CHRISTMAS: A Back Story

I'll start this Christmas story with the Jews fleeing Egypt under the leadership of Moses: There are many God stories in Egypt which have the same source as Judaism and later Christianity. Their main players have different names, but they have remarkably similar roles. In the ancient stories, there are several layers of meaning, so its best not to get prosaic and literal when reading them. That doesn't mean they aren't true just because the ancients were aiming for a deeper truth that historical facts don't reach. There is no physical, historical evidence that the Jews were physically in Egypt as slaves or spent forty years wandering in the wilderness, but I don’t think literal history is what this story is about.

The Jews learned much from the spiritual teachings of the Egyptians during their years of searching for their place. Who knows how far back the Egyptian religion went, possibly inherited from Atlantis originally. The Jews became enslaved to their experience of these teachings. All religions seem to deteriorate into dominating rules and empty form over time and need a reboot.  Moses, who was as much Egyptian as Jewish, received the insight that it was time to exit a system that had become enslaving, as orthodoxies tend to do.

After escaping from Egyptian slavery, the Jews wandered in a desert for forty years. It sounded good when they started out, but they weren’t quite ready to move to the next level of spiritual development and in fact degraded to a previous age of belief as soon as they were weary and scared. They got suspicious about Moses, once their hero, now the guy who led them into possible destruction. What did he get them into!  The past seemed safe at that point. They went back to worshiping the idol of a calf, symbol of the age of Taurus, instead of the Ram from their current age of Aries. People revert to old ways when they are frightened.

But, what about all those Egyptians in Pharaohs army that their God killed in a flood so that they could escape slavery. Wasn’t that evidence that their God freed and protected them? Yet the enemy is inside of us and how do you kill an internal enemy.  The Old Testament is filled with stories of the Israelites killing enemies and enemies just keep popping up. Their God gave them all this land and the directive to get its current tenants out of the way.  It seems like a serious case of inflation, possibly in reaction to feeling like slaves, but they get away with it for a while.

Alas, humans still haven’t got the message that the enemy is in the mirror. The Israelites believed God gave them a special dispensation to take this land on the other side of their desert experience. After all they had been through, they deserved it. God promised it would be a land of milk and honey. I think its interesting that both milk and honey are baby food. Was God hinting at something?  I know, the image in the mirror looks pretty threatening! Now I’m thinking of animals and how they react to mirrors. Have you had a kitten that saw itself in a mirror for the first time? I have, it’s terrorized and outraged.  It goes into, “I’m much bigger and tougher than you think”, mode with its back arched and tail hair expanded as big as possible. It hisses, shows its teeth and if it’s a brave kitten, it may launch an attack on that evil interloper.  We laugh at the kitten because we know the truth. But what if we are dealing with ever more sophisticated mirrors on our evolutionary journey.

The story of the Christ is another reiteration of what people do with a mirror. There are two parts to our nature. A part that wants to evolve and become greater, stronger, more beautiful, more godlike if you will, and a part that believes it must protect itself from the destruction of change, and competitors  who pose as a  death threat to our naive younger self. We don’t want to sacrifice who we are now, for someone we don’t know.

Okay, now let’s approach the Jesus Christ part of this story. This is a delicate issue. Jews don’t buy the gospel stories at all. They had a different expectation for a redeemer. It was much more historic and heroic and involved getting rid of the Romans so that they could go back to where they’d left off being Yahweh’s chosen ones. They had plenty of company. Everybody not Roman wanted to get out from under their boot. What an insult it must have seemed when Rome eventually took over a Jewish sect that followed a Jew who embodied a more transcendent spiritual solution to their problem.  This didn’t seem serious at first, and then even Roman citizens found this new teaching compelling. The Romans did their best to kill it in the bud, and when that didn’t work, they set about using their specialty. Romans were true masters of, “if you can’t lick um, incorporate um.” And that is what they set about doing.

There are two opposing aspects of human nature. One part protects itself from change, which is a kind of death to one’s future. We want to be bigger, stronger, smarter but not if who we are now must be surrendered.  Everybody knows, death and birth go on without our permission, although humans are constantly trying to control both.  What is the real deal about death and rebirth? Now you see me, now you see a different me, now I’ve disappeared. The ancient symbol of the Uroboros, that snake eating its tail tells the story.  I find myself getting very attached to treasured memories of the past, but of course, my memory also makes its own stories about the past, which is often better and sometimes worse than the original. Even our planet, had a beginning, is moving toward an end, and maybe it will all start over in another cycle, or another universe. Probably there are endless possibilities. The world bites its tail, and so does the cosmos. According to Hindu cosmology, we are in the last stage of the great Yugas, the Kali Yuga and have been for thousands of years, so don't expect relief anytime soon. But where much is suffered, much is learned. Creator's expectations for this round are very high, so we can feel honored to be here now.

After Jesus was born, those famous wise men, (nobody knows how many there were. Only the gifts were three) saw an unusual cosmic configuration. A piece of brilliant light against a dark sky. I can really get into that symbolism, and it gives me goosebumps. Perhaps, as astrologers, and in those days all wise men were astrologers, they had been waiting for this aspect, or maybe it was a comet. Either way, it’s a great symbol. As wise men they were aware of events as signs from a higher reality and saw beyond what non-initiates saw. They came from the east from which the life-giving Sun rises and set out to find the source of this vision.

The gifts the wise men brought to the child were gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Gold is incorruptible and symbolizes the Sun the life and light of our world. Frankincense wafts lightly in the air and awakens the higher mind to transcend the lower mind, so that we can “‘go another way,” like the wise men. Myrrh is an embalming spice. It stands for preservation and protection beyond death.

Next, we get to the antagonist Herod, the Roman appointed ruler of the Jews.  Like all ambitious politicians, he had a god complex. The wise men made the mistake of letting Herod in on their intentions of finding this new baby born to be “king of the Jews”.  He asked them to come back and share all about their visit. He pretended to be genuinely interested in any good news.  When it came time to leave, an angel warned them to go home without telling Herod.  Of course, Herod, like most dictators assumed he was a god and thus immortal, and saw this coming “king of the Jews,” as a threat to be eliminated.  In the gospel of Matthew, he is said to have ordered all boy babies under the age of three to be killed, to avoid losing his thrown. There is no evidence this happened literally, but it makes the point that dictators, instead of being like gods are more like male lions, or even tomcats who kill kittens that aren’t their progeny or may threaten their dominance.

Around the same time an Angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and warned him of Herod’s plans. The angel said, “get up and take the child and his mother with you to Egypt and stay until I tell you to come back”. Why Egypt? Was it a place outside Herod’s purview? Yes, but maybe there was something important to touch base with there. Possibly another deeper knowledge was revealed about why the Jews had to leave and find their own way. It was again time to find a new way.

Matthew doesn’t say how long Jesus and family were in Egypt, but I think it’s quite interesting that spiritually there is completion of a circle here. Scholars speculate that Jesus was a student in Egypt.  Many of his teachings have an Egyptian flavor. After Herod died, they came back to Israel. Unfortunately, Herod’s son who wasn’t much better was in power so they decided to go to a different town, Nazareth and that just happened to fulfill another prophesy, that he would be called a Nazarene.

Matthew was a Jew, and his gospel was aimed at Jews. Yet some scholars see in the teachings of Jesus an Egyptian influence. It makes sense to me. That was really a starting place for this spiritual drama. There is a Hindu teacher who says that if you want to get to the truth in a religion, you should find its founders tracks but rather than following them forward you should back track them to their source.   

When I was a child, I found Christmas entertaining. The colors were magical, the decorations seductively laced with mysteries that teased but never revealed, yet putting Jesus and Santa together seemed like a disconnect. Now as an adult, I’m aware that those savvy Romans once again saw an opportunity to meld the pagan celebration of hope in the cycles of Mother Earth, with the Christian, teachings of the Christ’s birth, death, and rebirth. The story soars above the Jews, the Romans and even the Christians as believers in the facts of a story that isn’t about facts. Those wily Romans may have outsmarted themselves.