Christmas, 2025
- George Elder
- 14 minutes ago
- 4 min read
By George Elder, Christmas Eve, 2025
My “Christmas present” to readers last year was an early scripture that did not make it into the Bible as we know it (the official canon itself was not firm until around the 4th century). We heard from a midwife at the birth of Christ that he was born as a “fantastically bright light”—and only afterward “shrank, imitated the shape of an infant.” Even then, “he had no weight like other babies who are born . . . but he was in his body totally shining.” Christians read that and believed it for centuries.
The Dutch painter Gerhard von Honthorst captures some of that “shining” in his depiction of the Nativity in which Jesus’s body is the only source of the painting’s light.
This miracle did not happen, of course, but it can be understood psychologically (and valued) as an image of the birth of the “light” of consciousness. We are being told that any increase in consciousness is a momentous event—even divine. It is the meaning of Christmas.
This emphasis on light, however, can lead to a distorted view of the religious life as all “sweetness and light.” It is one of the criticisms of so-called New Age religions. Unfortunately, it is also the tone of many Christmas carols (“all is calm, all is bright”)—while having to listen to “Santa Baby” at the grocery store intimates that Christmas and what it represents is all quite shallow.
Our early scripture, however, does not have this light touch. The midwife said repeatedly that she was “amazed,” that “awe gripped” her, that she was also “terrified.” It is why the comparativist Rudolf Otto defined religious experience as, at once, mysterium, tremendum, et fascinans—using Latin to draw our feelings toward antiquity. Jung would say these Latin words refer to an “age old” and “typical” (i.e., archetypal) experience of the sacred, the numinosum. Otto coined this last term from numen, “god” or the “nodding of a god” in response to prayer. (Idea of the Holy)
As modern persons, we can learn from this. When we find ourselves amazed and awe-struck, and terrified at the same time, then we are in the presence of the numinosum and having a religious experience. We are, by definition, experiencing the sacred and should be aware of that fact—even if not traditional--to give it sufficient weight. We might even be saying, “Oh, my God!”
Christianity’s emphasis upon “light,” not as consciousness, but as niceness is corrected by the Bible itself. We have only one canonical story about Jesus as a boy, when at age twelve he secretly stayed behind in Jerusalem where his family had celebrated Passover and were heading home. It was only later that the parents realized their child was not with them, days later that they found him. How distressing, as any parent can imagine!
True, the precocious boy had been in the Temple discussing matters of religion with the rabbis. But he was also breaking the commandment, “Honor your father and your mother.”
This episode is instructive, too, for modern persons: a genuine religious life may require breaking established rules, refusing to meet parental expectations, causing others distress. But how can it be otherwise if becoming more aware—what Jung calls the process of individuation—is the new meaning of being religious? By definition, this process removes one psychologically from the less conscious group—who as a “rule” do not look kindly on those looking down on them from a higher vantage point. The maverick is a danger to the solidarity of the group, even a heretic. Nor can the heretic avoid guilt for “going it alone,” although one can learn to carry it.
Then there is this non-canonical story when Jesus was even younger. It comes from the same collection of scriptures as that of the awe-struck midwife, dating from the early second century (Cartlidge and Dungan, Documents for the Study of the Gospels, 92):
When this child Jesus was five years old, he was playing at the ford of a stream. He made pools of the rushing water and made it immediately pure; he ordered this by word alone. He made soft clay and modeled twelve sparrows from it. It was the Sabbath when he did this. There were many other children playing with him. A certain Jew saw what Jesus did while playing on the Sabbath; he immediately went and announced to his father Joseph, “See, your child is at the stream, and has taken clay and modeled twelve birds; he has profaned the Sabbath.” Joseph came to the place, and seeing what Jesus did he cried out, “Why do you do on the Sabbath what it is not lawful to do?” Jesus clapped his hands and cried to the sparrows, “Be gone.” And the sparrows flew off chirping.
Here, the Christ Child is breaking the commandment to honor the “sabbath day and keep it holy” by what was construed as work. The story anticipates Jesus’s condoning, as an adult, the behavior of his disciples who were picking corn on the sabbath because they were hungry. (Matthew 12) The Child is also making “carved images”—prohibited to the Jews (and the Muslims) who must have had a tendency to overvalue the visible or the concrete. That the boy caused the clay birds to fly off demonstrates that he is not so inclined.
But what a bad little boy!
Merry Christmas.