One of the great retrievals that has happened in biblical scholarship in the past twenty or thirty years, one that I have returned to over and over again, is a rediscovery of the fact that we Christians basically are no more than a kind of reformed version of Judaism. On Christmas day I think it is particularly useful to review this fact and its implications because we can understand Christmas only if we see it as the kind of conclusion, or the apogee, of the whole business of the Jews' faith about, who God was, what we human beings were, and how the world is shaped.

If you read the Hebrew Bible, the one great problem that emerges constantly in the writings of the prophets and the great legal texts, is idolatry. Idolatry means a misidentification of the divine. You see this over and over again in these texts. For instance, if you take the Creation stories, which were written very late, the writers point out that God made the stars, sun, and the moon. In these stories, the writers say things that were contrary to the religiosity of most of the people in the ancient Near East. The stories state: No, we are not ruled by the stars. Human beings are not under the control of astral spirits. Nor are we under the control of the powers of fertility because God made the trees, plants, and animals to make little trees, plants, and animals. Therefore, we need not worship the powers of fertility as virtually everybody on the face of the earth did for a long, long time because this is a misidentification of the divine. And, of course, at the heart of this insight was the Exodus narrative. It contains probably the most stunning passage, certainly in the Hebrew Bible, maybe in the whole Bible There out of the silence of God comes the world, this strage, anomalous Jewish God, who addresses the human scene with those extraordinary words: "I have seen the oppression of my people. I have come to relieve their suffering". In other words, from the Jewish point of view, the heart of all oppression, the heart of all idolatry, is precisely this misidentification of what is divine, because if you can point to a state, culture, philosophy, religion or economic system and say this is God-intended, if not itself divine, then you can legitimately subordinate and oppress everybody else in the name of religion. And that is what idolatry is. And I think that this is important today in another way. For example, I just saw the film, Contact, and it is expressive of a current mood, based on the idea that we human beings somehow have a cosmic locale. I believe that this is certainly true and faithful to the biblical material. But the film almost seems to be advocating that these great cosmic scenes, the marvels of the universe, in their very beauty, are enough to testify to some kind of transcendent power. Although Carl Sagan who wrote the text for this film was an atheist.

What happens in Christmas? What happens in what the Christians later came to see as the incarnation of God? It is simply a reaffirmation of the central fact of the Jews' belief that the only place where you can find the image of God is in us human beings. It is not in some great structure, however awe-inspiring, whether ecclesiastical, political, or economical. And as we see the history of the Jews, as we see our own history as Christians, we see the tendency to idolatrize any of those structures. This is constantly at work. It just occurred to me recently that Charles Dickens, who is a kind of patron saint of Christmas, had Karl Marx as his contemporary. Dickens would have been well advised to write A Christmas Carol after he had read Das Kapital because what Marx does, far better than Dickens, is to iluminate this human tendency to suppress human beings in the name of some greater cause.

So, what happens with Jesus? Here is this one human being who took everybody seriously. This man, this Jewish man, let everybody be. Why? Because of their academic reputation, bank account, or wardrobe? No, he let them be simply because they were human beings. And he did it in a way in which he kept pointing to the most meagre, negligible parts of his society: women, the poor, handicapped people, and social outcasts. And in doing so, of course, there is a continuation of this great Jewish protest against the tendency that we human beings seem to have with wanting to divinize things of our own making. I suspect because we feel so fragile that unless we can do this our lives are insignificant. But Jesus does this radically different thing and says, "No. We cannot point to the church, government, or Bank of Montreal, we cannot point to any institution and say that in the name of those institutions, or those structures, another human being can be subordinated. In fact, it is precisely because of the inviolability of every human being that all institutions must stand under critique. Which is, of course, why I bring up Karl Marx, because this is exactly what he did. And writers have pointed out over and over again that Marx, although he was an atheist-Jew, stood very much in the line of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Ezekiel, and all the rest of the Jewish prophets. Thus, what Christmas does is to precisely bring this Jewish thing to completion because it celebrates that in this human being, who was radically open to everybody else, there is a transparency to the God who moves against our own tendencies to oppress each other.

It is very interesting. I listened to an interview with William Buckley, who is a Roman Catholic, and he is very bright. He has written several books on religion. He published his first book when he was an undergraduate at Yale and it was entitled God and Man at Yale. In the interview he spoke of a cheeky, sort of cheap atheism that was prevalent on the Yale campus in the 1950's. But he said that it is the absolute centrality of the individual, the human individual who is supreme. This is how he combines his own Catholicism with his world view. I understand what he is saying but I think he is wrong. It is not the question of the supremacy of the individual, it is the question of the supremacy of human connections because the other thing that the biblical texts tell us, (this too comes from Genesis) is that there is no such thing as the isolated supreme individual - because it is not good for human beings to be alone.

And so, this, I suggest to you, is what we are supposed to be celebrating at Christmas. Christmas is a politically explosive feast in its genuine meaning, because it calls into question all of our tendencies to misdescribe divinity. And I should have said earlier that by our ascribing of divinity to various institutions and structures I meant giving absolute power and value to anything else other than real human connections. And only this can give some kind of meaning to that notion of "A Merry Christmas". "A Merry Christmas" means what? It is the merriment of God in having created this diverse human race with various genders, colours, speech patterns, and sexual orientations, all manner of diversity, in order to become a family. And we cannot curtail the limits of that family and still be faithful to this man who was there for everyone and with everyone. And that is why, to go back to my first assertion, Christmas is essentially the completion of what Judaism was all about. I truly believe that this is the only thing that gives it the prospect of real joy to the world because joy, in so far as it is privatized, circumscribed, and limited to me and the safe environment of my circle of friends is too fragile and artificial a kind of joy. Christmas calls us to something larger than that.