So, if Christians can still celebrate Christmas in good conscience, how then should we celebrate? Some may conclude that to avoid the appearance of worldliness we must observe Christmas only at our expense. We might be tempted to feel guilty if we indulge in the season by enjoying our gifts and time off with our feet up by the fire. But this isn’t how the Bible cultivates faithful disciples.
Notice Jesus’s demeanor in Mark 2:18-19: “Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting. And people came and said to [Jesus], “Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?” And Jesus said to them, “Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast.”
Jesus, in his ministry, came eating and drinking—feasting. Many people mistakenly assume that feasting and gluttony are the same, but they are vastly different. Gluttony is a sin because its subject is the self—gluttony eats without giving thanks, it takes in as much as possible before being forced to share with others. But a feast is a proper response to something worth celebrating: Jesus’s first miracle is to turn water into wine; when the Prodigal Son returns home to his father, his father throws him a party and kills the fatted calf. So, if we’re celebrating the truth that God has come to be with us, well, we need not feel bad about raising a glass and enjoying God’s gifts to us, even in the darkest of winters.
Paul says as much in 1 Corinthians 5:8, “For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”
Every Sunday, Christians celebrate this gospel in song and in the feast the Lord provides in his Supper. And special observance and celebration of this gospel when the days are darkest and coldest makes even more sense because it’s the hope we have in tribulation, distress, persecution, and famine (Rom. 8:35). This was also the logic of the ancient church. As one church historian puts it, “If God has truly and irrevocably entered into the human condition and human history, then Christian faith can legitimately make use of the symbolism that the world provides . . . To celebrate Christ, the light of the world, in the darkest days of the year—at least in the Northern hemisphere—makes a great deal of sense; it is not the survival of paganism but the recognition of God in nature and history.”
Footnotes
John Baldovin, quoted in Susan Kroll, Toward the Origins of Christmas (Kampen, Netherlands: Kok Pharos Publishing House, 1995), 119.
