Christmas in the Present Tense

A memory from childhood: I am five years old and helping my mother make Christmas cookies. She is doing most of the work, mixing and rolling out the dough. I am wielding the cookie cutter. As I do so, I sing, "Joy to the world, the Lord has come."

"No," my mother says. "That's not right. The words are `the Lord is come,' not `the Lord has come.'" I am puzzled. Isn't Christmas about something that happened a long time ago? Why "is come" and not "has come"? Why the present tense?

Christmas is certainly about the past. We remember and celebrate the birth of Jesus some 2,000 years ago. We hear the stories of Mary's virginal conception and Joseph's puzzlement, their journey to Bethlehem where Jesus is born in a stable, the angels singing in the night sky to the shepherds, the special star guiding the wise men to the place of Jesus' birth, and King Herod's slaughter of infants in and near Bethlehem in his effort to destroy the one born as a rival king.

But to focus on the past is to miss the central meaning of Christmas. In the decades since that long-ago conversation with my mother, I have begun to appreciate Christmas in the present tense. Advent and Christmas, I now realize, are about the coming of Christ in the present.

Sometimes we find ourselves focusing on whether Jesus' birth stories are historically factual. Was Jesus really born of a virgin? Was there really a special astronomical phenomenon at the time of his birth? Did wise men bearing gifts really come to the place of his birth?

For some Christians, whether or not these stories are factually accurate is crucial. In their minds, the stakes are high: the truth of the Bible and the divinity of Jesus. But this debate puts the emphasis in the wrong place. For the truth of these stories is not dependent on their historical accuracy. Rather, these stories are "poetry plus, and not science minus," to echo a Swedish proverb. As "poetry plus," they use the language of poetry, and yet they are more than poetry in that they also make a truth claim. At the same time, the language of these stories is not inferior to the language of factuality because it says more than such language can.

As such, they speak to us in the present, using archetypal symbols that address our deepest needs and longings. They speak of the human condition and its remedy, both then and now, for us as individuals and societies.

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