The Political Significance of Christmas

“…so because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spew you out of My mouth.”

 

Fat man, sleigh, red suit, the child’s toy desire, the love of “children;” annual retail windfall as a leading economic indicator; the hated “Christian Influence” of lighted evergreen trees, stable re-enactments and a massive gift exchange…

When Herod the first encountered the “wise men” from the east seeking the “child that would be born” it was because there was a spontaneous movement in Israel that believed the time of “The Messiah” was at hand that he was driven to microscopically examine the prophesies. In general the “modern mind” has no concept of what it was they (the movement, the wise men and Herod) were all expecting. But it was from those investigations that Herod was able to send the visitors from the east to Bethlehem.

And the meaning of those prophesies is the reason he lied and told them he was on their side, part of the movement, and asked to be their facebook friend. It was the nature of that expectation that he considered a significant danger to moderate rule, that is, his own.

And right now, it is not the unreasonable expectations, but the reasonable ones of that time, the ones actually inherent in the prophesies of “the one” that should be born, that remain the challenge to tyrants the world over.

It was the birth of a king, but not just “a king.”

It was The King.

The Great Lion, the embodiment of real justice, the tyrant’s recurrent nightmare. The Restorer of lost promise. The MacGuffin of all history. The true King.

He is, in the final analysis, the reason Statists are inevitably, inexorably, drawn to filling mass graves. For they are obsessed, not with governing, but with the accumulation of the remnants of power they do NOT yet have.

This insurrectionist, this uncontrollable “God-man,” this “phantom,” whose existence they deny and whose presence they continually look back over their shoulder fearing –by his merely potential appearance – this Messiah, by His essential challenge to their political hegemony, is intolerable!

It is He who they were trying to kill. . . in Krasnoyarsk and Bashkirian and Tatarstan and Kazan and Volga-Don and the Sevvostlag clusters along the Kolyma river.

It was to rid themselves of His people forever that the two-legged cattle trains ran and ran to Bergen-Belson and Buchenwald and Dachau and Esterwegen and Maunthausen and Breendonck and Drancy and Vaught and Riga-Kaiserwald and Volary and Falstadt and Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinkla.

“Master, will thou at this time restore the kingdom  to Israel?”  They asked it naively, sincerely, in uncorrupted innocent anticipation. We would not ask it today.

Western Christianity has erected the image of a “suffering servant” and forgotten the conquering King, the Liberator, the one who wields the terrible, bold, swift sword, the usurpers’ bane.

But it is that King who was to be born and that kingdom whose foundation was then laid.

And it is, in every respect, a political kingdom that even now governs the behaviors of its citizens, the men and women who have voluntarily become its subjects and to it sworn absolute allegiance above everything else. It is, and they are, the primary obstruction to the Statist’s vision, the repeated scapegoat for his constant failures. And it is that multinational, multimillennial administration that will shortly judge their governments by his words.

For there is mercy only because there will also be justice.

It is against impending justice Herod – jilted by his religious visitors – raged, slaughtering every child, two years old and under, in the surrounding perimeter of Bethlehem.

It is against the same impending justice that Pharaoh raged, conspiring with the midwives to kill the Hebrew males.

This river of death meanders through human history.

It is against the legacy of America’s just destiny that the American Left has raged, shedding the blood of innocents, by the millions, unforgiven, as a sacrament to sexual ceremony.

And yet, He is born.

Evading Herod’s and Clinton’s and Obama’s dread murderous knife, against all odds, rejoicing against judgment.

And he comes, triumphant over death,

The Great King

White horse and vesture dipped in blood.

 

 

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