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A nativity scene painted by Giovanni di Paolo circa 1426-1440.
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Editorial: The Christmas story is a tale for all time

Frick Art & Historical Center

Editorial: The Christmas story is a tale for all time

Christmas celebrates the birth of a new kind of story in human history: the divine King who humbles himself by becoming a baby. This — the special dignity and surprising power of the small, the fragile, the vulnerable — is the most enduring worldly lesson of one of the world’s best-known stories.

It’s a lesson that has been the humane core of Western civilization for millennia. While anyone who’s opened a history book knows this moral principle has been constantly violated, our shared understanding of those failings — the common revulsion to wars of conquest, to the abuse of the weak, to the exploitation of the helpless, and above all to the hypocrisy of those who profess but do not practice this truth — we owe, in some small way, to Christmas.

The ancient world, for all its beauty and sophistication, was also a world where the strong were expected to dominate, and the weak to tolerate being dominated. Though the Nativity couldn't fix all human failings, it did introduce, and ultimately spread across billions of people, the moral understanding that the purpose of power is service, and that it is perfected in meekness, not in domination.

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And yet today, the Christmas lesson is being challenged in a unique way: not directly, as in brutish 20th century ideologies that openly preached that might makes right and weakness deserves death; but more insidiously, in the growing sense that, along economic and racial and political lines, our society is a zero-sum game. And the only victory is total.

That means the replacement of an ethic of mutual responsibility and healthy compromise — one imbued with the spirit of the Christmas story — with one of power, and power alone.

It will be tempting here to blame the other side, whatever that may be, for this state of affairs. They started it. They are the worst offenders. They must be defeated.

But that’s exactly the problem: The first impulse is to go on the offensive. We are gripped by the fear that if we don’t use whatever power is at hand, then we’ll be trampled by the other side. The result is an arms race of rhetorical and political and legal recriminations that is breaking the bonds of family and of civic friendship.

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A world where only power matters is, in the end, a world where nothing matters. All the values we say we’re fighting for — democracy, family, equality, liberty — become subsumed in the prime and only directive: to win. But when it’s over, there’s nothing left. In winning, we lose everything.

The Christmas story teaches the only way out: to embrace the humility of the infant King. To lift up the small and the weak. To reduce the suffering of others, while suffering well ourselves. To understand that the power that moves the world in the most enduring way — as it did two millennia ago — is the power of service, of compassion, of meekness, of love.

Only in losing ourselves, can we can all win together.

First Published: December 25, 2023, 10:30 a.m.

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A nativity scene painted by Giovanni di Paolo circa 1426-1440.  (Frick Art & Historical Center)
Frick Art & Historical Center
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