Editorial December 22, 1928 Issue

Christmas

Albert F. Gilmore

Should we undertake to define the reasons why all Christendom celebrates the birth of the Saviour, there would be a variety of answers, and prominent among them would probably be this: Because it marks the beginning of the earthly experience of him who, above all others that have lived on earth, recognized most completely the fatherhood of God and, in consequence, the brotherhood of man. Since God is the Father of all, all, having a common Father, are brethren in the true sense of brotherhood. This fundamental fact bases the life and works of Christ Jesus. His entire ministry, with all its marvelous manifestations and their priceless implications, revolves about the great central fact of God, the Father of all.

"I and my Father are one," Jesus told the Jews who tried by their sophistry to entrap him. And when they accused him of blasphemy because, as they alleged, he made himself God, he replied: "Say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God? If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not." Could words more plainly convey the fact of God's fatherhood? Moreover, he whom God had sanctified, and who knew the Father as none other has known Him, on many occasions and under a great variety of circumstances declared his sonship with God. But Jesus did not confine God's relation as Father to himself alone. Just as emphatically he declared the fatherhood of God for others. "Call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven," he told both his disciples and the multitude. Again and again did Jesus, both directly and by implication, declare the common fatherhood of God. Furthermore, he lived in constant realization and recognition of the transcendent fact that he was sent of the Father; that he came in obedience to God's will. Constantly was he aware of the divine presence, and to "practice the presence of God" was his unceasing endeavor.

So completely did Jesus live in the consciousness of the omnipresent and omnipotent Father that he could avail himself of divine aid under all conditions. It was because of his realization of the unchanging serenity of the divine that he stilled the tempest; likewise, it was through his unequaled assurance of the operation of spiritual law that "without meal or monad," as Mrs. Eddy says on page 90 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," he fed the multitudes with a few loaves and fishes. On that fateful night on the slopes of Olivet, when the emissaries of the law came to apprehend him, although surrendering himself without a struggle he said to Peter that, did he choose, he could call down forces so great as completely to overwhelm them. He submitted to their will because he foreknew the indignities he was to suffer and the demonstration he was to make in order to fulfill his mission as Saviour and Way-shower to mankind.

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