Christmas without the Incarnation

When you get the start of the story very wrong, can you be sure that the developing plot will not diverge from the blessings of the story's climax?

Charles M. Schulz, cartoonist and creator of the popular comic strip Peanuts, was asked in 1965 to make a special television program for Christmas that year. Through his character Linus, the blanket-clutching kid brother of Lucy, Schulz made a famous statement about “what Christmas is all about.”

Schulz, who passed away in 2000, was a Christian. So he reportedly told CBS that he would make the special on the condition that he could include the Christmas story. In A Charlie Brown Christmas when it was first broadcast in December 1965, little Linus responds to Charlie Brown’s exasperated question, “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” Linus shuffles into the middle of the stage, asks for a spotlight, and recites the Gospel according to Luke 2:8-14 with its classic King James expression, “and they were sore afraid.”

The remarkable statement that Schulz made in the drawings themselves, perhaps missed by many viewers, was that when Linus recites the words of the Lord’s angel, “Fear not!,” he drops his blanket.

This December three young fathers and I have set ourselves to preach “what Christmas is all about” in our little local church. We’ve been treating New Testament texts on the Incarnation — the taking on of human “flesh” by the Word who was with God and who was God. For the story does not start in Bethlehem, Judea, but rather “In the beginning.”

So Joshua initiated the series by proclaiming the One who “being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped” from Philippians 2. Jesse explained how the eternal Son became human in order to deal with the sin of Adam and the death it brought to humanity, from Romans 5. This past Sunday Chett told us that “God sent his Son, born of a woman…” so that He could redeem people, adopt them, and — incredibly — make them His heirs, from Galatians 4.

I give the last message of the series on Christmas Eve, and I have the pleasure of declaring to our little country community the “Fear not!” of the Gospel. My text teaches that Jesus shared in our humanity “so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death — that is the devil — and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Hebrews 2:14-15).

A number of details about Jesus’ birth are known in Islam because versions of the story appear in the Quran (3.42-47; 19.16-33). Many Christians have been grateful to find these echoes of the Christmas story in the Muslim scripture, and Christians have generally celebrated their similarities to Luke’s first chapter. I invite readers to appreciate these similarities. One of the differences, however, concerns the matter of Incarnation.

At the end of both of its versions, the Quran seems to place deliberate statements to preclude an understanding that “He came down from heaven.” In the third sura the angels indeed tell Mary that her child will be “a word from him” (Q 3.45), but it is not the Word who “became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). Instead, when Mary asks how she will have a child when no man has touched her, the angel answers, “Allah creates whatever he pleases” (Q 3.47). In the nineteenth sura, immediately following the story, the Quran comments, “When [Allah] decrees something, he simply says to it, ‘Be!’ and it is” (Q 19.35). In the Islamic interpretive tradition, these verses have mainly been understood to mean that Jesus was created in the womb of Mary and that the “Be!” of creation is the “word.” A related verse commonly brought in to support this interpretation is Q 3.59: “Sure the likeness of Jesus is, with Allah, as the likeness of Adam. He created him from dust, then he said to him ‘Be!’ and he was.”

Readers will note that this is quite different from the Jesus of Jesse’s message who enters humanity as the second Adam to do away with the sin and death of the first. Can this merely human Jesus of Islam bring the “Fear not!” and set free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death? The baby announced by the angel in Linus’ recitation is ‘a Savior…Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11). The Jesus who destroys “him who holds the power of death” does so by his sacrificial death on the cross.

Some may wonder why I am focusing differences so close to Christmas, a time of peace and good will to humanity. Some readers may simply stop reading. I accept that. Emphasizing similarities is a commonplace of modern Western Christian-Muslim encounter. But I have been at this long enough to question whether a search for similarities alone is more productive than honesty about faith differences combined with respect for the people who hold them. That is a question that deserves its own discussion.

The reason I highlight the difference related to Incarnation is that I believe deeply that the peace and goodwill sung by the angels (Luke 2:14), the “good news of great joy” announced by the angel to all the people (Luke 2:10), and the freedom from the fear of death (Hebrews 2:15) come only because of who Jesus really is. Peace in its most important New Testament sense is not a lack of disagreement, but rather peace between humans and God — “peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Colossians 1:20).

Out of this belief in the New Testament Jesus I sincerely and enthusiastically wish my readers peace and joy at Christmas. Fear not!