Christmas is for Everyone

Christians around the world are celebrating the birth of Christ today while those of other faiths, or no faith, are mostly sitting it out.  It’s the happiest holiday of the year and there’s every reason why non-Christians should join the celebration.  So please do.

You don’t have to be a Christian to celebrate Christmas.  You can celebrate the birth of Jesus without celebrating the birth of Christ, and there is every reason we all should.  So join us, please. It can only bring us closer in this ever-chilling world.

Jesus was for all people – all colors, origins, religions, conditions, shapes and sexes.  He was not a Christian.  He was a Jew who never pretended to be anything else, and he never changed “one letter or even a part of a letter” of the Jewish Law or the Prophets.  In fact, Jews hold Jesus in such high esteem that they  consider him a Prophet, though not their Messiah. So Jews could legitimately join us by celebrating the birth of Jesus as Judaism’s last Prophet.

So could Muslims.  Especially Muslims.  The Quran,  which is Islam’s central religious text that Muslims believe to be a revelation from God, places Jesus among the greatest of Prophets.  It says he was born of a virgin, performed miracles, rejected the Jewish religious establishment and prophesied Mohammad by using the name Ahmad. Jesus was not crucified but rather he miraculously ascended directly into heaven, and he will return to Earth before the Day of Judgment to restore justice and defeat “the false messiah”,  known among Christians as the Antichrist.  When Muslims speak Jesus’ name they add, “May peace be upon him,”  the same words they say when they mention Mohammad’s name.

The Quran even holds his mother, the Virgin Mary, in astonishingly high esteem, even higher than the New Testament does.   It devotes a full chapter to her, an honor it grants to no other woman.  It doesn’t even identify any other woman by name in the entire book, yet her name appears more in the Quran than it does in the New Testament.  So Muslims could easily join the Jews and us in celebrating the birth of Jesus.

And so could Hindus, members of other religions, agnostics and atheists.  There is nothing in Jesus’ teaching of love that should prevent you from joining us, too, and everything that should encourage you.

I keep saying “us.”  Technically, I should not say “us” because technically I am not a Christian.  A Christian is someone who believes Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, or even God Incarnate.  I do not actively believe either of those concepts so I cannot actively say I am a Christian.

But neither do I deny the possibility.  I studied Jesus up close and personal for 20 years – even wrote a book about him — and after realizing the surprising amount circumstantial, experiential and documentary evidence that indicates Jesus might indeed have been the Messiah,  I can see how it might be true.  If any person ever existed whose life could qualify, it was Jesus.

My wife, Sue, is a Christian, but I call myself a Jesusian (jeh-SUE-sian; I’ll explain it later), and I celebrate the birth of Jesus because of his teaching, to which he dedicated his life.  Indeed, he gave his life to teaching, preaching and demonstrating his cause so that we might understand it.  Christians hold that teaching so central to their faith, and they see God beaming so purely through Jesus by living his teaching, that they call him the Christ.

But either way, it doesn’t matter.  Jesus never claimed he was the Messiah.  He never denied it, but despite many people who knew him insisting that he was the Messiah, he never claimed it.  And crucially, he never said we must believe he was the Messiah to follow his teaching and live his promise of a life full of joy beyond human understanding.

Not only did Jesus not say we must believe he was the Messiah to live the life he promised, but he also never said we had to believe anything to live that life.  We don’t even have to believe there is a God.  We certainly don’t have to believe Jesus’ body was resurrected after he died (although there is evidence that it was).

(Sidelight: Neither did Jesus say we have to oppose abortion.  Jesus was a Jew who never contested any of Judaism’s beliefs, including its belief from the beginning that life begins at birth.  Roman Catholics also once taught that life begins at birth, but in 1591 Pope Gregory declared that life begins 166 days after conception and the church never looked back. {His edict explains why several states limit the  right to abortion to 24 weeks.}  In 1869 Pope Pious IX strengthened Gregory’s edict by forbidding abortion any time after conception. Most Protestant churches accepted abortion as a woman’s right to control her own body until powerhouse Christian Nationalists used it in the 1970s to cover for their drive to prevent the Internal Revenue Service from denying tax exemptions to the religiously ultraconservative Bob Jones University because of its racial segregation policy.  For a fuller explanation of the latter I recommend reading The Power Worshipers by Katherine Stewart.)

Jesus only said that to live his promise we must love God and love one another (Matthew 22:37-40).  The Hebrew bible (the Old Testament) expresses the same basic thought in a different way. Micah 6:8 reads, “…(W)hat does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God?”

It’s a practical matter.  God is love, so to love God is to love love – literally love love. Love the idea of love, the thought of love, the reality of love.   Doing that will naturally lead to fulfilling the second commandment, which is to love one’s neighbor, who is everyone.  That means putting other people’s needs above our own and helping them however we can.

Look, God is love.  Love exists.  Therefore, God exists.  If we will love that Love and love one another we will have fulfilled Jesus’ commandments and we will realize the happiness he promises.  That is it!  Christianity is that simple!  It requires nothing more, but neither does it require anything less.

Again, Jesus only said that if we want to experience joy beyond human understanding – the Greek word for it is makarios – then all we must do is love God (love love) and love one another.  And we don’t have to be Christians or believe that God exists to love love.

So although by definition I do not consider myself a Christian, I most certainly do consider myself a Jesusian, which is a first cousin to Christianity.  It’s a word I coined (or at least I think I coined it) to describe people like me who believe Jesus’ teaching and try to live it, but who do not necessarily believe Jesus was Lord.

What is important to us is what was important to Jesus, and what was important to Jesus was that we put love first.  Jesus never wanted to be praised, certainly not worshiped.  He only wanted us to follow his teaching.  He only wanted us to love, for our own sakes.

So instead of praising him, Jesusians honor him by following him, which means that to the best of our abilities we do what he said do.  We don’t do it because he was the Christ.  We do it because, as utopian as it may sound to some, his teaching does lead to makarios for us and a better world for those we meet.  And what’s wrong with that?  Makarios is the destination and it may be humanly impossible to reach it, but the road that leads there is bright and gets ever brighter.

To Christians and Jesusians, the word love has a specific meaning, and it has nothing to do with sentimentality.  The New Testament was written in Greek, and there are seven Greek words that translate into English as the one word love.  However, the word for love used in the New Testament is fundamentally different from all the others.

The six words are philia, the deepest and warmest feelings shared among closest friends;  storge, love shared among family members;  eros, the physical expression of affection;  mania, obsessive love, the kind of “love” that a stalker feels toward his victim;  pragma, practical love, such as that found in arranged marriages throughout history;  and philautia, self-love, or how people view themselves and how they feel about their own bodies and minds.

But the word Greeks chose for the New Testament is agape (ah-GAH-pay), which differs fundamentally  from the others because all the others deal with feelings of the heart, and Agape alone deals with actions of the mind.  Agape is the kind of love that forces us to get out of our skins and think first of the needs of others, and what we can do for others.   And the promised result of doing that is makarios.

Which gets me back to wishing non-Christians would join us – yes, us — in celebrating the birth of Jesus, if not the Christ.  Change the name from Christmas if you will, call it Prophet’s Day, but please join us in celebrating this incredible season, and this most incredible man.

I hope everyone is having a very merry Christmas.

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