Christmas Is Coming - Is This Good News?

‘And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins…  After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God.  “The time has come,” he said.  “The kingdom of God is near.  Repent and believe the good news!”’  Mark 1:4, 1:14-15

When it’s coming up to Christmas, I am frequently ambivalent about whether this is good news or not.  It’s not that I don’t believe that Jesus was born (even though he probably wasn’t born on December 25^th), but that I’m not always sure that I trust him to be good news for us.  If he isn’t, then Christmas for me carries similar overtones to the spoof Christmas carol my friend Doom Metal Singer found for me: Death to the World! 

About ten years ago, a visiting preacher at the church I then went to asked the congregation how we would sum up the message of the gospel in one sentence.  We wrote various answers, generally on the theme of grace and atonement.  The preacher remarked that these were ‘very nice’ but that if we looked at the Bible to find out what the gospel message was that Jesus preached, we would see that it was the same that John the Baptist had preached before him: repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is coming.  And, he said, the Kingdom of Heaven is first and foremost about justice.

Now, you could argue that, as a central belief in Christianity is that Jesus, by dying and being miraculously raised to life, has changed the situation for humanity.  From this point of view, a more useful way of understanding what the gospel message for Christians is would be to study what Jesus’s disciples after his resurrection taught about his significance.  But to understand what Jesus would want to achieve, we still need to read the gospels to form an idea of Jesus’s values and priorities.

At the time that I heard this sermon, I was terrified.  I was convinced that justice as Jesus saw it was neither the social justice that Judaism aims towards, nor the Evangelicals’ pseudo-justice of ‘someone has to be punished for your sins, but Jesus has already taken your punishment for you, so that’s all right,’ which I could see was anything but just. 

I suspected that Jesus’s idea of justice was more a matter of retributive justice along the lines of: ‘If you haven’t done enough good things, meeting the needs of everyone who was in need – if there was even one person whom you didn’t help, because you had nothing left to give – then you’re going to suffer eternal punishment in hell.  But also, unless you’re a penniless, sick and starving beggar with no money to give to anyone in the first place, you’ve already had your share of good things, so you’re going to be tortured in hell.  If you have ever done anything bad, it proves that you come from bad seed planted by the Devil, so you are incapable of doing anything good and will go to hell.  And all mortals are evil, since no-one is good except God, so you’re all going to burn in hell.’

I couldn’t see that this was good news from my point of view, and I felt ashamed of not welcoming it.  Having grown up in an Evangelical church, I was used to the idea that, by God’s standard of perfection, we are all sinners and all deserve to go to hell.  So I felt ashamed of having been so seduced by the traditional Christian belief in forgiveness that I couldn’t value justice.  Surely I ought to accept that it was objectively good that we were all going to get what we deserved, even if it didn’t feel pleasant, from my selfish point of view, to be tortured forever?

I’m sure this wasn’t what the preacher meant – their message, if I had stayed to listen to it, was probably about social justice.  And I know that my interpretation wasn’t exactly – not to that extent, anyway – the way that any Christian except me had ever interpreted the Bible.  But it probably isn’t far from what most non-Christians think Christians believe.  Most people whom I see criticising Christianity seem to consider either that Christians are full of neurotic guilt and feel irrationally guilty over nothing, or that Christians are sociopaths who care about nothing except getting away with their crimes and delight in being as evil as possible because Jesus has taken their punishment for them.  And, in turn, either of these attitudes probably isn’t far from how at least some Christians do think.

I keep seeing questions on the internet from anxious Christians, probably mostly teenagers, wanting clarification on what is or isn’t allowed.  Is it a sin, they ask, to read fanfiction, or to hold a simulated conversation with a chatbot programmed to talk like their favourite fictional character?  Is it a sin to eat snacks, or to miss a gym session, or to cut down from reading 10 chapters of the Bible per day?

Well-meaning people try to reassure them by saying, ‘Grow up!  There’s no such thing as sin – the Church just invented the ideas of God and sin to terrorise people into conformity.’  But in practice, I’m sure the people who write this would consider it wrong, for example, to harm or oppress anyone.  Just because some people’s scruples and anxieties aren’t about real sins doesn’t mean that there aren’t things we do which harm ourselves, each other, or the environment.  Even for those of us who are generally amiable, there are always things that we could do better.

The obvious flaw in interpreting Jesus’s message as ‘You’re all doomed,’ is that people clearly did hear his message as good news.  John the Baptist, and Jesus after him, urged people to repent of their sins and be forgiven, and people flocked to them.  Forgiveness isn’t a matter of getting a free pass to commit atrocities if you’ve received a token ritual of baptism, but neither is the message of the gospel about spending the rest of your life feeling miserable and hating yourself and never doing anything you enjoy in case it might be a sin.  It is about finding a better way to live, in harmony with each other and with God.