The everlasting (?) tension between faith and filth

There is, as you may know, an atheist named Vik in California who thinks that Christmas is just a fairy tale for kids, a fable like Santa Claus and Rudolf. He’s been scorning the story for years, setting up atheistic displays alongside the famous Santa Monica manger, and the city fathers are so intimidated this year that they cancelled Christmas (well, the manger anyway).

Do you realize the FIRST Christmas was produced by an atheist? Birthday No. 1: Jesus. Christmas Memorial No. 1: Herod. NOT fairy-tale stuff, this first-ever Christmas (if you don’t count the actual birth night).

People are singing “Handel’s Messiah,” the happier portrayal of Christmas. How many know there’s another Christmas oratorio by Hector Berlioz: “L’Enfance du Christ”? It’s about infanticide, refugee hardships, near starvation, tyranny, and contempt against Jews. Some Christmas carols also include the blood-stained Christmas that Herod staged.

The “wise men” didn’t follow the shepherds into the stable, or enter Bethlehem the night the angels sang. They could have come a whole year later, perhaps (oh, the irony) hitting town on Jesus’ first birthday. When they didn’t tell Herod the new address of the infant king (a “house” now), Herod went into a homicidal rage and sent centurions into Bethlehem, and they killed every boy under the age of two. (He included children up to the age of two “...just to make sure, you know...”

But... Joseph had a warning dream from God, so the little family caught a “red-eye” flight for Egypt. Berlioz’s oratorio portrays the trip as including near starvation. I don’t see it that way. These “Magi” brought the family some gold. From my experience of being a Christian, and from seeing the timings of God and His provisions in my life... I’m quite sure Joseph suddenly had plenty of cash for the trip.

Back to Herod’s Christmas display in the town’s square: Picture it! Handsome soldiers in polished armor, tossing baby boys into the air and catching them on swords. Mothers screaming. Blood spurting. This is a factual and gruesome part of Christmas, and the Christian church has insisted it be told, too. Prophesied hundreds of years before in Jeremiah, he wrote about the grief of “Rachel... weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.” Was this fulfilled on Jesus’ first birthday? Not unthinkable! Have atheists had displays mocking God from year ONE? Looks like it to me. Ever wonder why they are still at it? What about baby Jesus so infuriates many non-Christians?

Is it because Christmas is about devils, too, and not just angels? About atheism as well as Christianity? It certainly touches on humanity’s biggest issue: God. Dostoevsky put the cynicism of unbelievers into the mouth of Ivan Karamozov: “Belief in God is NOT worth the suffering of even one child.” We are forced by Ivan, by Herod, and by life alone, to deal with the ghastly crud thrown over the Christmas creche... and over history. This is tough stuff to handle. Do atheists feel Christians are too air-headed to ask why God would allow suffering?

 We don’t see starving children? Or hear of sexual trafficking? We don’t know about the monsters hovering around our cradles, pouncing on children... kidnapping and selling them... raping... killing... filling their minds with filth? We don’t see that? “’Joy To The World? The Savior Reigns?’ What on earth does that mean?” asks Fleming Rutledge, Christian and pastor. She’s not alone. We’re not the first to notice this bloody stuff. God faced it all long, long ago and Christ is His answer.

Jesus was born two miles away from Herod’s “Herodium,” right under the nose of this monster. Herod was threatened, like many still are, by this mysterious child who keeps drawing people to Himself. In his paranoia, the atheist Herod had for years challenged any God there might be by his crimes against humanity. He wanted to have the greatest name of Jewish history, not some baby born 30 blocks away. So, on the first Christmas, he again scoffed at any God-idea out there. What mystery of evil motivated him, and the many who are still trying to do that?

Fleming Rutledge (my nudge today) said, “We see in (Jesus’) death on the Cross and in his Resurrection from the dead the source of our conviction ‘... that human judgments are not the last judgments, that human justice is not the last justice, and that the power that humans exercise over one another is not the final power.’” This quote within a quote is from a message by Father Lucic in bombed-out St. Anthony’s Roman Catholic church of Sarajevo during the deepest night of their suffering. The standing-room-only crowd on that Christmas Eve contained Muslims and Jews as well as Catholics.

Christmas shows that we can, paradoxically, hold onto faith and hope, even while being mystified by modern Herods, or still hearing the echoes of children in Hitler’s gas chambers, or seeing mounds of baby skulls in Cambodia. This manger story gives us, on the one hand, gruesome horror, but it also gives us the most hopeful story ever told. Isn’t that quite a stunt?

Christians recite every Sunday that Jesus came once as a baby, yes. But also that He is coming again as an Adult, with a capital “A”. The Christmas carol puts it: “He comes to make his blessings known/ far as the curse is found.” All the Christians’ eggs are in this Christmas basket. Christmas displays the reality of goodness and God on the one hand, and the reality of evil and the devil on the other. The scary question is: Are those two realities always to be in dualistic balance?

I love Rutledge’s conclusion to “Monsters at the Manger” in “The Bible and the New York Times”: “Only a faith forged out of suffering can say with conviction that the angels and monsters will not coexist forever, that Muslims and agnostics and Christians and Jews will be drawn together in ways that we cannot yet imagine, that the agonies of the victims will some day be rectified, and that the unconditional love of God in Jesus Christ will be the Last Word.”

Miles Finch, of Lakeside, is the author of “Somewhere by Chicago.”