Viva La Revolucion!

So it's nearly Christmas again. As usual we are bombarded simultaneously by marketing campaigns making a case that love comprises a bunch of plastic stuff and blinking gadgets and sugary sentiments proclaiming that Christmas is about Children, Love, and Peace. I will suggest a third alternative.

Consider this: when Luke described the angels appearing before shepherds as "a great company of the heavenly host," he did not intend to conjure images of your church's ladies hand-bell choir. Rather, it is a military allusion. Instead of middle-aged women in kitty-cat Christmas sweaters beneath their gold and burgundy choir robes, it portrays an image of ten thousand highly-trained and tightly-wound Marines amassed at the border of enemy territory. And they came to issue a declaration of war.

The birth of Christ was an invasion, a covert operation perhaps (who would ever suspect a baby born in a barn...), but an invasion nonetheless. It is the moment went God began a campaign of liberation, when he began to take back His rightful territory from an occupying army. You and I were a nation oppressed by an enemy regime, but on that night an infant's cries were the first shouts of revolution.

To be sure, Christmas is about love, inasmuch as God's audacity was motivated by his love for you and me, but Good Friday is really about Love. And Christmas is about peace, inasmuch as the end goal of the operation is defeat of enemy aggressors and the establishment of peace, but Easter is really about Peace made possible by God's victory over death. And Christmas is about children, inasmuch as his victory makes possible our adoption into his family. But make no mistake: Christmas is about a turning point in history, a decisive moment that separates "Before" from "After." It is our D-Day, Bethlehem our Normandy. Because of Christmas, Eden will be restored.

Christmas is about the steadfast ferocity of a Warrior-King assaulting hostile territory, determined to take back what is rightfully his. Anything else is merely the cowardly and bankrupt "happy holidays" of our politically correct world.

Merry Christmas to all and Viva La Revolucion!