Christmas and Distance
Christmas, we’ve been told, is all about closeness.
“Being together” with loved ones for the holidays. Taking a break from work to connect with family and friends. Gathering for worship. Even Jesus’ celebrated name, “Emmanuel,” means “God with Us.”
And yet this year, for many all over the world, the opposite seems true. The very idea of togetherness now can seem fraught, even dangerous. As COVID, the flu virus, and RSV sweep over the planet, even the simplest gatherings and travel plans are complicated — not to mention the people across the globe who are, because of illness or war or migration or estrangement, at a considerable distance from those they love.
It’s the opposite of closeness, the opposite of Christmas.
Or is it?
Harrowing and heartbreaking and annoying as these circumstances are, they can also call our attention to dimensions of the season we might otherwise overlook. On second thought, maybe Christmas is about distance after all.
The stories themselves are full of spans and separations. Gabriel comes to Mary, it’s true, and the shepherds and the Magi come to see Jesus — but they all arrive as uncanny strangers, and the holy family, after all, has just been through the ordeal of birth. As many of the finest paintings of these stories over the centuries depict them, everyone keeps their distance, and the pilgrims are soon on their way.
The angels do call to the shepherds — but they do so out on the open hillsides, across a grand distance on a cold winter’s night. The Magi notice a star a long, long way off, and set out to follow it. The vast majority of their journey isn’t about closeness, but rather about longing for closeness, seeking out something far away.
Moreover, according to Luke, Mary and Joseph are far from their native town, holed up in a makeshift shelter; no doubt they felt isolated and homesick. And those shepherds up on the hillside are remote from just about everything. The fact that the angels come to them, and not to Jerusalem or Rome, is a surprise: the story’s central idea is that God is slipping into the world quietly, far away from virtually everyone. God has come, incarnate in the flesh — but hardly anyone knows! In a way, the “with us” in “God with Us” is a kind of whispered promise in these stories, something yet to come.
In both Matthew and Luke, then, Christmas is a time of yearning across distance. It’s a glimpse of coming closeness, and at the same time, it underscores the current separation, the journey yet to be traveled. Jesus comes to bridge the distance, to reconcile, to show us the Way — but his birth is only the beginning. Even as the Magi present their gifts, Herod’s henchmen sharpen their knives. There’s so much work to do.
Over the years, the popular music of the season has intuited this underlying longing. The best-selling Christmas song of all time is Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” first performed in 1941 — a melancholy song many associate with soldiers pining for home across an ocean. Indeed, Christmas songs often bring with them a kind of sadness, sometimes unbearable, as we miss loved ones we’ve lost in one way or another.
Finally, even the deep poetry of the winter solstice can be reconceived in this way. On one hand, the light is indeed returning: each day will now be a couple of minutes longer than the day before. But on the other hand, even so, the reality remains that these are among the longest nights of the year. It’ll be a good while before the luxurious days of late spring and summer come back around. The Messiah’s birth marks a turning of the tide, but there’s still a long way to go.
And so if Christmases past gave us glimpses of the togetherness and intimacy at the heart of the Gospel, this year’s Christmas, like last year’s, may give us a glimpse of another set of indispensable ideas. There is distance, too, at the heart of Christmas. It takes many forms, but it most often comes down to this: yearning across a span of space or time. Calling out good news to people afar off, from whom we’re separated by the brisk air of a cold winter’s night — or by health concerns, or pixels, or miles. Noticing an encouraging sign, like a distant star, and resolving to make our way toward it, step by step by step.
Togetherness will come. But in many ways, Christmas begins with distance. Distance between loved ones, and distance between the present state of the world and the world as God desires it to be, the world God calls us to help make real, the world God promises to deliver: the dawning reign of God.
It’s still a season of joy, of course: “God with Us” really is born this day, and the nights really are getting shorter. But it’s also a season of yearning for what’s to come, mourning for what we’ve lost, and renewing our trust that God is with us in the distance, with us in the longing, with us as we go.
Blessed Christmas,
The SALT Team