Discerning the True Meaning of Christmas

Christmas is the most celebrated holiday around the world for Christians and non-Christians alike considering the billions of dollars spent on Christmas cards, gifts, and food. It is a phenomenal bug that bites us every year with “Christmas feeling” symptoms like joy, despair, and hope depending on our situation or mood. It is highly commercialized, and that fact obscures the true meaning of the celebration.

Christmas Day is supposed to be Jesus’ birthday, but we don’t greet him with a happy birthday. Nobody really knows when the historical Jesus’ birthday really was. December to February is the low season for tourism in Israel where he was born because it is the rainy season there and the cool temperature could be as low as 40-50oF at night. Meaning, Christmas Eve and the day after is cold and the outfits described for the Nativity participants do not seem to jibe. It also means that “the inns being full” could be a hyperbole.

In truth, Christmas can be celebrated anytime of the year, if only to capture the spirit of sacrifice and gift-giving. Only biblical scholars haggle about the date but for mortals like us, the Nativity keeps us hoping to be reborn with a different, albeit better attitude and transformation every year, to start a new leaf. The Christmas bug is let loose by humans after Thanksgiving when the airwaves begin to play the jingles all the way to Christmas Day and up to Three Kings in some countries.

If we didn’t get the bug by Epiphany, then we give it another shot by Lent. That’s the cycle of the Catholic liturgical calendar – birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For us, they’re recurring events that fuels our faith, our Christian lives. Through this cycle, we journey with our faith beyond our mortality, in the fullness of time. As humans, however, we get so caught up in the cycle that we don’t find the time to reflect on the true meaning of the occasion.

Being a cycle, it keeps turning forward, but not truly evolving unless we stop, reflect, and redirect our focus to what is important. For example, let’s look at the Nativity scene. Simply, the birth of baby Jesus in a manger. For Filipinos, we have been oriented during our childhood to a European version of the Nativity narrative that St. Francis of Assisi popularized with characters that were foreign to us.

The Nativity scene that we have become accustomed to captivating our minds about such magical moments has been colored by pagan traditions that have become part of the celebration. Sometimes the scene is portrayed with the kind of embellishment that lets us stray from the truth amidst the commercialism that is attendant to the celebration.

The story of virginal birth borne of the Holy Spirit is a concept that is hard to fathom for humans. There have been several virginal births mentioned in the Bible other than Jesus, from barren or elderly women (or couples who can’t conceive naturally) who were chosen by fiat and gifted with a child. Each child involved in miraculous births would take on important roles in biblical times. They were all sons of the Holy Spirit.

The prophet Isaac was Abraham’s son and Jesus’ great grandfather. Jacob, son of Isaac became one of the fathers of the Jewish nation (Israel). Samuel was Israel’s last judge and first prophet, and Sampson was a legendary Israelite who was gifted with immense physical strength and was a diviner of justice. John the Baptist was the guy who baptized Jesus and advocated that Jesus was the Messiah.

Although we refer to the nativity of Jesus as a product of virgin birth (parthenogenesis), it is not true in a real sense. Parthenogenesis is scientifically real. Women are capable of conceiving on their own, but when they do, the baby will only have the DNA of the woman and thus will produce a female offspring. Men are not capable of conceiving because of the absence of the uterus. Transgender men have a uterus and are therefore capable of parthenogenesis.

All biblical virginal births produced males including Jesus. This was because it was the Holy Spirit who allowed the incarnation, but what pronoun would you use for the Holy Spirit? A “he” or “it” as used in the Bible? Our human understanding of pregnancy involves a man who provides the sperm to fertilize the egg from a female, becomes an embryo and eventually a fetus to form in the uterus. With virginal conception, the Holy Spirit must be a “he” in our understanding.

Well, I beg to disagree. In the Holy Trinity, the Father and Son are both males. I believe that it was the feminine side of the Holy Spirit who “planted the woman seed” who would crush Satan’s head and free humanity from sin as prophesied in the Bible. Mary as a woman did not have a seed, but the Holy Spirit provided it as prophesied in Genesis (3:15) and in Isaiah, of a “virgin birth” who will be God with us (Immanuel).

The question is, why did the Old Testament prophecy a “Redeemer” amongst us – a God-man? Was it because of the original sin of Adam’s disobedience that Jesus was supposed to redeem humanity from? As Catholics, we are baptized in the name of the “Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit” to free us from such sin. As we reach the age of reason, however, we continue to sin (concupiscence) as part of our human nature to disobey God.

Jesus’ virgin birth freed him from Adam’s sin and to restart humanity, if you will. His birth, therefore, is a marking point between the Old Testament (OT) and the New. I believe this is the essence of the Nativity of Jesus. If the OT is about a search for physical paradise for the Israelites, Christianity in the New Testament is about a spiritual world and Jesus lived to tell and show us what that Spiritual World would be – the Kingdom of God.

Between Luke, Paul, Matthew, and John exist a contradiction about the doctrine of the virgin birth. Luke, Paul, and Matthew all focused on the human aspect of the virgin birth – Mary being a virgin and Joseph who was the begotten father of Jesus and descendant of David. The angel intervention was about fulfilling the prophecy by ensuring that Mary agreed to be the earthly mother of Jesus, and that Joseph did not back away from the deal for his own modest reason.

John, on the other hand, focused on the divine side of Jesus’ nativity. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” The eternal Word became flesh and dwelt among us. This is the central truth of humanity. Jesus’s birth was from two women – Mary and the feminine side of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is our Spiritual Mother and is the unifying element of the Church – the “Mystical Bride of Christ.”