An important Eckman family tradition at Christmas time was watching the much loved, "A Charlie Brown Christmas." My wife and I and our two children adored the characters: Lucy, the psychiatrist; Snoopy, the home decorator; and Linus, the theologian. I have since learned that "A Charlie Brown Christmas," which first aired on CBS in December 1965, was only the second animated Christmas special on American television; "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" was the first in 1964.
The main character, Charlie Brown, is not happy, eager or overfl owing with excitement for Christmas. Instead, he is depressed, sad, lonely and alienated. Somewhat like the little Christmas tree he chose to decorate, he was misunderstood, mocked and rejected. "Isn't there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?," he inquires. Perhaps that is the reason this cartoon has such appeal. It is a real world, emotionally authentic focus on the human condition. The consumer's Christmas does not ultimately satisfy. Linus, as he recites the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke, not only helps Charlie Brown see the need for Christmas; he also helps him understand that Christmas is all about the baby in the manger; it's all about Jesus -- the answer to loneliness, alienation and meaninglessness.
Indeed, historian Rebecca McLaughlin has written that "When Mary met the angel, she was a noname girl from a disempowered people in a seemingly inconsequential place. Today, if you worry that you might be insignificant -- unknown, unloved and unimportant in this world -- perhaps this Christmas you will hear her message with fresh ears. If she was right about her son, then you are worth the birth and life and death and resurrection of the Son of God."
Furthermore, this Jesus, shortly after his birth, was actually, with his family, a refugee fl eeing from the power hungry machinations of an unstable ruler who wanted him dead. As theologian Esau McCaulley argues, Christmas "suggests that things that God cares about most do not take place in the centers of power. The truly vital events are happening in refugee camps, detention centers, slums and prisons. The Christmas story is set not in a palace surrounded by dignitaries but among the poor and humble whose lives are always subject to forfeit."
In contrast, today if you were wholly unfamiliar with the life of Jesus and simply observed many Christians in 2024, you might conclude that the most important thing Christianity values is worldly power -- the power to control and compel. But the birth and life of Jesus shatters this perception. Christmas is the moment of God's incarnation, when this broken world became his home. As ethicist Peter Wehner reasons, "It was not an entrance characterized by privilege, comfort, public celebration or self-glorification; it was marked instead by lowliness, obscurity, humility, fragility."
For those of us of the Christian faith, Christmas is meaningful because it places each of our lives -- the joys, and the sorrows, the hope and the despair, the dramatic and the mundane -- in a larger narrative: Not only did God author it, the Son of God lived in it. No one's teaching has had a deeper impact on culture, politics, morality, justice, philosophy, and human character than Jesus. Indeed, in a 2019 book by British historian, Tom Holland "Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World", Jesus and his movement called Christianity are characterized as "the most subversive revolution in human history, whose legacy is the ongoing disruption of settled patterns of life." With his emphasis on love and human equality, Jesus undermined tyranny, racism, men's abuse of women and selfish imperialism. He off ered salvation to all humans and provided the foundation for a new kingdom, the kingdom of God -- with values, virtues and standards that undermine the kingdom of darkness in this broken, fallen world. Jesus created "the most infl uential framework for making sense of human existence that has ever existed."
Our spiritually dark world, groping for stability staggers in a cycle of repeated disasters. But Jesus, the babe in Bethlehem, declared that he is "the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life" (John 8:12). Christmas challenges us to consider that there is something transcendent, eternal and greater than we are; it is about the Lord of two worlds -- the material and the spiritual -- descending to live, for a season, by the rules of one, so that he could resolve its dysfunction, discord, loneliness and alienation. Linus, the theologian, was right -- this is "what Christmas is all about."
Jim Eckman, Ph.D., is a retired historian and educator and now teaching pastor at Steadfast Bible Fellowship Church in Omaha.