The Crib and the Cross: The Paradox of Christmas
The spirit of Christmas is alive with paradox. The joy at the birth of the Baby is all the more delightful because it delivers us from evil. The innocence makes us rejoice because it delivers us from guilt. The Babe taken up in the arms of his Mother brings us joy because he takes up arms against the Devil. The smallness of the Child delights us because his smallness defeats the greatness of the World. The joy and laughter help us make sense of the suffering and tears. The levitas lightens and enlightens the gravitas. It was, therefore, not merely for laughs that Chesterton tells us that angels can fly because they take themselves lightly whereas the Devil fell because of the force of his own gravity. With this spark of epigrammatic brilliance, Chesterton makes the crucial connection between humour and humility. Angels and saints can laugh at the Devil, whereas the Devil can only vent his fury at the angels and saints. The Devil takes himself too seriously to get the joke.
We have laughter in our hearts and joy in our souls at Christmastime because the Divine Comedy makes sense of the Infernal Tragedy and is its antidote, dispelling the poison of pride with the humour of humility. It’s all too good not to be true! Or, as Chesterton says, we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds but in the best of all impossible worlds.
If this is so, why are we not walking around with a permanent smile on our faces? Why do we spend so much of our time bemoaning our lot in life and bewailing the state of the world? Why do we ignore the candle and see only the darkness surrounding it? Why doesn’t the joy of Christmas and the laughter on the lips of the Christ Child and the delight in the heart of his Mother keep us in a state of perpetual contentment?
The answer is that Christmas is not enough. Birth is not enough. Being loved, as a baby is loved, is not enough. The Baby is not merely born to live. He is also born to die. Enshrined and enshrouded in his nativity is his mortality. The comedy of birth points to the tragedy of death. To live is to die because to love is to die, the latter being a dying to self for the good of the other. And yet, and here’s another delightful paradox, the refusal to love is a refusal to live. Living and loving are synonymous. Therefore, paradoxically, living and dying are mystically synonymous. Bethlehem points to Golgotha. The Manger points to the Cross.
As we had no choice about being born, so we have no choice about having to die. There are, however, two ways of dying which are shown to us on either side of the Cross of Christ. They are the cross of death on which the good thief hangs, and the cross of death on which the bad thief hangs. Dismas or despair? This is the choice facing all of us, sooner or later. We have no choice but to bear our crosses, but we can choose the way that we bear them. We can bear them resentfully, becoming bitter and twisted by the experience of doing so, or we can bear them on the via dolorosa, which is our life’s journey, to our own particular Mount Doom or Golgotha, which is our own particular death at journey’s end.
It is true that most of us do not choose suffering, but the paradox is that we do not avoid suffering by trying to avoid it. If we choose to cast off the yoke of our own crosses, those given to us, we will only replace them with heavier and worse crosses, which are those we give to ourselves.
The joy of Bethlehem points through purgatorial sorrow to the glory of paradise. This is why the Comedy of Christmas brings laughter, even in this vale of tears and its veil of fears. It sees the life in death, the life after death, and, joy of joys, the Life, born in Bethlehem, that puts an end to Death in the Love-Life of the Resurrection. May the Babe of Bethlehem be praised in the Name and Glory of the Resurrected Christ!
