Each December, a lot of the Christian world enters a well-recognized cycle of celebration: carols, lights, embellished bushes, shopper frenzy and the nice and cozy imagery of a snowy night time. In the USA and Europe, public discourse usually speaks of “Western Christian values”, and even the imprecise notion of “Judeo-Christian civilisation”. These phrases have turn out to be so widespread that many assume, virtually routinely, that Christianity is inherently a Western faith — an expression of European tradition, historical past and id.
It isn’t.
Christianity is, and has all the time been, a West Asian / Center Japanese faith. Its geography, tradition, worldview and founding tales are rooted on this land — amongst peoples, languages and social constructions that look much more like these in right this moment’s Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan than something imagined in Europe. Even Judaism, invoked within the time period “Judeo-Christian values”, is itself a totally Center Japanese phenomenon. The West obtained Christianity — it actually didn’t give beginning to it.
And maybe nothing reveals the gap between Christianity’s origins and its up to date Western expression extra starkly than Christmas — the beginning story of a Palestinian Jew, a toddler of this land who was born lengthy earlier than trendy borders and identities emerged.
What the West product of Christmas
Within the West, Christmas is a cultural market. It’s commercialised, romanticised and wrapped in layers of sentimentality. Lavish gift-giving overshadows any concern for the poor. The season has turn out to be a efficiency of abundance, nostalgia, and consumerism — a vacation stripped of its theological and ethical core.
Even the acquainted traces of the Christmas track Silent Evening obscure the true nature of the story: Jesus was not born into serenity however into upheaval.
He was born underneath navy occupation, to a household displaced by an imperial decree, in a area residing underneath the shadow of violence. The holy household had been pressured to flee as refugees as a result of the infants of Bethlehem, in response to the Gospel narrative, had been massacred by a fearful tyrant decided to protect his reign. Sound acquainted?
Certainly, Christmas is a narrative of empire, injustice and the vulnerability of peculiar individuals caught in its path.
Bethlehem: Creativeness vs actuality
For a lot of within the West, Bethlehem – the birthplace of Jesus – is a spot of creativeness — a postcard from antiquity, frozen in time. The “little city” is remembered as a quaint village from scripture moderately than a residing, respiratory metropolis with precise individuals, with a definite historical past and tradition.
Bethlehem right this moment is surrounded by partitions and checkpoints constructed by an occupier. Its residents stay underneath a system of apartheid and fragmentation. Many really feel minimize off, not solely from Jerusalem – which the occupier doesn’t permit them to go to – but in addition from the worldwide Christian creativeness that venerates Bethlehem’s previous whereas usually ignoring its current.
This sentiment additionally explains why so many within the West, whereas celebrating Christmas, care little in regards to the Christians of Bethlehem. Even worse, many embrace theologies and political attitudes that erase or dismiss our presence fully as a way to help Israel, the empire of right this moment.
In these frameworks, historical Bethlehem is cherished as a sacred concept, however trendy Bethlehem — with its Palestinian Christians struggling and struggling to outlive — is an inconvenient actuality that must be ignored.
This disconnect issues. When Western Christians neglect that Bethlehem is actual, they disconnect from their religious roots. And after they neglect that Bethlehem is actual, additionally they neglect that the story of Christmas is actual.
They neglect that it unfolded amongst a individuals who lived underneath empire, who confronted displacement, who longed for justice, and who believed that God was not distant however amongst them.
What Christmas means for Bethlehem
So what does Christmas appear like when advised from the attitude of the individuals who nonetheless stay the place all of it started — the Palestinian Christians? What that means does it maintain for a tiny group that has preserved its religion for 2 millennia?
At its coronary heart, Christmas is the story of the solidarity of God.
It’s the story of God who doesn’t rule from afar, however is current among the many individuals and takes the facet of these on the margins. The incarnation — the assumption that God took on flesh — will not be a metaphysical abstraction. It’s a radical assertion about the place God chooses to dwell: in vulnerability, in poverty, among the many occupied, amongst these with no energy besides the facility of hope.
Within the Bethlehem story, God identifies not with emperors however with these struggling underneath empire — its victims. God comes not as a warrior however as an toddler. God is current not in a palace however in a manger. That is divine solidarity in its most hanging kind: God joins essentially the most susceptible a part of humanity.
Christmas, then, is the proclamation of a God who confronts the logic of empire.
For Palestinians right this moment, this isn’t merely theology — it’s lived expertise. After we learn the Christmas story, we recognise our personal world: the census that pressured Mary and Joseph to journey resembles the permits, checkpoints and bureaucratic controls that form our day by day lives right this moment. The holy household’s flight resonates with the hundreds of thousands of refugees who’ve fled wars throughout our area. Herod’s violence echoes within the violence we see round us.
Christmas is a Palestinian story par excellence.
A message to the world
Bethlehem celebrates Christmas for the primary time after two years with out public festivities. It was painful but essential for us to cancel our celebrations; we had no selection.
A genocide was unfolding in Gaza, and as individuals who nonetheless stay within the homeland of Christmas, we couldn’t fake in any other case. We couldn’t have fun the beginning of Jesus whereas kids his age had been being pulled lifeless from the rubble.
Celebrating this season doesn’t imply the battle, the genocide, or the constructions of apartheid have ended. Persons are nonetheless being killed. We’re nonetheless besieged.
As an alternative, our celebration is an act of resilience — a declaration that we’re nonetheless right here, that Bethlehem stays the capital of Christmas, and that the story this city tells should proceed.
At a time when Western political discourse more and more weaponises Christianity as a marker of cultural id — usually excluding the very individuals amongst whom Christianity was born — it is important to return to the roots of this story.
This Christmas, our invitation to the worldwide church — and to Western Christians specifically — is to recollect the place the story started. To do not forget that Bethlehem will not be a fable however a spot the place individuals nonetheless stay. If the Christian world is to honour the that means of Christmas, it should flip its gaze to Bethlehem — not the imagined one, however the actual one, a city whose individuals right this moment nonetheless cry out for justice, dignity and peace.
To recollect Bethlehem is to do not forget that God stands with the oppressed — and that the followers of Jesus are referred to as to do the identical.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
