Christmas Story Retold

Celebration! No word is singularly simpler than what fiesta-loving Filipinos have attached to Christmas.

We grew up looking forward to this festive season, the longest in the world, when we put aside thoughts of war, crime and natural disaster to indulge ourselves in this prolonged suspension of reality.

Like other Filipinos raising children in Japan, my wife and I are hard put to re-create the "Christmas air." For someone literally born to the merry-making frenzy in December, I have come to associate this season with colors, sights, sounds and tastes that are so native I cannot even describe them to my children.

"What's so special about Christmas," my children ask, expressing a new level of awareness this year.

Stumped, I pause to give a thoughtful answer. As a child, I probably never had to ask the question. Overwhelmed by the surrounding visual stimulus, I imagine myself never having been jolted to ask for the essence behind the trappings.

Seizing the chance to winnow the grain from the chaff, I begin with the Bible story familiar to them, "Christmas is all about remembering the birth of the child Jesus. It is a bit like celebrating Dad's birthday, which we did on the 1st of December, except that Jesus' birthday is a lot more important.

"You see, Jesus was born in a special way, not in the same manner you and I were born. Every human being is born from a father and mother.

"But Jesus was conceived through the power of the Holy Spirit and was born through Mary who was not even a mother then.

"Do you remember anybody else who was born in a special way? Who did not have a father and mother? Who was created as a handmade of God?"

My 10-year old girl raises her hand, and with a twinkle in her eyes, replies, "Adam."

"Of course we all know the story of Adam and Eve. He was created in the image and likeness of God, but displeased God by eating the forbidden fruit. Thereafter, all children born from Adam and Eve have committed sin and displeased God. Probably frustrated by how badly human beings turned against Him, God tried to start all over again by giving his blessings to Jacob, marking his children and their children as His chosen people. But even God's chosen people repeatedly turned against Him."

I suddenly realize that I am now taking the liberty to connect in one thread my children's Sunday school lessons to define Christmas for them, which until now has only meant a big party.

"God was saddened by the sins of men. He could not see His own image in the bad things men do. In His great power, be brought forth His only Son, the baby Jesus, into this world to show us what God's perfect likeness is. Jesus never turned against the Father, always following Him."

That is probably all that my children can comprehend, and perhaps only very vaguely. But what's more important is what I, fumbling for the essence of this celebration, have come to understand myself.

Our Christian faith is dominated by the gruesome image of the crucifixion, which fulfilled Jesus' redemptive role and which was validated by his resurrection.

Children recoil at this theology, but easily snuggle up to the Christmas story. Unfortunately, we find little in the Christmas story to expound on Jesus' divinity, except the supernatural event of a star brightly guiding the wise men. That is perhaps why Christmas is given importance in our faith more for the celebratory importance of a newborn child than for the historic significance of God's intervention, consistent with His actions from the Old Testament, to reconcile with His wayward creation.

I am glad that my children have asked and forced me to distill the essence of Jesus' birth for me.

Jesus' birth was special because he was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, but was also very ordinary because he was born biologically to a mother like any human being, nay in a far more dismally ordinary setting.

Being both human and divine, he embodies the end towards which God had intended man when He created him in His own image and likeness, but which man had always fallen short of. His divinity reveals the forgiving nature of God while his humanity points to the possibility of man's transcendence of his biological finitude.

Jesus' redemptive work did not begin at Calvary but at the manger: His birth is itself God's gift of reconciliation with man.

The power of the Holy Spirit that enabled His conception also points to the possibility in every human being, allowing that power to work within him, to become a new creation, a spiritual newborn, reflecting the likeness of His Creator. *