Christmas is upon us.
Every year for quite some time now conservatives have gone on about the left’s “war” on Christmas. This year is no exception.
Admittedly, more so than at any other time in our past, and courtesy of the recent rise of Faucianity, it is in 2020, under the pretext of combatting “The Virus,” that Christianity’s enemies have come closer than they ever have before to canceling Christmas.
Still, one would think that Christmas would be the least offensive of holidays to the anti-Christs, for the dominant Christ-image associated with Christmas is that of the Babe in the manger. In other words, it is this image of Jesus more so than that of any other that seems to have been all but designed to assuage and even bolster the sensibilities of our Politically Correct Age.
The Baby qua baby, like all babies, is innocent, non-threatening, without judgment, and, well, babyish.
Babies are also the neediest, the weakest, and the most vulnerable among those this side of their mothers’ wombs. The satisfaction of their physical needs is contingent upon the attention of those wiser and stronger than themselves. So too, though, do babies exist to be controlled by those with more power and authority, but power and authority that is only supposed to be utilized for the purpose of protecting children, both from the harm of others as well as the harm that they can visit upon themselves.
Whether it is courtesy of Nature or God, babies, children, are ordained to live under paternalistic—or maternalistic—rule.
If only they didn’t despise Christ so, how much more mileage could the left get from imploring America’s Christians to be more like the Christ-Child!
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The real tragedy is that American Christians in 2020 don’t need anyone to tell them this. The leaders and laity of the contemporary American Church of both the Protestant and Catholic varieties long ago opted to anchor their faith in a child-friendly conception of the God-Man who they purport to worship.
The Jesus who is overwhelmingly preached from pulpits today is Jesus Meek and Mild, a harmless Jesus who judges no one, never so much as raises his voice, to say nothing of issuing condemnations, and who preaches, not love, but a hippy-dippy lovie-doviness that couldn’t discriminate between good and evil if it had an eternity to do so.
This Jesus, you see, isn’t merely in the world; he is of it. More specifically, he is of our world, the world as 21st liberal democrats (small “l” and small “d”) tend to conceive it.
In other words, the Jesus that far too many Christians and their secular counterparts alike prefer is most emphatically not the real Jesus.
This Christmas Season comes on the heels of a year unlike that of any other. It is the year that, under the pretext of combatting a corona cold virus with a survival rate of 99.9%, power-obsessed politicians and career bureaucrats and their ratings-obsessed propagandists in the media gave new meaning to the term “fear-mongering” as they brainwashed millions of weak-minded and fear-ridden Americans into contributing to the economic, psychological, and social subversion of their own country.
It is the year that these same self-interested actors not only legitimized but encouraged Black Lives Matter riots in hundreds of cities throughout the United States.
And it is the year that ended with a stolen presidential election, followed by more hyper-sensationalistic fear-mongering over an alleged explosion of new virus “cases” (a notoriously unreliable, even meaningless, benchmark).
2020 has been a year of lies, the Year of the Lie. That being the case, this Christmas, as we foster within ourselves a hope, a militant, indomitable, warrior’s hope in the Spirit of the Season for a better year ahead, let us reflect on Truth, on the Truth that was born to the Virgin in the manger. Let us remember that the Babe who lay in swaddling clothes and before whom kings and shepherds knelt is a Warrior-Christ, the same Person whose revulsion of evil and the wicked is such that the accounts of His violent retribution against it are offered consistently throughout the pages of Sacred Scripture from the book of Genesis to that of Revelation.
Jesus, the Word of God, God the Son is eternally begotten from the Father, is anything but the pacifist that He is all too often made out to be. He is no pacifist at all. He is a Warrior-Christ. Moreover, when He wages war, He tends to go scorched Earth. He goes big.
The same Babe in the manger flooded the planet, ensuring the destruction of, outside of Noah and company, all other men, women, children, and animals.
The God who, on multiple occasions, either directly annihilated all of the living inhabitants of whole tribes and cities or commanded Israelites to do the same is the God who assumed flesh as Baby Jesus.
The God who saw to it that His chosen people would prevail in the battle over their enemies—who were His enemies—is the same God who would lay in a bed of straw outside of the inn.
This is also the same God who would bless warriors, like King David, regarding the latter as “a man after my own heart.”
And when God became incarnate as the Man of all men and proceeded to embark upon His ministry, He showed, not merely impatience, but the same contempt for the haughty and dishonest that He exhibited in His pre-incarnate state. Among other things, when Christ wasn’t cleansing the Temple, overturning their tables and driving out the merchants and their livestock with a whip, He continued to unload upon His enemies, the religious-political elites of the day, the same fiery, unstoppable indignation as He blasted, not their ideas, but their very persons as spiritually and morally twisted “white-washed tombs” who were destined for agonizing punishment, “wailing and gnashing of teeth”—a fate that He, their accuser, would visit upon them.
The Baby whose birth we celebrate on this most blessed of holy days would grow up to command His disciples to arm themselves with swords, and when the Roman governor, a man known for his ruthlessness, reminded Jesus that it was up to him whether Jesus would live or die, Christ, without batting an eye, flipped Pilate’s script and set him straight, informing him that the only power that Pilate possessed is the power that Christ permitted him to have.
Nor should we ever forget—as all too many Christians today would prefer to forget—that the Christ-Child is the same Person who “the disciple that he loved most” assures us will return one day to separate the wheat from the chaff and slay His enemies.
Doubtless, these are not the images and thoughts that we are accustomed to dwelling upon during the twelve days of the Mass of Christ (or at any other time). Yet dwell upon them we should, for far from being incompatible with the God of Love, they rather underscore it; they underscore that God is Good. God is Love and God is Good because God despises evil and its purveyors.
He came into the world to reconcile it to Himself. However, knowing that human beings, those of His creations that He made in His likeness, i.e. with reason and freedom of the will, would always have among them those who would exercise their freedom to reject God’s offer of adoption as children, God knows that unless goodness has powerless euphemistically, violence—in its defense against evil, evil will prevail.
While I’m not as enamored of Jordan Peterson as some, he deserves all of the credit in the world for having captured a profound truth with concision and a clarity that few others have achieved. During an exchange with former Navy Seal and martial artist Jocko Willink on the latter’s podcast, Peterson remarked:
“A good man must be a dangerous man.”
This is an insight that remains lost upon far too many contemporary Christians (and conservatives). Thus, this Christmas, let us, Christians generally and Christian men specifically, begin to dwell upon the Lord as He is, and not as we and our secular liberal democratic culture would like for Him to be.
Let us, paraphrasing Peterson, begin the work of searing into our consciences the following glorious, blessed Truth:
“Jesus, the God-Man, the best of men, is, and can only be, the most dangerous of men.”
As we seek to become better Christians, let us do as Jesus would do and aspire to become the good men, and good women, who He wants us to become.
Merry Christmas! We have a reason, the Reason, to hope for the rebirth in ourselves that He can help us to make a reality in 2021!
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