Christmas season 2023 as seen from Brazil . . . .

Sharing with you my reflection for this Christmas

If the story of Jesus’ birth was today, there would be no history. No roads to travel because of the lockdowns, no streets to enter the city, no houses on which doors you could knock, no stable, manger or animals, the beautiful story of the peripheral couple who persists and in adversity, has their son, could not be told.

This is the severity we are dealing with. As we prepare to celebrate Christmas today, we check atonites and atonites that if it were in the present time, baby Jesus probably would not have been born. The hijacking of the possibility of living that was imposed on the Palestinian people by Israel’s war turns the experience of God deciding to be people into intangibility. This is why there’s no Christmas today in Bethlehem, occupied West Bank.

The Palestinian people are mourning the thousands of children, adults, teens and young people being killed. The State of Israel, under the command of Benjamin Netanyahu, has become a killer state and acts on the logic of genocide. It is no different from the Nazi state that exterminated Jews in the first half of the 20th century. Thus, in “mourning and honor of the Palestinians killed in Gaza, the city of Belem announced the cancellation of traditional Christmas festivities,” reports Rev. Mitri Raheb, president of Dar al-Kalima University in Belem.

At the time of Jesus, the tyrant was Herod, who, knowing the birth of the child, but unable to identify it because the magicians did not give him sufficient information, decided to kill all the children of Bethlehem and all the surrounding territory, under two years old (Matthew 2,16). Today, the tyrant is Netanyahu, who bombs hospitals and maternity hospitals, schools, homes, streets, so that pregnant women are killed before giving birth or, if they survive, have no minimum conditions to give birth to their children. And what is heard on the earth is “a cry”, a “weeping and great wailing”; it is the Palestinian mothers who cry over their children, and do not want to be comforted, because they are no more (referring to Matthew 2,18).

Christmas 2023 puts us in front of a paradox: the birthplace becomes a non-place, the outbreak of life transmits into the emergency of death, the condensation of hope in starlight is lost in the trail of missiles crossing the sky. It happens that the paradox doesn’t represent an end in itself, it doesn’t have to mean a lock, a closure, an impossibility. It’s a statement, an eye opener. And what do we do facing the paradox?

This is exactly where the core of Christmas lies: the force of mutation is present in everything, in every person, in every moment; there is no reality that is static, established, finished. There is no tyrant – be it Herod or Netanyahu – who can take away the strength from us to fight to end the war, against the arms industry, against the authoritarianism of warring and genocidal states such as the United States and Israel in the present time.

In the face of the paradox we affirm that Christmas is the name of our deepest desire to fight, to believe that it is possible to defeat tyranny, to insist that life will be stronger than death, that the universe organizes in favor of peace, that justice is of have the last word, and that even God is born as people to make history.

Lusmarina Campos Garcia is an eco-feminist theologian, Lutheran pastor, doctor and law researcher for UFRJ.