At Christmas time, we are privileged to reflect on how God in His wisdom has taken human sophistication and urbanity, and folded it back over itself, turning everything around. The first Christmas was the time in history when God began announcing His mastery of irony—and it is also the time when the worldly wise began their fruitless attempts to studiously ignore what He was doing. And in this attempt, they shut themselves off from that laughter that William Tyndale described as coming from the “low bottom of the heart.”
Christian literary scholar Anthony Esolen has identified three principal uses of irony—uses that God Himself has displayed richly in the Incarnation, and which faithful Christians have been imitating ever since. They are the irony of time, the irony of power, and the irony of love. God is a masterful writer, and so the Christian faith is therefore the central source of deep, understated, rich and lyrical irony. We love what words can do because we love what the Word has done.
Our postmodern age likes to pretend it has mastered irony simply because our late night comedians have mastered the cheap shots of cynicism, the ability to point—as the fellow said—to the price of everything and the value of nothing. But this is not the kind of thing we mean at all. Our use of irony, if it is to be Christian at all, must be an harmonious echo of what God has done in Christ.
First, let’s consider the irony of time. In John Buchan’s novel Mr. Standfast, the central character says that he would trust to Providence because, as a friend of his had put it, “Providence was all right if you gave him a chance.” Twists and turns in the plot are to be expected because there is a plot, one devised by a master. For the ancient pagans, history was not history at all but simply a long, recurring, endless cycle, or a meaningless clash of meaningless fated events. They accounted for the disparities by assuming that atomistic fragmentation represented the whole fairly accurately—what you saw was what you got. But Christians, looking at the same phenomena, concluded something quite different. All these strange elements, seemingly headed in every which direction, meant, of necessity that the last chapter of our world’s story was going to be the ultimate denouement. If all things work together for good for them that love God and are the called according to His purpose, then this means that billions of plot points are going to come together in the most satisfying cathartic release possible at the end of all time. The great day of resurrection, the eschatological climax, will be what Tolkien called eucatastrophe, and will be literary catharsis writ large, although large is far too small a word for it.
Bethlehem is the moment in the story when significant numbers of readers start to have that aha moment. The consummate writer, God foreshadows what He is going to do—in fact He was doing that from the earliest prophets on. But at Bethlehem, the central character in this story arrives in the story, and those following the story recognize Him. Those who recognize Him this way are called believers, and as the story unfolds, there will be more and more of us. By the last chapter, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess Him. But in this grand denouement at the end, not only will everyone see who He is, but we will also all see who He has been all along, and we shall see that history, far from being a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, is actually the ultimate ironic tale. Christ as the Word is the irony of time, He is the irony of story. In worshipping Christ, in worshipping the Word, Christians are worshipping God’s irony.
Second, we should also reflect on the irony of power. How did God choose to enter the story He was writing? God overcame the world and its evil forces by setting aside His omnipotence, and becoming a helpless baby. The Incarnate one now had pitiful limbs, had tiny arms and legs, but even they were bound up tight in the swaddling clothes that Mary had remembered to bring with her. God was taking on what Martin Luther once called “left-handed power,” the authority that arises naturally from a certain kind of willed helplessness. We are not talking about the helplessness that is simply impotence fueled by cowardice. Rather, we are recognizing how to overcome evil with good, how a strong man turns the other cheek, how the one who could have called for legions of angels to rescue Him from the cross declined to do so. The one who takes the position of servant is given authority over all. The one who humbled Himself to the point of death was given a name above every name.
The one who spoke the galaxies into existence at the beginning of all things took on human flesh, and consented to have his diapers changed. But He did not do this in order to demonstrate how low He could stoop, as though that stooping were arbitrary or aimless. Rather, He did this and ordained that stooping this low would be the means by which He overcame the world. And He ordained that stooping in this way would be the means by which His disciples followed Him into the kingdom.
So Bethlehem is the place where every thoughtful person must wonder—what is He doing? And when we think we know, it is only because we have gotten used to the idea in that setting—but whenever we see someone imitating God’s ways in this—at our place of employment perhaps—we are as startled as ever.
And last, the irony of love. St. John tells us that God so loved the world that He gave us His only begotten Son. That giving began at Bethlehem, was continued in His perfect sinless life as the new Israel, and culminated at the cross where He died for our sins. He entered into His joy (and our justification) at His resurrection, and He now sits at the right hand of God the Father, where there is a torrent of pleasure forever. He is that cascading torrent of pleasure. He is that endless waterfall of joy, which is hard for us to visualize because there is no top, and no bottom, and no sides. But there is an endless motion of delight just the same, and because we are in Christ, we are right in the middle of it.
So love sacrifices, but love never sacrifices at a dead end. There have been many sacrifices that look like a dead end—remember the ironies of time—but they are not at all what they appear to be. What could have been more of a dead end than to be flogged, crucified, speared, and laid in a grave for three days and nights? And yet, even there, God was demonstrating His love for us. He was not giving us one more tragedy in a long line of them so that we might be justified in our despair. Rather, He was conquering sin and death, lust and the devil . . . and not giving us a lesson in pointless heroism.
And so this is the meaning of Christmas, a meaning which lines up perfectly with the meaning of the rest of the story. God is an ironist. He folds the story up in unexpected ways, tying things together that we could never have imagined. He is the ironist of time, of history, of story. He, in possession of ultimate right-handed power, determined to set it all aside, and overcame evil by taking on an invincible vulnerability, inviting us to learn how to do the same. He is not just strong, but also wise in the authority of humility. And He is love, which means He overflows in sacrificial ways. But His sacrifices are not throw-aways, but always come back to Him thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold. Love is fruitful, and in imitation of Him we begin to learn that the more we give, the more we have.
And so, this Christmas, remember you are learning how to open God’s gifts to us. And because He really knows how to shop for us, when we get the wrapping paper off, we are always surprised.