The Christmas Revolution: Radical Goodness

At this Christmas season, year 2010, I pause to reflect on the stunning significance of the birth of a baby who understood intuitively what many of us have been missing because of materialistic static. Only after years of reading the Bible has my clouded brain begun to understand what Jesus must have discovered by the age of twelve when he discussed Scripture with the teachers in the Jerusalem temple--to their amazement. At the similar age of twelve I was watching flannel graph lessons in Sunday School, taught by Mr. McGee, a barber. (The most profound thing I learned from him was how to knot a neck tie.)


We are not told that preadolescent Jesus impressed the temple teachers with scholarly shoptalk, but rather with his unusual intuitive wisdom and his searching questions. We know from his New Testament teachings that he recognized how the traditional Jewish scriptures were spun out of post-Eden perspectives, and that the unvarnished narratives of human fumblings to understand soul issues were in serious need of more illumination.


I hesitantly admit that I was into my third decade of life before I sensed how jolting is the transition from the Old to the New Testament. I had long been puzzled by how un-Christlike it can be to quote selectively from the Old Testament to support contemporary moral stances, or lack thereof, but the fog began to lift as it occurred to me that Jesus was remolding what the temple teachers were expounding. His insistence on rebirth was a re-casting. The first book of the New Testament--Matthew--strove to provide a segue from the Old by emphasizing how Jesus was a fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. But fulfillment of prophecy is not the same as agreement with inadequate notions. Obviously, for Jesus was executed because his seemingly new message was a threat to the keepers of ethnic messiah expectations.


What I celebrate at Christmas is the arrival of a radicalization that would yank the world out of a post-Eden stupor. Jesus' radically new covenant is well presented in the New Testament, and ironically (if you are up to date) his message is resonating today with many non-Christians, even scientists. God's people are all human beings, and his message is a spirituality that supersedes all catechisms. It is a language of the heart that outranks the brain--thank God.


My prayer for the New Year is that we as Christ-followers do not fall behind in tapping into the jolting insights Jesus gave up his life to inaugurate.