“Are you sleeping through the ‘whoosh and the boom’ of Christmas?”

Friedrich Nietzsche is the philosopher well-known for his criticism of historical Christianity, amongst other things, and for the assertion that “god is dead,” a poignant turn of phrase to express the Enlightenment sentiment that progress in reason had functionally rendered belief in God as unnecessary and outdated. In his works, Nietzsche had a particular interest in the classics, and much of his work, if not directly assessing Greek mythology, draws on the myths and ideas prevalent in those stories.

Nietzsche was a brilliant student, so much so that at the age of 24 he was appointed to be the chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, and shortly thereafter released his first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. In one of the most spectacular lines in this book, Nietzsche writes: “The [Greek] gods justified human life by living it themselves--the only satisfactory theodicy ever invented.”

A theodicy is an attempted resolution of the problem of evil: how can God be all-good and all-powerful and yet there is pain and suffering and evil in the world? A theodicy is an attempt to draw out how we could understand the concomitant existence in our word of evil and God. And in these words from Nietzsche, he recognizes that the Greeks justified their suffering, understood their suffering, made sense of their suffering through stories of incarnate deities - gods who came down and lived and suffered alongside them.

The immense irony of this statement is that Nietzsche, on one hand, commends this incarnation in Greek mythology as “the most satisfactory theodicy ever invented,” and then turns in his later works to a spectacular critique of Christianity as the theological foundation for the moral beliefs of much of Europe at the time; Christianity, where God himself became incarnate, took on human flesh, that He might suffer and die in order that we might be reconciled to him. How ironic that Nietzsche missed this satisfactory theodicy actually occurring in history!

The “whoosh and boom” of the incarnate Christ was utterly lost upon Nietzsche in this context; Christ himself could serve as the very answer, the perfectly shaped puzzle piece, to the question for this son of a Lutheran minister, and yet it was lost in the malaise of the commonplace. In this advent season, looking forward to the celebration of Christ’s coming, it is especially easy to be as blind as Nietzsche to the prescient relevance of the incarnation, and yet, we are called to “Behold! Pay attention!”

However, it is too small and trite a thing to think that Christ is but the missing puzzle piece to this Christmas season. Christ is not the part of Christmas that we are leaving out; Christ is not the part of Christmas that we simply need to recall. Christ is Christmas. Behold Him; behold how He alone gives meaning and significance to anything in this season. There is no giving of gifts, no singing of songs, no drinking of hot chocolate, no Christmas trees, no Christmas lights, no Christmas cheer, no caroling, no partying, no merriment that means anything apart from Christ. Christ is not merely the star upon the tree; his existence is what gives meaning and significance to the entire tree! Christ is not the missing puzzle piece to what Christmas is all about. Rather, we have a few puzzle pieces, a few parts of Christmas tradition and meaning, and unless we behold that in Christ himself do those pieces fit, Christmas means nothing.

My friends, beholding Christ this season is not merely finding out how Christ can augment our understanding and our experience of Christmas. Behold our Christ means perceiving how Christ, taking on human form and coming as a crying and mewling babe, fundamentally reorients all of our traditions, all of our experiences, all of our joys, all of our sorrows, all of our hopes, all of our expectations to have meaning and true reality in Him. Do not sleep through the “whoosh and boom” of the incarnate Christ; behold Him!

~Josh Spare