A Sorrow That Leads to Death

Humanists Always Get Christmas Wrong

The modern humanist's version of Christmas is relentlessly secular. He manufacturers all sorts of work-arounds to re-interpret, re-frame, reconstitute Christmas so as to avoid its meaning and implications which are, after all, painful.

Christmas is painful because it reminds us that we need atonement. We are lost, cut off, and alienated from God. There is never a day in which we have not sinned in thought, word, or deed. It is not just that we do the odd, occasional wrong. It is that we are sinful and sin touches and perverts everything. We commit true moral evils by what we commit and omit. The joy of Christmas is that God has provided atonement for our sins and that the atoning One is the child born of Mary in Bethlehem.

This should be good news to all who realise their unworthiness and moral defalcation. Humbling news, but good news. But humanists have a thousand work-arounds to avoid this truth, to pass hurriedly by on the other side of the road. To accept Christ's atonement on our behalf is the ultimate humiliation of man, whilst at the very same time it is his ultimate glory. The humanist always wants the glory, but not the other.

One Judy Lightfoot, an educator from Seattle, wrote a personal reflection about Christmas that involved her coming to understand she was sinful. Well, she did not put it in those terms--she did not believe she had true moral guilt as a sinner before a holy and angry God. But she came to a point in her life, she said, where she understood that although she was successful in the world's eyes, she had done some truly evil things.

On the whole, I thought quite well of myself until several years ago, when one winter night I sat up in bed next to my sleeping husband with the sudden realization that I’d done terrible things. You know the kinds of regrets you periodically remember through your life, and the way they sting every time? That night I thought about how I’d cherished grudges against a difficult colleague — perhaps because news of her serious illness had arrived that day. Right on top of it came the thought that my marriage to the father of my children hadn’t lasted nearly as long as hers, and that I’d gotten divorced — more than once. Then the abortion I had in grad school came crowding in. And so on. The memories were old and familiar, but taken together they imposed a new and heavy weight. I’d cultivated my pleasure in someone else’s pain. I’d broken solemn promises to “love and honor until death do us part.” I’d even ended a human life. And so on.

Maybe it was because I’d been reading C. S. Lewis, but sitting there in the dark I realized that I had cut myself a lot of slack. My pride in being a pretty good person had rested on thinking like the Pharisee who plumed himself beside the tax collector: comparing myself with others I deemed less worthy (“Which one of you did it?” …“Not me!”). You know the drill: “I may be selfish and greedy sometimes, and I may cut corners on my tax returns, but I'm no Bernie Madoff.” My sense of virtue was merely comparative, and it had separated me from other people in ways I hadn’t been aware of. But with this recognition my blind pride began dissolving — leaving room for something new to be born as days went by. Was it merely a coincidence that this happened around Christmastime?

Now at this point, the interest of every Christian perks up. We have all heard hundreds of such personal accounts and we would all be able to add our personal "amen". The conviction for sin, such that we own up to it for what it really is, without excuse, flattery, or equivocation is something all Christians know. It is those who mourn and weep who are blessed. Maybe Judy is going to tell us how, under this new realisation of who she really was, that she began to long for God and His Saviour.

But no. In this case, another great humanist work-around emerges.

I’m still excessively proud of my writing, my productivity, my good taste, my politics, and my résumé. Habits of mind hardened through my decades on this earth still tend to make me hypercritical, judgmental, and competitive with others to the point where I can sometimes actually be glad when they fail. But instead of shuddering when struck by my shortcomings I can smile (wryly) because my radical imperfection helps me. I don't mean that I open an accounting business: “I've got some black marks, so I better earn some gold stars to balance the books.” I mean that a sense of my sinfulness is a bridge linking me with others who might otherwise seem unapproachably different.

So the sum of this darkened soul's personal conviction for true moral guilt and evil is that it has made her more tolerant of the imperfections of others. It helps her live in amity with others she may not otherwise like. Well, clearly Judy is too good to need a Saviour. She will not be found in Church, beating her breast, crying, "Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner."

The Scriptures speak truly when they declare there is a sorrow that leads to death (II Corinthians 7:10). It is the sorrow for sin that leads to work-arounds to avoid the open hand of the Saviour.