Tikkun Magazine, November/December 2005

Christmas As Archetype

by Matthew Fox

Let's not talk about Jesus at all. Let's talk about ourselves. Who are we? What do we entail? Who do we carry around inside of us? How do we connect to the Divine, to Yahweh, to the Source of all things, to the poor and neglected? Yes, let's talk about Christmas.

Christmas has become an archetype. That is its power. It means many things to many people, and some of these things are just plain offensive. Among the offensive things would be the glut of materialism and consumerism that characterizes the season in a consumer-dominated culture, or the sentimentalism that wallows in nostalgia.

But what are the deepest meanings of this archetype called Christmas?

Christmas is non-triumphal. That is to say, it is not about the victory of any empire, god, tribe, or human enterprise. It is not history written by the conquerors. Quite the opposite: It is "history," or at least a story, about the non-conquerors, the unsuccessful, the non-empire-builders. Christmas is a story about a couple, pregnant and poor with no home or hotel to take them in for their child's arrival. A story not so far fetched given today's world of poverty and exclusion, not just in the "third world," but even—as we saw in New Orleans in September—in the hidden corners and neighborhoods of our own cities.

Christmas is a story about the poor triumphing over life's tough challenges. Like bringing a child into the world. Bringing a child into a corner of the world that is not hospitable to the event, because the parents don't have the means.

Christmas is a story about bringing a child into the world in the midst of the four-legged creatures, in the hay, in the manger where animals feed. It is about laying a child in a manger, not in a pristine bassinet; in a manger, not in a sterilized hospital ward. Christmas is a story about survival.

But it is more than that. The archetype of Christmas also speaks to just what a child is. Who is a human child? Not only the son of a king, the son of a president, the daughter of a rock star—not only the identity of a well-known or well placed child, but the "every child," including the poorest of children born to the poorest of parents in the poorest of circumstances—in a stable, a barn, a ghetto, or a peasant village. What about that child? What is his or her worth?

That is the news that Christmas brings: That a child who comes into the world, however unconnected, however poor and insignificant, however unheralded, is a son or daughter of God. Is wisdom incarnate. Is Emmanuel, God-among-us. Is worth a great deal.

There lies the Good News of this archetype. It stretches the imagination to suggest it, especially in light of how many humans have been destroyed by each other over the past centuries in wars and other atrocities. But that is the lesson staring us in the face on Christmas: That every child is precious and counts, counts more than we can imagine. Every child is a unique face of God, a unique image of the Divine One who remains so often shy and hidden, but who becomes manifest in creatures—including the human creature, the helpless baby who will grow, we hope, into a compassionate adult.

Is such a story credible? Does it take more faith than we can muster in this hardened twenty-first century? What are the implications of this lesson—for education, for example? For economics? For politics? For religion? For the media? If every child is a son or daughter of God, a bearer of Divine Wisdom, what about every adult? Is this Godlike-ness, this God-among-us, lost as we grow older? If so, why? If so, can we get it back? And how do we do that?

What would a society—or better, a community—look like if we all committed to every human child and every human adult being an image of the living God? Being a "Buddha nature"? Or "another Christ"? Or the Shechinah in our midst?

These are challenging questions, which is why Christmas is not going away, no matter how woefully consumerist culture beats up on it, or how stiflingly institutional religion fails to plumb its deeper meaning. "We are all meant to be mothers of God," the great mystic Meister Eckhart preached in a Christmas sermon seven centuries ago. The news does not stop with our being divine children, but insists that we ourselves give birth to the divine child on a regular basis—in our children, in our creativity, in our work, in all our relationships.

A deep Christmas to us all.

Matthew Fox is president of Wisdom University in Oakland, California. He is the author of twenty-six books.

Source Citation

Fox, Matthew. 2005. Christmas as archetype. Tikkun 20(6):17.