getting. It is easy to pour forth money in celebration of the earth's rounding the corner of solstice, of humanity's hope for a better and brighter world, of the portents of spring. For the winter solstice, at least for much of the living earth, is in truth the first harbinger of spring, even of summer. Who doesn't want to celebrate the grand abundance the universe so generally offers her children? Who doesn't love the gifts of life symbolized in evergreen and lengthening days; in the stars mirrored in every drifting snowflake?

To Christendom, these glorious Twelve Days are a blessed, hallowed time, culminating, as they do, in the great Epiphany of Christ to the gentiles, those who heretofore had moved about in darkness. But to Christians attentive to the Faith, all this hoopla and pageantry, all this decking of halls is so much futility; it is just mere paganism and fertility cults wrapped in ribbon and mistletoe, if Christ is not Christ, if Easter is not Easter, if death is not overcome.

That is why Holy Week is so much more difficult to commercialize: It is too difficult to package the bloodied Christ heaving through the streets of sorrow; the scorned and rejected baby in the manger, his swaddling clothes shredded by thorns and whips, his ravaged body gulping bloody air, the sand of Jerusalem abrading his every wound. It is too difficult to sell toys around an arrest and a scourging; it is too difficult to herald like so many angels the coming of that Death which must come for life to be granted in abundance. No angels gather, no carollers either, on the trash heap upon which Christ's blood drains outside the most desirable neighborhoods. There is no star over the cross, no nebula over the tomb. There is just the quiet cry of a God forsaken before mocking crowds, with the message splashing from a pierced Savior that each of us must finally die alone.

Indeed it is too much to commercialize the mortality of God; and it is too morbid to remind ourselves of the mortality of men. A God whose goodness is honored with brutality penetrates too deep beneath the deceptions we tell ourselves that if we are just "good enough" no bad "shall ever on us befall." Christmas songs and sundry other charms tell us that we will be rewarded by a rotund saint who "knows whether [we've] been bad or good, so be good for goodness' sake." We better not pout, better not cry. For pouting and crying are too much like Good Friday.

But just as it is too much to remind ourselves about the death of that Christmas baby, it is too much for even the greediest capitalist to exploit Easter's scandalous empty tomb. For the Easter story is all too rational, for Christ is either alive or he is dead. It is too if-then, lacking all the poetic imagery of Christmas angels and Advent wreaths. It is too clinical, with rigor mortis warmed and gravecloths emptied by the power of Hope. It is too scientific, with physics defied as stones roll about seemingly of their own accord (or they do not). Where is the little baby and the little lamb and the sweet little star of Christmas that we so adore? Alas, they are but quaint knick-knacks compared to the one awful act of God: He refused to stay dead to our schemes.

It is easy to be a Christmas person, even a Christmas Christian, enamored of beginnings and the pageant encircling the opening of a great drama. But it is hard to be an Easter Christian, reminded of the ending, the falling and rending of the curtain, the ending which we do not, and cannot, control. Christmas might indeed be the news that "God is with us", but Easter is the story of God without us, and of our own deprivation; and of the triumphant news that He cannot be destroyed. In short, Easter is about us pushing against that stone, digging in our heels, straining to keep God dead.

But His message remains: "I am still here, looking for you. Now what?"

Peace on Earth to Men of Good Will,

Contratimes

©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.