At first, it seems that the Christian message of the Nativity of Christ bears close resemblance with the political slogans and propaganda that we find intruding into our lived consciousness at almost each moment of our lives today, especially among Filipinos who are now daily bombarded by campaign materials as national elections draw nearer. Is not Emmanuel – God-with-us – so similar with: the State-with-us, history-on-our-side, truth-is-with-us or you-are-not-alone? Is not the appearance of the hosts of heavenly beings on the skies of Bethlehem proclaiming, “Glory to God in the highest and peace to men of goodwill” commemorated during the midnight vigil of the nativity so closely similar to the television advertisements, the banners, posters and paraphernalia that announce the messianic visions of those who claim to be the redeemers of this country’s abject socio-political conditions? And just like the political advertisements, after the liturgical celebrations, the parties and the merrymaking of Christmas, we look around and find our joy, excitement or enthusiasm so misplaced in a world that appears to be deserted by God. Confused, saddened, bewildered, we silently ask: “What, if any, did the birth of Christ contribute to the world and to human history that it demands celebration today?”
What, if any, would the celebration of the birth of Christ mean for our political consciousness?
The ancient and popular Christmas hymn invites us today: Venite adoremus! O come let us adore Him! O come let us adore him! At the recitation of the Credo in the Catholic liturgy of the day, the congregation is invited to kneel and pause in adoration at the words – et homo factum est – and God became Man. And at the end of the Catholic liturgy of today, we line up and kiss in silent adoration the image of the infant Jesus.
Why adore this powerless Christ who in the next couple of months we shall adore again not anymore as a baby but as a beaten, bloody and dead body hanging on the Cross?
It is here that we recognize the fundamental difference between the messianism of our political leaders and the Messianic message of the baby on the crib who is also the same man on the cross: both instances in the life of the same person point not just to himself, not because the self is of utter insignificance but because it is God who gives meaning to an otherwise meaningless event. Hence, unlike the political messiahs whose referential point is their ideological construct and vision of the world, the helpless and powerless Christ points to the graciousness and loving embrace of the Father.
An easy and conventional interpretation of this fundamental difference between our politics and the religious order is tempting to adhere to, that is to make a clear delineation between two co-existing spheres of human life: that of the secular and that of the sacred that do not communicate with each other. That is, if in fact, the political realm is radically different from the religious realm then it demands its autonomous set of values, goals and dispositions that cannot be inflected with any religious voice or undertone. Radical democratic theorists, in their attempt to save religion from its transmogrification into state-led projects of modernity or Enlightenment, offer a rather delicious solution – to insist on a God-abandoned political realm and to subject everything in politics to the contingency and indecisiveness of compromises or games of power relations. Simply put, radical political theorists argue that if God has been paradoxically purged out of modernity by transporting His divine will into the collective will of the people embodied by the institutions of politics, making such institutions inscrutable from criticism, then, political relations have no meaning in them except as markers of the victory of one hegemonic power over other competing and similarly hegemonizing bearers of power. While radical theorists resist the arrogance of their liberal rivals who by claiming moral ascendancy through the forging of a social consciousness deny us the restlessness of the heart and the uncertainty of the mind through which a divinely-ordained plan could unfold, the radical compromise with God and religion is achieved at the expense of legitimizing difference for the sake of difference. It is true, however, that the de-deification by radical philosophy of certain human constructs open such to Divine authority and make them accountable to the public. Yet in doing so is the tendency to provide no opportunity for politics to become a space which could be claimed by actors as a space for the Divine to unfold its plan. Religion is transformed into either or both ideology – a secret whose logic remains hidden – and/or ritual – a purely exterior manifestation but can not claim to substantive and demanding meaning. Here, religion, in the guise of allowing it a public character, is, in a more creative manner than the earlier projects of modernity, pushed once more into the private affairs of human life, making no space for it in the public affairs of society.
On the other hand, the arrival, the incarnation of God vis-à-vis the infant child and made possible by the cooperation of Mary and Joseph, demands that we recognize its definitive and determined occurrence in history. The Gospels are united in proclaiming “the appointed time”, “the fullness of time” in which this occasion transpired. This leads us to the recognition of the incarnation as a gift, as an act of love and condescension on the part of a Divine Being who was faithful despite our infidelity. As such, the marvelous story of the nativity is something that was caused into fulfillment by God. Christian theology teaches us that this causative nature of God is no other than His Word, that same Word that caused creation. And because it is Word – Logos – it is not a secret, it is on the contrary, visibly manifested and draws people to it, just as the angels in the nativity story invited the shepherds and the star drew the magi from the orient. Also, because it is Word, it is not meaningless but in fact meaning itself. It is reasonable, not in the sense of reason as rational, but as the prophesies of the Old Testament announced, it is articulated and not simply felt. This visibilized and reasonable figure of the Word is Christ himself. It transcends the political demarcation of what constitutes the public and the private.
Hence, unlike political propaganda, the Kalenda – the Christmas proclamation – acknowledges that Christ is the Lord of history. This is a rather radical yet very humbling proclamation. To celebrate the nativity of Christ can therefore only mean our submission and surrender not to history as dialecticians would put it, nor of the submission of history to our making as materialists would claim, but rather, our recognition that Christ has claimed history and that He is the only way, the truth and the life as His public ministry and Christological teachings would later on make more manifest. This, unlike political propaganda is something that we know: it is not a secret that underpins history nor is it an appeal to the emotional stirrings of the heart. Lest, we misinterpret Mary’s silence in all these events, it is she and Joseph who embody how to be knowing subjects of the Lord of history.
In our contemporary freedom-obsessed, liberty-possessed political imaginary and vocabulary, the condition of subjection would always be antithetical to emancipation. While it is true that political affairs must always strive for equality in conditions among members of a political community, the extension of this equality into the nature of what it means to be human bears fundamental obstacles to our recognition of Christ as the Lord of history. This utter politicization of the entirety of human life has already been achieved by the emergence of a security and police state, a governmentalized political structure and quite ironically, even by the vanguards of the post-modern agenda. The consequence of this ceaseless yearning for equalization forgets the most basic nature of what it means to be human: that is to be a created reality. The subjection of man to the Lord of history means, however, not to become unthinking pawns but to always unite one’s thoughts into the will of the same Lord. That the Word incarnate was made flesh only through this process, that the birth of Christ only occurred because one woman’s ascent to the will of the Father, to be repeated later on in the garden of Gethsemane in the penultimate moment of the history of human salvation points only to the extreme trust and love that the Creator has bestowed upon His created being. That God himself became fully man, though in the process did not relinquish His divinity, should only point to an extremely gratuitous consciousness that we as humans should develop in relation to God. Today’s world, however, forbids us from nurturing a sense of gratuitousness. Today’s world is driven by a sense of entitlement: that man is fully entitled to certain privileges that he must get, a theory of rights, if you wish. The recognition of our nature as subjects of the Lord of history is therefore not one characterized by movement of despair or nihilism or fatalism or evolutionism. It is a movement of reasoned faith, that same movement that stirred within the heart of Mary the powerful song – Magnificat anima mea Deus – my soul magnifies the Lord.
Nowhere in Mary’s canticle do we hear her disparaging her status as a servant, as a handmaid of God. That she has allowed herself to be in the service of God is in fact the very source of her pride, joy, strength and courage. Unlike ideologies which put man in the service of history and therefore render man a sacrificial lamb of the unfolding of the logic of history, man in the service of God is not sacrificed. Ideologies do not explain the martyrdom of so many of their warriors except as a necessity in the realization of the anticipated utopia, except perhaps by tricking man through scientifically contrived propaganda of various sorts. In contrast to this perversion, the nativity of Christ has in fact simultaneously exalted and humbled humanity. Forgetting one of the other misconstrues the reality of man as a created being. That God was not ashamed to take upon human form, to experience the frailty of humanity compels us to defend the dignity of humanity in all fronts, to resist the transformation of man into mere utility for this and that notion of progress. God did not make man his utility, God in fact became man and did not abandon His divinity in the process. Hence, the story of Christmas, the adoration that we are invited today to take upon ourselves, will always be confounding for the world whose primal desire is to live on its own without God.
So what in fact is the cause of our celebration? Pope Benedict XVI puts it beautifully in his book Jesus of Nazareth: God. It is God that the birth of Christ contributes to our history, such that through His birth, God entered history in the most final, definitive and complete way, so that as Pope Benedict XVI puts it, we now know the face of God – Jesus.
The characters surrounding the nativity story would not have encountered Jesus Christ without God’s grace. From Mary who “has found favor in God”, to Joseph who was visited by the angel in his dream, to the shepherds who were heralded by angels into the manger, to the magi who were drawn by the star of Bethlehem – all of these participants in the nativity story needed God to realize the economy of salvation. In his excursus on the temptations of Jesus in the desert, Pope Benedict XVI argued that the devil was not as vulgar as to tell Jesus to abandon God. The devil only tempted Jesus to follow the designs of the world, that as the Messiah he must command the empires of the world, its riches and its honor. The devil only tempted Jesus to follow a well-organized, systematic structure of the world and in the process to not need God anymore.
The story of Christmas for me is a story of our need for God and God’s assurance that He-is-with-us. This need for God, however is a moment of grace, thus these two for me are inseparable and imply each other all the time: one needs God because He has created us, He-is-with-us because of our reality as created beings who have been unfaithful to him and as a testament of His fidelity to us. This is the joy of Christmas for me: the joy that one finds in the need for God and the recognition of the realization of that joy through Christ – the God-made-man.
What do these imply for politics?
A lot of times in our political engagement we are tempted to follow templates, blueprints and systems of progress or ways of critique or of doing things. In some occasions, we reject these templates and blueprints, mostly because they have become meaningless mantras repeatedly imposed by societal institutions. Both of these tendencies are however two sides of the same coin: blind obedience to ideology which leaves no room for the plan of God to unfold.
The joy of Christmas – a joy beyond feelings or sentiments, a conviction of faith – must possess our tasks for political transformation. Our political endeavors must be open to the grace of God. They must not reduce God into a private affair or entirely shun Him from the picture by pre-determining the effects and the consequence of human activity. Of course to realize this we must as individuals become signs of the human need for God. Only those who do not need God will not need others in this task. Radical political practice already contains some of these elements. What radical theorists and practitioners of political philosophy need to do is to move beyond their obsession with the indeterminacy of political life: if Christ is Lord of history and therefore of politics, then political life rests upon the same certitude, the same fidelity of God’s salvific plan for us. In politics then, we may not always be certain of what our actions may bring, but we of course as political actors are certain of our joy in the truth of God. We do not plunge into a nihilistic world in which values are merely decisions of shifting alliances of relations of power, or where values are those which we simply construct or create of our autonomous selves, rather we plunge into a world which has known the Word, in which the Word has been born and which points to the Word Incarnate as the guide and standard of human striving.
A Blessed Celebration of the Solemnity of the Nativity to everyone!