the month in special ways. Greeks celebrated the Lenaea, a time for theater, fatty meat-roasts, and uncorking new wine. At the Lenaea, the god Dionysus experienced rebirth. Attended by dancing satyrs and nymphs, he came ready to party. Germans meanwhile hunted and feasted and spoke of Yuletide. The Irish had Wren Day. Agricultural communities rested from their farming duties, but their collective restfulness quickly turned to restlessness. The sedentary ease of the fallow season did not give rise to quiet meditations and gentle repose. It stirred a need to carouse, amuse, and let off steam.
Barrels of new beer became ready to drink in December. The first snap of chilly December weather signaled the arrival of fresh meat. The cold would preserve slaughtered meat from spoiling, and so protein became a staple of December meals, making up for the lack of vegetables and fruits during the cold months. Perhaps the oldest Roman temple on record is the Temple of Saturn, dedicated to the deity of seed and sowing whose holy day began December 17 and continued for a week of festivities.35 During the Saturnalia, priests symbolically unchained the god so as to let him run free. Ordinary commerce was suspended as were the customary rules of behavior and decorum. Slaves might be treated as the equals of their masters, being permitted to wear their clothing and to be waited on at meal time. The plain toga could be exchanged for colorful garments reserved for special occasions. The civil authorities made allowances for gambling in public places and cross-dressing. Friends visited friends and brought gifts of wax candles. Public banquets were held to honor the god. Some of these became raucous and out of control.
The Saturnalia was by far the most popular holiday of the early Romans, although the elite rich tended to endure the frivolities away from the crowds, in a private cubiculum or country estate. When spotted out of doors, the plebs expected the wealthy to shower coins and bread freely from their own hands. The poet Lucian highlights the most extreme behavior and gives us a taste of the Roman holiday: “drinking and being drunk, noise and games and dice, appointing of kings and feasting of slaves, singing naked, clapping of tremulous hands, an occasional ducking of corked faces in icy water.”36
At first glance, the celebration of Saturnalia seems to offer a foretaste of society as it might become if all were treated equally and if money and pride lost their power. But in truth, it did not anticipate a Golden Age, it memorialized one, the Saturnia Regna. Instead of an age of the future, it referred to an age of the past. Fueled by nostalgia, people allowed themselves to follow Saturn’s wistful gaze back to an imaginary era when equality and freedom wafted like incense through the streets, when those who had shared with those who had not, when masters needed no slaves and slaves knew no masters, and when friends did not drag each other to court. The magic of selective memory and wishful thinking took its effect on people as they nodded their heads in agreement: life was better way back when.
Christian faith leaves little space on the shelf for the musty perfume of nostalgia. Jesus Christ, the true Lord of Misrule, did not come to restore a lost kingdom or a Golden Age. In Acts 1 we encounter a puzzling little episode. Jesus had been executed but risen from the dead. He appeared alive to his overwhelmed disciples and held conversation with them. What questions might the disciples like to put to the crucified, dead, and resurrected Messiah? The wonders of heaven? The harrowing of hell? the sensation of coming back to life? Instead, in Acts 1:6 the disciples asked, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” This is the best they can come up with. What an odd question! What does it mean? They seem to be asking if Jesus now intended to raise up an army, evict the Romans and the Greeks, reestablish the Davidic throne, and usher in a new Golden Age in Israel’s history. Now that he had come back from the dead in power, they wanted to know if he intended to use that power to make everything like it had been under King David. It’s like they were asking, “Are you about to bring back the good old days?”
They missed the point completely.
The resurrected Lord responded that it was not for them to know or waste time with such things as the Father set by his own authority. Jesus instructed them to wait until they received the Holy Spirit in power to carry out the Gospel message first to Jerusalem and Judea, then Samaria and the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8). It was no mere kingdom of Israel that he had come to restore. “Behold,” he says, “I make all things new” (Rev 21:5).
Jesus is no Saturn. He is not the God of pleasant memories but the God of things yet to come; not the God of the dead but of the living. Believers drink the cup and eat the bread of communion not simply as a way of recollecting the Lord’s last meal, but of repeating it and so participating in the experience of his death and sacrifice. It is remembrance in the form of repetition and expectation. Communion does not snare the mind in nostalgia, it anticipates the heavenly banquet where we will sit at the common table of the Lord and share his bread.
Christmas faith celebrates the advent of something new, not the return to what formerly was. We must reject the notion that salvation aims to restore a spiritual, intellectual, and physical perfection lost in the fall. It is not the case that in the paradise of Eden humankind enjoyed all perfections which were then shattered and lost in the catastrophe of sin and disobedience. This picture of things makes it seem that Christ came to earth as a cosmic Plan B, an impromptu solution to fix what went unexpectedly wrong in a perfect system. Sin neither caught God unawares nor did it destroy God’s creation. God created a good world and declared the creation of humankind to be very good (Gen 1:31). The fleshlings of creation stood before one another naked and innocent, not knowing good and evil, to be sure. But they were not perfect. They were innocent. Perfection comes with wisdom, and wisdom comes through the Word, and the Word came through Mary and was born and dwelt among us. Faith in the Word is trust that the one who began a good work will see it to completion, and that the same God who created us will also resurrect us and make us fit to see him face-to-face.
Hope
After faith, the virtue of hope shapes our conviction as people of the Word. In terms of hope, the season for celebrating the Word made flesh anticipates the coming of the new time when death and dying shall be no more and all flesh shall be reborn. Christmas has always been a time to look ahead toward something better, the promise of a millennial age, peace, harmony, and the end of winter. This hope is not unique to the Christians. Long ago humans of all cultures established traditions for ending the cold darkness of winter’s ever-shorter days and ushering in the new year. In a preindustrialized world dependent on the slow turning of the seasons, the new year marked a true turning point. It signaled that winter would spend its strength and spring would soon slumber forward.
In addition to the Saturnalia, later Romans observed the Brumalia in order to mark the winter solstice. Like the Jewish festival of lights, Hanukkah, the Brumalia attended to the passage through the darkest day of the year and the anticipation of the end of winter. Picking up on this solar symbolism, the Emperor Aurelian added the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun to the carnival of festivities in ad 286. The Kalends of January rounded out the season of dissipation and decadence. Initially this celebration of the new year involved the humble exchange of gifts and the sharing of special meals, but by the fourth century the Kalends had become another reason to party with abandon. John Chrysostom (347–407) in a sermon “On the Kalends” described what happened at Antioch in tantalizing detail: lurid jokes and pranks, midnight dancing, processions in the forum, unmixed wine in large bowls, nocturnal feasts, and gaming in the taverns.37 Chrysostom instructed his congregation to resist the temptation posed by such invitations to wantonness for the sake of self-control and Christian holiness. Disciples of Christ must somehow resist the urge to follow the scent of desire wherever it leads.
Yet, Chrysostom did more than shake his head “No”; he also tried to give a new perspective on feasting. The “heathen” reserved feasting for new moons and special occasions. Every day the Christian could enjoy the feast of a clean conscience and good works. Chrysostom’s valiant efforts did not ultimately sway society to drop the charades of
