Christmas: The Seed and The Star
A vulnerable little baby was born, as the ancient story goes, in the most lowly of circumstances.
A young Jewish woman laboured in the dirt amongst the animals, the docile cattle her onlookers. A single star rose in the sky above where he was cradled; a pinprick of light in the dark sky marked his arrival. Astrologers from the East who had predicted his birth journeyed to the little town of Bethlehem to welcome him; a new king they said, was born.
This story of a humble beginning with cosmic promise of authority has survived two millenia of global history, still unfolding. The story of a babe in a manger has found its way from the Middle East to Africa and Europe, to Asia, Australia, and the Americas. It remains alive in global Christendom and the West’s imagination, hidden like a pinch of yeast worked through dough. The evidence is there, after proving and baking. The dough has risen.
Today, the figure of Jesus of Nazareth’s meaning may be subdued amongst the noise and concerns of 2025 (what will become of AI; questions of identity, authenticity and performance; belonging; uncertainty; hope; responsibility and power). Yet through his astonishing enduring influence over the last 2000 years, the nativity as an archetypal story of suffering and splendour, is timeless. It is a living symbol for existential, philosophical and spiritual contemplation.
Historian Tom Holland was curious about the Christian story, while not persuaded by the faith claims of Jesus’ divinity. In an effort to understand his own British and spiritual inheritance from the dust of Christendom, he wrote Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (2019). Through the books’ 600-plus pages, he walks the reader through an historically accurate retelling of the unlikely rise of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, a man who died the death of a criminal but in his memory became the West’s most civilising and political influence in recorded history. From out of the melting pot of the Roman Empire in which middle Platonic philosophy of shadows and perfection flourished alongside strict social status categories (free citizen, non-citizen or enslaved), Jesus the boy, grew. Polytheism, stoicism, mysterious pagan practices and the religious underdog of monotheistic Judaism were practiced under Roman rule jostling together in the Roman occupied, colonised region of Judea. To today’s Westernised and justice-sensitive ears we would understand it as unapologetically unfair society, both morally and socially, however in the ancient context the culture was not uniquely evil, unequal or brutal, it was normal. Slaves were frequently taken from conquests and warfare; violent crime was common and deadly, suicide was sometimes chosen, women died in childbirth, children were frequently abandoned, plagues and disease were rampant without prejudice and fatal. These are the social conditions in which little Jesus, in a stable was born, laid in a trough where the animals go to eat. Although this is hard for us in the West to imagine the unlikeliness of such a scene having much significance as we live in the vast influence of Christendom— that his birth in the dirt, like the planting of a tiny mustard seed in the soil might yield social change and growth on a magnificent scale.
Holland faithfully chronicles the key events that tell of people over time working out the moral logic of Jesus birth, words and death in unexpected ways. The history of Christendom is as a true mirror to human nature as might be expected, both shocking awfulness and attractive loveliness are woven together in the making of the Western mind. Taking the long view of history, the radical teachings of Jesus have changed the way we perceive the individual human life; his reordering of moral priorities bestowed intrinsic moral value to the human being, irrespective of status or suffering. The man who told his followers to love and live a life of peacemaking by forgiving, not persecuting one’s enemies, and to treat others as you would have others treat you brought intense suspicion, rejection: his was an ethic of mercy, equality, personal conscience, not tribal retribution or political power. He taught charity (expressions of divine grace, the gift of charisma) and compassion towards the most unlovely and vulnerable in society. Holland tells of how gradually, over hundreds of years of history, the accepted moral order that the strong should rule over the weak, that “might makes right” was undone; an innocent man who taught forgiveness, care for the weak and poor, but died a shameful death was to be held up as the highest moral value, rising above symbolic virtue of physical strength. This moral shift from “might equals right”, to moral humility and rightness as an internal disposition towards divine forgiveness can be understood as the great reversal of human power and spiritual meaning. As history marched onward, so did the implications of the Christian moral inversion of power: that the weak, the poor and the humble have spiritual significance, power is not assumed to be right but must be morally questioned and exercised with care and justice for all. Greatness is not just for the strong.
As understood by the New Testament writers who contemplated Jesus’ identity as it was recorded, it was decided he was not an ordinary person. Jesus was understood amongst the faithful to be paradoxically God-Man. This claim has been affirmed by believers, declared by mystics and studied by scholars and theologians over the last 2000 years. In the life of Jesus, it is understood by Christians to provide a symbolic picture of the cornerstone of Judaeo-Christian worldview: the Imago Dei. That is, the image or face of God is reflected in the image of the human. In seeing one another as corrupted, sick or lowly as we may be, we can also see something else, a glimmer of another, higher order, reflections of the face of God. This God is described as something perfect, something eternal, something good. So, when we care for others, we are at the same time, in communion with God. The Judaeo-Christian idea of God within and without, reflecting in the multiple faces of our humanity asks that we nurture one another forward in life, to greater goodness, greater growth. It also means that the divine, or perfect goodness is not just out there, but is to be found in here, in between people, in relationship. To my reading, this God according to the descriptions of Jesus is inherently relational, familial. It is coherent logic within this worldview, that to see the divine, we need each other and we need each other to see what is good. If we can see good in the other, we might find a reflection of this in ourselves and conversely, this helps us to find it in the other. In essence, the Christian ethic says that when we love others, are merciful, are peacemaking, we are reflecting the glory, the beauty of God to the world, we become the greatest good.
But of course the history of Christendom has not been one long, uninterrupted God-humanity hall of mirrors, where the divine goodness shines back flawlessly from the human face. Holland does due diligence to detail the battles, persecutions and wars fought for the sake of “good” in historical contexts- to our modern ears these are easy to judge, perhaps even indefensibly so. Christendom was never a completed picture, it was moral project, still a work in progress.
In protest to the corrupt practices of late-mediaeval Christian theology, Martin Luther, a German theologian and priest asserted that the radical moral law of Christ (that instruction made one do good things) was internally “written on the human heart”, rather than in interpretations by the Church. This interpretation made the need for personal grace the cornerstone of moral rightness, thus displacing intervention from the Church, such as instruction for discipline and good works. For his radical ideas, he was excommunicated from the Church in 1521. Luther persisted in his conviction in his writing, bringing about the birth of the Protestant Church (the protestors against the Catholics). This lead to the Reformation, a revolution of the Christian faith which allowed for a multiplicity of scriptural interpretations of the New Testament. The effects of the Reformation that continue to this day are an emphasis on personal conscience in response to private reading of scripture to light one’s moral steps; reliance on divine grace rather than perfect codified conduct to save.
Luther, will always be remembered as a reformer, but he was a man of his time and place- the 16th century Europe. His personal protests against spiritual corruption would not have been possible, were it not for the technological revolution of the printing press that put perfect copies of the written bible into the hands of the many. Books being widely distributed and a conviction that all were equal under God; that all, no matter their status or position were worthy of education and nurturing to understand scripture for themselves extended the teachings of Jesus into the modern era. The doctrine of the Imago Dei demanded that if all were morally responsible for themselves, all should have access to scripture to read. Education should be universal, for boys and girls. This, combined with the printing press stimulated education as an expression of universal benevolence. It was for the common person, not only the elites.
Indirectly, this emphasis on personal conscience, responsibility and the moral duty to act, even against social norms led to two key dates in Christendom’s world history:
1807- William Wilberforce, a member of Parliament, a man with deep Christian conviction that every man is made in the image of God, therefore slavery is a pernicious moral sin. Standing against the cultural and economic norms of his time, he secured the abolishment of the British slave trade in the British Empire.
1833- Wilberforce continued to champion the rights of the enslaved and the Slavery Abolishment Act was passed in Parliament just two days before his death. Wilberforce had campaigned tirelessly for around 40 years, fuelled by his Christian conviction of moral equality and human dignity for all. With a dogged persistence as a member of Parliament, his advocacy and the contributions of many others eventually lead to the abolishment of slavery as a practice across the British Empire and eventually across the Western world.
Today it is unthinkable that a person might be enslaved by another in the West; this thinking is the result of the civilising trickle of the new moral order that began with the baby born in the dirt, amongst the cattle with a star in the sky marking his birth.
These civilising cultural, economic and educational shifts that dignified the individual, called for personal moral responsibility (not ascribing group moral responsibility), that honoured inner conscience within the person allowing for a private, inner critique as to what is right and good has led to a structural diffusion of the faith. Membership to Christianity has decreased. Although formal belonging to many faith organisations has declined, Holland argues that moral critiquing of each other’s actions, particularly of the powerful, shows no waning of interest today. In place of formal spiritual belonging which include codes, rites and rituals, we have informal, social, moral policing.
Social media pile ons, mass outrage, and social death via public shaming are what we have come to call cancel culture. They bear striking resemblance to the early modern witch trials that spontaneously sprang up across European and American colonies, peaking around 1600s. I am not the first person to make this connection, I am merely borrowing this analogy from British playwright and journalist, Andrew Doyle. In his book The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World (2022) he details the peculiar parallels from a by-gone era of localised religious persecution, to today’s global and secular moral trials executed via the device in your hand. It is a worthy read critiquing the nature of unhealthy religious thinking and scapegoating in secular, non-traditional times.
Coming back to Dominion, I highly recommend the entire work as a doorway to understanding Western history, our cultural inheritance we share even if at a distance. Holland makes an excellent case that the values we take to be self-evident and normal are the ripples of the first Christmas birth in ancient Bethlehem, carried forward by a multitude of human minds and moral motivations. In a world that is in constant flux, without a shared understanding of our cultural roots, the base on which we share our mutual belonging, we are “rootless and lost” (Lidz, 1983, p.16).
As Christmas 2025 draws very near, the literal story is very old. The symbolic narrative of a light shining in the dark, a new life born is like a tiny seed; it holds great promise and is eternal. The truth that what is born in lowly obscurity can rise to the highest value over time, remains. Mercy and forgiveness can overcome tribal retribution.
What might be nearly forgotten beneath the layers of Christmas wrapping, consumerism and personal, secular holiday rituals is a story handed down generation after generation. Even if faintly remembered through our use of candles, sparkling lights, tinsel and glitter- tiny reflective fragments that catch the light and reflect it back to us- these symbolic decorations silently brighten what would otherwise remain quite ordinary or even dark.
Merry Christmas.
Image: Photograph by Anna Worthington
References:
Doyle, A. (2022). The New Puritans. Constable.
Holland, T. (2019). Dominion. Basic Books.
Lidz, T. (1983) The Human Endowment in The Person: His and Her Development Through the LifeCycle, New York: Basic Books