Or is Christmas is a strange time to ask this particular question? Far too deep for a time which is essentially for children, with a bit of family fun and consumerism thrown into the mix? But Christmas is also a strange, ambivalent time, and I think that ambivalence itself leads us into asking the question.
On the one hand, a lot of us find ourselves preoccupied by of all the noise of Christmas: songs on repeat in the supermarkets, pressure to spend, and spend, to consume and consume, the pressure to have the most perfect Christmas ever. To perform “happy families” for just one day of the year. All the while knowing that the pressure of these powerful, but hazy, expectations works to undermine our best intentions.
On the other hand, a lot of people experience the shadow side of Christmas, afflicted by loneliness, missing family members, financial problems or a million other things, leding to ample opportunities for at least sadness, or even for shame, guilt, and resentment.
We put a lot of loading on Christmas, for all that the decline of church-going suggests that we live in a post-Christian world. All those strong emotions and expectations and grief and loss and everything else that makes up for the complex, ambivalent festival of Christmas points to something, some sense of disconnection, something missing, some sense of malaise at the heart of our society.
This ambivalence gives us a sense of the Bad News. Which is actually a good thing, because you need to know what the Bad News is in order to understand the Good News, all the more when this astonishing declaration of Good News to all people is delivered by an entire choir of the terrifyingly brightly shining, and surprisingly musical, messengers sent by the creator and upholder of all things.
Every age seems to have its own particular anxiety, its own particular gnawing sense that all is not right with the world. For us, in our little secular, worried, but still rich, corner of the world, a phrase which I think sums it up well is the meaning crisis.
Hence the question I started off with: What is the meaning of life? And what might Christmas have to say about it?
Our ancestors – probably like the majority of people in the world now – lived in a universe where everything was connected. A new star in the sky or a comet – that pointed to some great even unfolding on earth. We can see that happening in the story of the Wise Men from East who followed a star to see the great marvel it was pointing to. But it wasn’t just in Biblical times – in historical terms it was really quite recently that people stopped thinking that way.
Even now when the sky glows a threatening red colour, or the moon looms unusually large, a little part of me shudders and wonders whether it means something.
It is hard for us modern secular people to imagine our way into the mindset of peop le who felt that everything was connected like that. That they were part of a universal web of being, that the universe was not just a random collection of atoms or vibrating strings creating sub-atomic particles or whatever. That the universe was something much more like a work of art, or like a very complex sentence, spoken by something unimaginably powerful and ancient. That things meant something.
Of course, that might well be a very oppressive place to live. What if the gods control the fates of humans, and make us dance to their tune? If everything is a gigantic system of the world, then are we not just cogs in a vast machine? And if the universe really has “a place for everything, and everything in its place”, then are we not trapped? Like the verse of “All Things Bright and Beautiful” which we don’t sing anymore which goes “the rich man in his castle / the poor man at his gate / God made them high and lowly / and ordered their estate.”
Our early spiritual ancestors seem to have felt this very strongly. You can imagine that a slave in the Roman Empire would have felt very trapped by fate and overshadowed by the inevitability of death. For them, Jesus came as the great liberator, who freed them from fate and the fear of death and adopted them as children of the great creator of all things.
We are in a different situation to a slave in the Roman Empire, less trapped in our place, healthier and much less likely to succumb to sudden death through illness or misfortune.
Our problem, it seems to me, is that instead of living in a universe where everything is connected to everything else, a universe that is like a work of art or a play, a universe that is attempting to say something, we live in a universe of atoms which just bounce off one another like a more or less infinite supply of billiard balls.
In the universe we inhabit, humans are increasingly like solitary atoms bouncing off one another, stripped of agency by the digital world we inhabit, increasingly lonely – in fact, in Australia, almost one in three Australians feel lonely.
You can see this at work in the way our folk-religion picture of Jesus’ birth reflects the deep individualism of our world. We imagine them as being lucky to find space in a cowshed in a field, and Mary giving birth with only Joseph to help, sheltered from the snow, but not much else.
But the key to understanding the meaning of life by way of the Christmas story begins with looking at the actual story. In fact, Jesus was born into a thick web of community. He wasn’t born in cow-shed, but in an integral, if not very high status, room in a house probably belonging to one of Joseph’s many relatives in the town. And far from being all alone, there is no way that the women of the town would allow a young mother to give birth unattended.
So I said I was going to answer the big question of “what is the meaning of life” by talking about Christmas, and I am indeed going to. But maybe that isn’t the best way of framing the question. It makes it sounds as though there might be an answer, which could be conveyed in words, or perhaps in a mathematical formula.
But I don’t think that’s a very good way to think of it. After all, what possible sentence could there be which would fill this deep existential void which each of us carries around? Words are all very well in their way – and obviously, here I am, preaching a sermon, so I don’t want to dismiss them altogether. But I don’t think that the meaning crisis can be solved by words alone, no matter how well chosen.
We think of meaning as a private thing – a revelation which suddenly occurs to us while standing at the top of a mountain, gazing thoughtfully at the passing clouds. Something unique and special and just for us.
I think there is something to that – each of us has a unique subjectivity, and our own personal need for transformation which requires a particular word from God.
But what we see beginning at Christmas is not Jesus learning to “tell his own truth” or to “be true to himself.”
Rather, there is an actual, objective meaning to Jesus’ birth. That’s the point of the choir of angels. They aren’t just putting on a son et lumiere spectacular for the sake of it. They are trying to convey what the birth of Jesus means. Not just what it means to Mary and Joseph, not just what it means to Jesus himself, but what it means full stop.
What God means by it.
And what God means by it is that God in God’s own self has come to us. That is what the name Emmanuel means: God-with-us.
Jesus’ birth is the key to unlocking the universe. It tells us that, far from being a meaningless collection of billiard balls bouncing off one another, or 1 dimensional strings vibrating in some inconceivable sub-atomic way, or just one damn thing after another. It tells us that the ancients were right: The universe is more like a painting, more like a play. It is a giant web of meaning.
And we know this because God in Godself comes to us, born in humble circumstances, spending a life in teaching and healing, being put to death by the imperial and religious authorities, being raised back to life by God on the third day, and ascending to sit at God’s right hand, God invites us into participation with Godself. Not the slavery to fate which our ancestors rightly feared, and not the meaningless, random motion of atomised selves which we suspect.
This participation that God calls us into is not just a matter of individuals and their attitudes, but of being called into communities which strive to reflect Jesus’ way of being in the world. Which answers a question which I ask myself occasionally: why does becoming a Christian mean having to have dinner with me every Tuesday night for the rest of your lives? Because Christianity is a religion not only of inner transformation, but of community formation.
Jesus, born in the manger, comes into our lives even now, to forgive, heal, and transform. God calls each one of us by name, speaks a word into each of our subjective selves, and joins us into the biggest story of all, told by God Godself.