Christmas
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.
What is the significance of this great fact of the fatherhood of God, both in relation to Christ Jesus and to mankind? As Christ Jesus claimed for himself this divine relationship, so may all mankind lay equal claim to the divine origin of man, of sonship with God! Not the mortal, material sense of man! No, far from it! God could scarcely be conceived of as the creator of so frail and fallible a creature. Man born of woman, whom Job declared to be of "few days, and full of trouble," has none of the characteristics of the son of God. God's children are spiritual, the perfect ideas of Mind, perfect and harmonious, coexisting and coeternal with God. They possess by reflection all the qualities, all the attributes, of God. How marvelous to be a son of God! Yet all may claim this sonship, not for the false material sense of selfhood, but for the true spiritual self, the real man.
John's familiar words, "Now are we the sons of God," offer no limitation to this precious heritage of sonship with Him. Rather does he imply that man, unfolding and developing forever as the spiritual idea, passes from glory to glory. Mrs. Eddy makes it very clear on page 258 of Science and Health that man is not static, but constantly unfolds spiritual perfection. "God expresses in man," she states, "the infinite idea forever developing itself, broadening and rising higher and higher from a boundless basis." How true, then, was John's vision when he declared, "It doth not yet appear what we shall be." Surely, to the idea forever developing, the infinitude of God's glory progressively unfolds.
In discussing the unfoldment of the sense of Deity from the early Jewish concept, on pages 576 and 577 of Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy states, "This human sense of Deity yields to the divine sense, even as the material sense of personality yields to the incorporeal sense of God and man as the infinite Principle and infinite idea,—as one Father with His universal family, held in the gospel of Love." And she closes the paragraph with this sweetly significant statement: "In this divinely united spiritual consciousness, there is no impediment to eternal bliss,—to the perfectibility of God's creation." What wonder that the Christmas bells joyously acclaim the recurrence of the birthday of him who showed the way to eternal bliss, to Life everlasting, to man's perfection, and to changeless glory!
Albert F. Gilmore
