When I was a boy, I would secretly stay up past my bedtime reading books like The Boxcar Children (by Gertrude Chandler Warner) or Island of the Blue Dolphins (Scott O’Dell), among others. “One more chapter, and then bed,” I would tell myself and, with the help of a flashlight or a night light, I often found myself another four-or-five chapters into the story before finally nodding off to sleep in my bed. PS: Mom. Dad. If you’re reading this—I apologize for not going to sleep when I should have!
During these late-night reading sessions, questions would fill my mind. What happens next? Will the hero escape danger? How will they overcome the villain? Will good win in the end? To this day I still find myself captivated by good works of fiction. The Chronicles of Narnia (CS Lewis) and The Lord of the Rings (JRR Tolkien) are some of my favorites. And for me, there is nothing like a satisfying ending to a good story.
Outside of the Bible itself, my favorite Christmas book is Hidden Christmas: The Surprising Truth Behind the Birth of Christ, by the late Dr. Timothy Keller. It has become a tradition for me to read through it every December. In it, Dr. Keller shares how the Christmas story changes how we read the good stories we enjoy. He writes:
“The Christmas story is not fiction, and yet, I would argue, it changes the way we read fiction in the most wonderful way.
Just before Peter Jackson’s first Lord of the Rings movie came out, there was a host of articles by literary critics and other cultural elites lamenting the popular appeal of fantasies, myths, and legends, so many of which (in their thinking) promoted regressive views. Modern people are supposed to be more realistic. We should realize that things are not black and white but gray, that happy endings are cruel because life is not like that. In The New Yorker Anthony Lane said about Tolkien’s novel: “It is a book that bristles with bravado, and yet to give in to it—to cave in to it [to really enjoy it] as most of us did on a first reading—betrays… a reluctance to face the finer shades of life, that verges on the cowardly.” Yet Hollywood nonetheless keeps on recycling fairy tales in various forms because people hunger for them.
The great fairy tales and legends—“Beauty and the Beast,” “Sleeping Beauty,” King Arthur, Faust—did not really happen, of course. They are not factually true. And yet they seem to fulfill a set of longings in the human heart that realistic fiction can never touch or satisfy. That is because deep in the human heart there are these desires—to experience the supernatural, to escape death, to know love that we can never lose, to not age but live long enough to realize our creative dreams, to fly, to communicate with nonhuman beings, to triumph over evil. If the fantasy stories are well told, we find them incredibly moving and satisfying. Why? It is because, even though we know that factually the stories didn’t happen, our hearts long for these things, and a well-told story momentarily satisfies these desires, scratching the terrible itch.
“Beauty and the Beast” tells us there’s a love that can break us out of the beastliness that we have created for ourselves. “Sleeping Beauty” tells us we are in a kind of sleeping enchantment and there is a noble prince who can come and destroy it. We hear these stories and they stir us, because deep inside our hearts we believe, or want to believe, these things are true. Death should not be the end. We should not lose our loved ones. Evil should not triumph. Our hearts sense that even though the stories themselves aren’t true, the underlying realities behind the stories are somehow true or ought to be. But our minds say no, and critics say no. They insist that when you give yourself to fairy stories, and you really believe in moral absolutes and the supernatural and the idea that we are going to live forever, that is not reality, and it is cowardly to give yourself to it.
Then we come to the Christmas story. And at first glance it looks like the other legends. Here is a story about someone from a different world who breaks into ours and has miraculous powers, and can calm the storm and heal people and raise people from the dead. Then his enemies turn on him, and he is put to death, and it seems like all hope is over, but finally he rises from the dead and saves everyone. We read that and we think, Another great fairy tale! Indeed, it looks like the Christmas story is one more story pointing to these underlying realities.
But Matthew’s Gospel refutes that by grounding Jesus in history (Matthew 1:1-17), not “once upon a time.” He says this is no fairy tale. Jesus Christ is not one more lovely story pointing to these underlying realities—Jesus is the underlying reality to which all the stories point.
Jesus Christ has come from that eternal, supernatural world that we sense is there, that our hearts know is there even though our heads say no. At Christmas he punched a hole between the ideal and the real, the eternal and the temporal, and came into our world. That means, if Matthew is right, that there is an evil sorcerer in this world, and we are under enchantment, and there is a noble prince who has broken the enchantment, and there is a love from which we will never be parted. And we will indeed fly someday, and we will defeat death, and in this world, now “red in tooth and claw,” someday even the trees are going to dance and sing (Psalm 65:13, 96:11-13).
Put another way, even though the fairy tales aren’t factually true, the truth of Jesus means all the stories we love are not escapism at all. In a sense, they (or the supernatural realities to which they point) will come true in him.
If you are a Christian, it is hard to know what to say to a child reading a book who says, “I wish there was a noble prince who saved us from the dragon. I wish there was a Superman. I wish we could fly. I wish we could live forever.” You can’t just blurt out, “There is! We will!” There is a scene in the move Hook where Maggie Smith plays an elderly Wendy from the Peter Pan story. She addresses Robin Williams, a grown-up Peter Pan who has amnesia. He is amused by the stories Wendy tells his children, but at one point she stares right at him and says: “Peter, the stories are true.” If Christmas really happened, it means the whole human race has amnesia, but the tales we love most aren’t really just entertaining escapism. The Gospel, because it is a true story, means all the best stories will be proved, in the ultimate sense, true.”
Keller, Timothy. “The Gospel Story Changes How We Read Other Stories.” Hidden Christmas: The Surprising Truth Behind The Birth of Christ, Viking, New York, New York, 2016, pp. 24–28.
A Note from Chris: If you’re interested in reading more of Hidden Christmas (which I highly recommend you do!), you can get your copy on Amazon.