Finding a Nativity Set for Christmas

Finding a Nativity Set for Christmas

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            This is the first Christmas that I have been actively following blogs I learned about through Facebook and/or Twitter.  I’ve had my thinking challenged, but also at times have thought that maybe I had something to say to some of the various conversations taking place.  I think of one of the persons whose twitter messages I follow who is into “enneagrams”.  I had no idea what she was talking about, so searched the internet and discovered it had to do with a system for categorizing various people’s character traits.  I have a double-minded view of such things.  Yes, I think that behavior traits often come in groups of strengths and weaknesses such as how introverts may have a hard time making a lot of friends, and how they often are quite serious in their thoughts.  So there is something to psychologically categorizing how people behave.  I think sometimes we understand ourselves just a little better by seeing ourselves through such prisms.  But still people are individuals who defy ultimate categorization.  We are developing who are becoming tomorrow from what we are today.  Someone shy, fearful and lacking confidence may one day become confident and assertive because of their newfound confidence.  Our personalities change with growth.  There was something in the enneagram categories I found that is a part of the reason I wrote this blog.

            I looked over the categories of one of the enneagram systems.  I didn’t take the test, but a category grabbed my attention.  It was a category for “peacemakers.”  I’d like to imagine I am a peacemaker.  I have some of the weaknesses mentioned.  But I know I am a flawed peacemaker, if I am one.  Still, sometimes in these past months of trying to figure out where I am on some of the issues dividing modern Christians, I have felt like I needed to stand in the middle and say to everyone else “Do you ever simply listen to one another?”

            It’s taken me awhile to get to the topic of my title.  But this year, in the blogosphere, and on Facebook and in Twitter Land we’ve been rethinking our cherished nativity sets.  I spent many years in my younger days being a real Scrooge when it came to nativity sets.  I was an iconoclastic Calvinist that viewed nativity scenes as idolatry.  I wasn’t declaring everyone lost who had nativity scenes but I thought they had an incomplete view of sanctification.  I thought they were like those generations in the history of Judah when God’s people got rid of their idols but not their high places.  Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate the view of the ancient church which recognized that something dramatic took place with the coming of Christ, something so dramatic that it caused a change in how that commandment against graven images would be kept following Christ’s coming in the flesh.  Before he did so it was inappropriate to express and portray God within the creation.  God created the creation and was distinct from it – end of discussion.  But then Jesus became one of us.  He was conceived by the Holy Spirit as the Nicene Creed testified and took up residence as the fully human and fully divine son of the Virgin Mary.  That is part of why there is a mystery that surrounds Mary, her person, and how she should be viewed as the one blessed above all women.  To some degree, every woman has a right when they are with child to realize that their bodies have become a temple to bring forth a being created in the image of God.  But Mary’s pregnancy was distinct according to the Scriptures, she was carrying one who was fully God and fully man, truly God and not just in the image of God.  She was the temple in which God had chosen to dwell as he entered the creation in preparation to his birth and arrival into human society.  Many of the ancient theologians thought this changed everything about God’s relationship with the creation.  God, in the person of Jesus Christ, became a part of the creation like he had never been before the incarnation.  That is why the ancient fathers, for the most part, took the view that it was permissible and maybe even advantageous to use the various forms of art to present Biblically described perspectives of the life of Christ in human flesh.  God had entered his creation in the person of Jesus Christ and this made a great difference.

            The debate over nativity scenes and how one ought to present Christ as come into the world became heated this advent season.  Megyn Kelly, a commentator on Fox news became part of the news and the story of the day when she tried to assert that Jesus was white.  She has come around to acknowledge that wasn’t as certain as the assertion she had voiced.  For that reason, I don’t want to have much to do with lambasting what she said.  Still, how many of us with our white European styled nativity scenes and paintings of Jesus have come to think without questioning the thought that Jesus was white, maybe not Swedish white, but certainly French or northern Italian white?  We’ve thought of Jesus in a European style without ever questioning it, at least too many of us have.  There is some reason to believe that he probably resembled more a middle-Eastern man than a European.

            Rachel Held Evans is another person I follow on Twitter.  She has described the difficulty she has found in finding anything resembling a historically accurate rendition of the nativity scene.  She found mostly European nativity scenes.  Some had a blonde-headed Virgin Mary, and others had definitely historically questionable portraits of the holy family in their original Bethlehem setting.  She found one nativity set from the nation of Peru, in which the holy family was dressed complete in traditional Peruvian clothing and appeared Peruvian instead of European or Middle Eastern.  She found that she looked seemingly in vain for what might likely be an accurate artistic expression of the historical first Christmas.

            I can remember reading Jaroslav Pelikan’s first two volumes of his history of Christian dogma.  In those two volumes Pelikan pointed out that theologically the early church came to view Christ as the representative of “everyman.”  There was a recognition among the Church Fathers that Jesus, while coming into the world born in a Jewish family, had come ultimately not just for the Jewish people but for all humankind.  Therefore, there was a sense if not historically accurate, that it was theologically accurate for people to view Christ as come into their form of humanity.  He was born for each and for all of us.  That is something to remember this Christmas season.

Given that sense of things, I am not one to say toss out your European based understandings of the nativity scene.  But there is a real problem when we who are white have begun to claim an exclusive right to have Christ viewed as one of us, in our own skin color, in our own cultural perspectives, etc.  We have to pull back and ask if our nativity scenes, so many millions of them portraying Jesus, the European Jesus, haven’t become something sending a message most of us never intended to send.  We wanted to see Jesus come into our culture and among our people, and theologically that was alright.  But if that conveys the message that he did not come for other races, tribes, and cultural perspectives, then something is dreadfully wrong.

            For this reason, Catholicism and also Eastern Orthodoxy has been content to have Christ portrayed within Christian art as one of us, in whatever tribe or nation we have existed.  There have been oriental forms of Jesus placed in cathedrals in Japan and China.  It is probably not historically accurate that Jesus is portrayed as a European or as a Peruvian in a nativity set, but theologically it is essential for Jesus to be understood as having come to be a living participant in our culture, among our people, in our skin color, whatever that may be for each of us.  We must escape this “Jesus is white” mentality that we may foster “Jesus is one of us, one of all of us” mentality.

            So, I am wondering now what would be the best nativity set.  Would it be to find a historically accurate nativity scene?  Or maybe we should begin a collection of all the varied nativity sets showing how the artists of each culture have perceived Jesus' birth as being a birth into their culture.

            In the midst of such discussions, and I think predating the Megyn Kelly fiasco, Rachel Pieh Jones took some time to describe how her view of the nativity has taken shape since she moved from Minnesota to Djibouti, a small nation existing along the Red Sea between Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia.  I hope everyone that enjoys this blog will read hers.  See her take on the nativity scene.

            In conclusion, God’s peace and good will toward all for Jesus Christ was born on that first Christmas Day – “He was born to become one of us, born for Jews and Gentiles, whites, blacks, aborigines, natives, and Orientals across the globe, and he has intended to be known by and to dwell with every tribe and people on this earthen ball.  That is what I would like to focus upon when I buy my next nativity set for Christmas.