The Real Christmas Is the Christmas of the Spirit

In 1952 I was one of many college students who professed their growing alienation from organized religion. Although I was raised in a churchgoing family and still considered myself a Christian, I shared some of my fellow students’ skepticism about the ability of the church to challenge social injustice in American society.

At the time I was dating a young ministerial student named Martin Luther King Jr. In one of our many conversations about the future and what we were going to do with our lives, he surprised me by saying that he also had some doubts about the relevance of the church. However, he insisted, “To really carry out the precepts of Jesus would be the most revolutionary and dangerous thing in the world.”

Every Christmas season I remember those words as if they were spoken yesterday. For me they reveal the true spirit of Christ in stark contrast to the commercialization of the holiday, which so thoroughly permeates the season.

When pressed, even devout Christians will admit that Ebenezer Scrooge had a point. Some of the synonyms that the dictionary lists for humbug include fraud , sham , imposition , trickery , deception and swindle . Can anyone who has been to a shopping center during the holiday season say that old Scrooge was completely wrong?

What can be said about the commercialization of Christmas in a nation where 33 million people are living in poverty? One of Christianity’s best-kept secrets is that Jesus had an economic policy. The reason it has been overlooked is because extremes of wealth and poverty don’t square with his teachings, and that makes a lot of folks uncomfortable.

Unlike the policies of the President’s economic advisers, Christ’s economic views were clear and simple, not meant to confuse anyone. In the Gospel of Matthew, Christ tells a young man that in order to achieve eternal life, “Sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.” When the young man departed, Jesus turned to his disciples and explained, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”

But it is in the book of Luke that Christ delivers his sternest warning about the commercialization of the sacred. When Jesus cleared the temple of merchants and bankers, he told them, “My house is the house of prayer: But ye have made it a den of thieves.”

Although more than a billion people of all races and nations identify themselves as Christians, there’s no denying that the phenomenal growth of the church in this century has been accompanied by a parallel increase in the militarism that Jesus eloquently challenged in word and deed. Yet, as Napoleon Bonaparte said, “Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and I have built great empires. But upon what did they depend? They depended on force. But centuries ago Jesus started an empire that was built on love. And even to this day, millions will die for him.”

Somewhere, far away from military misadventures and yuletide hucksters, you can find the real Christmas. It is the Christmas of the spirit, a holiday that has endured through the ages because of humanity’s timeless longing for love, brotherhood and reconciliation.

The unfinished business of the Christian revolution provides a challenge of burning urgency for people of good will everywhere. As Martin Luther King Jr. said in his final published statement:

“Jesus of Nazareth wrote no books, he owned no property to endow him with influence. He had no friends in the courts of the powerful. But he changed the course of mankind with only the poor and despised . . . . Naive and unsophisticated though we may be, the poor and despised of the 20th Century will revolutionize this era. We will fight for human justice, brotherhood, secure peace and abundance for all. When we have won these in the spirit of unshakeable nonviolence, then in luminous splendor the Christian era will truly begin.”