Christmas is for all of us, even though it is the kids who relish the visit from Santa. We older folks know there would be no joyful December time like it if it were not for the Lord Jesus, who was born “in the fullness of time.” We understand that it is a mystery how Mary as a virgin gave birth to God’s son, and we accept it. The word “incarnation” is one of those religious vocabulary words seldom used in any secular sense that can make our eyes glaze over. Words like redemption and apocalypse and consubstantial do that. But to incarnate is to bring into the flesh. It is from the Latin caro, carnis, as in carnal or carnivorous. Each of us was incarnated at conception.
God was brought into the flesh nine months before that first Christmas, a staggering mystery that has implications for us believers, us who choose consciously to be followers of the man Jesus. Through two millennia Christians have argued about the Lord’s identity. Strangely enough, the earliest heresies about him were not denials of his divinity but of his humanness, his humanity. With hardheaded logic early Christians said of course he was divine. How else explain the many miracles? But some devout conservatives claimed it would be blasphemous to say that Jesus had the same human anatomy and hormones and desires that the rest of us have. They blamed these for our sexual sins. They thought it would be more loyal to make Jesus angelic, incorporeal, above the physical. But early church councils said he was true God and true human.
I call this “devotion” heretical because the early church did. Its name was Docetism. It was the attempt of the pious to keep the Lord from soiling his feet in this creation of God, who made us just as we are, libido and all. The Lord was a person like us in all things but sin. His mercy for guilty sinners scandalized pious Pharisees then and now. So the evidence shows he was comfortable with incarnation and with what goes with it.
Today’s Docetism is a bit more subtle. It has the devout denying that we have responsibility for the physical, bodily needs of Christ’s extended body. They seem to feel that the Lord would be pleased if we confined ourselves to spiritual concerns like praying while deciding against giving a cup of cold water to a thirsting sister or brother. Yet it was the Lord who told us to leave our gift at the altar and first go to reconcile with an alienated brother, showing us what should come first.
What evidence do I have for this modern Docetism, denying the collective Body of Christ? How do we tolerate America’s poor being legally deprived of food? In November, Congress allowed food benefits to end for 47 million hungry in this land of abundance. This is the Congress that routinely rubber stamps defense appropriations far beyond anything we will ever need for national security. This is the Congress that sees nothing wrong with tax laws favoring companies that export jobs and then qualify for government subsidies. This is the Congress that exempts the rich from its fair share of taxes while claiming that anything less would be socialism, a word thrown around with about as much responsibility as was “communism” by people like Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
Unlike other highly industrialized countries, the U.S. has nearly 15 percent of its population living on subsistence or less. As Edmund Burke, a member of the English parliament who spoke for the 13 colonies, said, the only thing needed for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. This is what we do when we look the other way as the media report stories of Christmas in the ghetto or the barrio. If we advocated for equal hiring and equal housing and equal education -fair policies all around – we would be attending to the bodily needs of Christ who dwells especially among and in the poor.
It is hard to imagine the Lord liking the trivialization of Christian discipleship of today’s docetists who find no problem denying the humanity of the poor who are, more than the rich, the brothers and sisters of the Lord of Christmas. Fair laws, not charity, will raise up the poor in a dignified way.
Because these things are so, the Second Amendment must be repealed.
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