Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
Christ’s incarnation is the fulcrum of human history. Yeshua bar Yoseph’s life, ministry, crucifixion, death, and resurrection is the turning point away from a hopeless human existence ending in meaningless entropy towards a way of life with genuine hope.
Jesus of Nazareth, an obscure carpenter and itinerant preacher from a backwater province of the early Roman Empire, opened the way for all people everywhere to reconcile with God the Father, creator of heaven and Earth, of all that is seen and unseen. His messiahship transformed the scope of what is possible for each and every one of us.
Even if I were not a terribly flawed Christian believer, as a historian I would be compelled to recognize that the effects of this man’s life transcend the legacy of every other man. Christianity is and always has been at the heart of our shared Western Civilization. From its birth in the Dark Ages following the fall of the Western Roman Empire through the present day, faith in Christ was and remains the mote of dust around which the West’s distinct civilization coheres.
The West redefined its inherited Classical according to the Christian notions that all human beings are made in God’s image, all governments are accountable to God, and love is our highest virtue and best destiny. The West then became the world’s first worldwide civilization and its first industrial civilization, effectively conquering the entire planet before World War I.
The West remains the Earth’s default human society, linking it through commerce, communications, and international institutions. It is the West that developed human rights, built republics, cured Polio, went to and from the Moon, forged the Green Revolution, and still offers unprecedented opportunities to the people of the world for freedom and prosperity.
Christ is at the center of all of this. Christians insist that all human life has value, not just the great, heroic, storied men of the Iliad and Plutarch’s Lives. Christ cared for poor and forgotten men, for women, for children, for slaves. All of these children of God could be saved, and all of them mattered.
This universality of human value made peace and prosperity within a stable and decent civil society possible. We human beings are ends as well as means. The Christian West has been ever more fully implementing this universality for two millennia.
Jesus’ fulcrum existence began when the infinite and eternal re-entered creation within the limited form of a finite human being. The transcendent God that crafted everything in existence became, in a mysterious fashion, merely one portion of this reality. Illimitable divinity was born of woman, lived in a specific circumstance of time and place, knew pain, hunger, and even doubt; “Father, Father, why have you forsaken me!”
The omnipotent would know weakness. The omniscient would know uncertainty. The omnipresent would know limits. Most importantly, the immortal would know death. All of this because God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten son to die for our sins, so that we might have eternal life.
Jesus did not come as a conquering warlord, an all-powerful ruler who commanded Empires. In His time, He was nobody that anyone was ever compelled to listen to. His followers were undistinguished by birth or special training or talents. He promised no easy life, no charmed existence without travail. He offered that people take up a cross as he did. He offered division,
separation, strife, and seemingly endless conflict with the non-Christian world.
When he died, his followers could fit inside a single room. Yet, today, no part of the world has not heard the name and story of Christ. Christianity, along with Buddhism and Islam, is one of the world’s three largest religious faiths.
It remains the fastest growing. When St. Paul determined that converts would not need to become Jewish by being circumcised and keeping Kosher, Christianity exploded across the Greco-Roman world. This evangelical expansion continues apace.
Whether you like Jesus or not, agree with Christianity’s many denominations or not, Christ’s message has resonated through humanity for two thousand years like few others.
All of this began in a Bethlehem manger with a fourteen year old mother who was pregnant before being married. Alone in a strange town, Mary and Joseph experienced the fear and hope that characterizes new parenthood. The hope of the world was a helpless infant. Utter strength began in abject weakness.
Without Christ, life is nothing but an anarchic struggle by the most desperate and aggressive among us for totalitarian power. Without Jesus, none of our pain and sacrifice means a thing, because everyone inevitably dies.
Everything wrought by human hands and human willpower is an exercise in futility. We are reduced to being wannabee godlings struggling amongst ourselves for the meaningless illusions of power, stability, security, and control. Without the hope of Heaven, our existence becomes Hell.
That is what Christmas means to me, a hope for something better both within this life and beyond. I hope to live in genuine gratitude for the hope God offers, from the sure and true basis of His loving grace. I hope for a life that has meaning and is worth living. That hope, to me, is the greatest Christmas present of all!
