50 YEARS AGO
The Man Who Gave Us Christmas
Winifred Kirkland
This inspiring story about the apostle Luke was
published in the _Atlantic _Monthly
fifty years ago in December 1939. Its
timeless message is still of value to all who
celebrate Christmas.
How many of us in the hurry and hubbub of the
holiday season steal a few silent moments
to consider where our Christmas comes from? Stories
as beautiful as that of Christmas do not just
happen; they have a source, they come from somewhere,
they come from someone. When we stop to think and search
for a sure but distant origin, we shall find,
contrary to the evidence of this mass-mad decade,
that over and over again some far-off individual,
man or woman, is responsible for giving the
whole world some undying dream, a dream that can
always be seen to have been long and courageously
preserved within the dreamer's own undaunted
soul. Yet this far-off bravery too often
fails to stir us, because we seldom
pause to look back and remember.
From year to year we join in the singing of the old
familiar carols, forgetting who recorded the very
first Christmas hymns that have set the fashion for
all that have followed. From year to year we listen
while some voice reads, My soul doth
magnify the Lord, without remembering how high and
holy and humble some far-off man must have kept his
spirit before he could have perceived the ineffable loveliness
of the Annunciation and shared a young mother's glory
in a child-to-be. Every year we gather together, young
and old, to construct the Christmas cr,che.
We arrange the sheep, we place the kneeling
shepherds, we crown with a halo the baby's
head lying on the straw, but we forget the man
who so revered the sacredness of commonplace things
that he dared to describe a God laid in a
cattle trough for a cradle. We forget the
man who gave us Christmas.
We do not know Luke well enough to say thank
you to him across the centuries. But we might know
him better, and Christmas might mean more to us,
if we tried to discover what it must first have meant
to the man who gave it to us, gave it in all its
perennial freshness and beauty to a world racked with
war in his day and still racked with war in our day, in
spite of the soaring, singing message of the two
thousand Christmases that have come between. While in
no sense did Luke invent the Christmas
narrative, one can with truth say that it was he
who gave us Christmas, for it was Luke, and
Luke only, who searched out and found and
preserved a birth story too humble for prouder
historians to touch. It is said of Jesus, the
wayside preacher, that the common people heard him
gladly. It may be said of Luke, the
wayside doctor, that he heard the common people
gladly. Was it these same common people who brought
to Luke's knowledge the story of the first Christmas,
revealing to him perhaps the existence of some
close-kept Aramaic document, or simply
transmitting to him by word of mouth sacred and
secret memories? The narrative of
Jesus' birth seems to have been unknown to the
earliest Christian Church, concentrated as that
church was on its Founder's death and
Resurrection. Who else but humble people, still
open to wonder and awe, could have told those old
tales of miracles and angel voices? Who
else but Luke would have listened? Who
else in that day and hour reverenced humanity enough
to accept the story of a God born in a stable and
to give that story to the world?
Let us read once again the first two chapters
of Luke's Gospel. Then let us pause
to consider where our Christmas comes from, picture
by picture, chant by chant. The most beautiful
book in the world, so Renan has described the
Gospel of Luke. And in that book, for sheer
unearthly loveliness, the opening chapters are the
most beautiful of all. Only a painter could
have conceived the strange stark beauty of the scene in
which the tall angel delivers his message to a
wondering awestruck girl. In fact, some
early statues of Luke represent him as an
actual artist, carrying palette and brushes.
Only a dramatist could have seen and made us
see that doorway meeting of two rapt women,
one young, one old, each bearing beneath her heart a
little child. Only a man attuned to music like a
harp could have given us those immortal chants
uttered by Zechariah and Mary and Simeon.
... Picture: An eminent doctor,
Luke also excelled in painting and
sculpture. This painting, attributed
to Raphael, shows the evangelist painting
a portrait of Mary and the infant
Jesus.
... We possess little enough information about
Luke, but it seems to be generally accepted that
he was a young doctor of Antioch and a member
of the Christian community there before he met
Paul and joined that intrepid leader on his
second missionary journey as his personal
physician. ... Paul's description of his
friend has become part of the world's vocabulary:
"Luke, the beloved physician."
... It was the "beloved physician" who could
describe motherhood in all the holiness of our
Christmas narratives. It was one who had
given all his being to the service of others, and who
was never to hold a child of his own in his arms, who
could set down the raptured words: "My soul
doth magnify the Lord." It was one whose life
was consecrated to the relief of suffering who could
describe with such exaltation Jesus'
miracles of healing. Long before he had ever
heard of the mysterious man executed in a
distant city, Luke, a
joyous-hearted young Greek, must have chosen a
career of kindliness. He had himself gone about
doing good before he was equipped to write of all
the wealth of kindly deeds and sympathetic words
that he records in his life of Jesus. Of
all four Evangelists, it is Luke who
best reveals Jesus the man, friend always of the
poor and the downtrodden, comforting even the
despairing thief crucified beside him, as
Luke alone tells us. It is a joyous
human Jesus that Luke presents,
probably because he himself had learned high joy
in his close contact with an unseen Master. In
spite of all its tragedy, Luke's
Gospel gives the reader a sense of
unconquerable gladness, gladness like that of the two
disciples on the walk to Emmaus when their
Master returned to share a meal with them, an
incident that Luke alone has saved from
oblivion. Truly Luke was mysteriously
fitted to transmit to us forever the joyousness of
Christmas.
... Thus there came into existence a book which
to this day presents the supreme appeal of
Christianity to all paganism past or
present. The universality of the Christian
faith is revealed by the fact that Luke's
book was written by a Greek to a Roman about
a Jew.
... But what had these sacred stories of a
holy little child meant to Luke himself in his darkening
old age, in his darkening world? Persecution was
rife. For all we know, Luke may have
written in the very shadow of his own martyrdom;
some ancient authorities say that he was
martyred. From end to end of Palestine the armies
of Rome had gone raging and avenging. No one
could count the fallen dead that Luke's pen might
have recorded but did not. Instead, Luke, an
old unbroken man, sent forth from the stricken
world of his day to our stricken world of today the deathless
hope of an angel hymn, and the deathless
promise of a newborn child.
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