It’s been a gruelling year. The physical and emotional hardships felt unevenly across the world need no roll-call here. With traditional Christmas celebrations pared down to almost nothing (Tier 4 residents forced to stay in their homes, everyone else faced with a difficult decision about travelling solely on Christmas Day), and with Christmas worship a pale shadow of what we are used to (the lack of indoor singing being particularly painful to me), is Christmas cancelled?
What I particularly don’t want to do here is to offer a trite, facile answer. It is important to not just say, “Christmas isn’t cancelled because it’s all about Jesus’ birth”. In our current context, this would risk demeaning the suffering experienced by so many, and would also imply that, somehow, Jesus’ coming as a vulnerable baby is unconnected with that suffering. This is untrue. But I have found it helpful, and I hope that others might too, to reflect on a theme of the Christmas narratives that I often miss: vulnerability.
It is tempting to settle on the homely, warm elements of the traditional nativity scene: the cuddly sheep and friendly shepherds; smiling Mary, barely a scratch on her; a warm stable with Sky TV and all the latest mod cons, along with an obedient butlering team of animals. What is all too tempting to omit, is the vulnerability of a small baby, whom the local ruler tries brutally to eradicate;all the migration of Mary and Joseph in the Nativity accounts, from Nazareth to Bethlehem to Egypt to Nazareth, as God prompts them in dreams and angelic visions to keep them one step ahead of danger. In short, if the Christ child is the true light of God, come to tabernacle himself, to “pitch his tent” among us (John 1:14), it is normally tempting, in our family-friendly presentations of the Christmas story, to hugely understate the darkness in which that light shines.
The people who walked in darkness have indeed seen a great light (Isaiah 9:2) – but the sign given to the shepherds is that the baby will be “wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger”, (Luke 2:12) It’s hard to imagine anything more vulnerable than a newborn. I remember my daughter moments after birth, curled up and startled. It brings a new perspective to imagine the fullness of the power of God, wrapped in tender flesh, and born into a world with no baby vitamin K injections or vaccination programmes! I wonder if we lose some of the sheer scandal of God being a baby, living in a society where infant mortality is so low.
The ancient Latin hymn of the church “O magnum mysterium” captures this well:
O great mystery,
and wonderful sacrament,
that animals should see the newborn Lord,
lying in a manger!
Blessed is the virgin whose womb
was worthy to bear
the Lord, Jesus Christ.
Alleluia!
It is somewhere between scandal and outrageous joke that God should choose to come dwell among His creation in a feeding-trough, and be seen first by dumb animals. What I have found helpful and hopeful, and what I have too often forgotten in the past, is that the Christmas story is one of hope against all hope, of a Messiah resiliently awaited for his whole life by the elderly Simeon at the temple (Luke 2:25 – one wonders what journeys of tortuous self-doubt he went through in his life of waiting). If 2020 has been a year where the difficulties and anxieties, the personal and corporate darkness, have been unremitting, I take comfort in the crazy hope that this is exactly the kind of situation God drops Himself right into the middle of. Just as the mysterious fourth figure, who looked “like a son of the gods” (Daniel 3:25), didn’t extinguish the fiery furnace that Daniel’s companions were cast into, but came into that deathly situation and dwelt with them there, right in the middle of the trouble.
“For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them” (Matthew 18:20) is an oft-quoted saying of Jesus. But in its larger context, it is about the resolution of conflict. If your brother sins, go point out their fault… (Matthew 18:15)… then take 2 or 3 witnesses, then tell it to the church. Whatever 2 or 3 agree about on earth, my Father will do it in heaven. For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them. Jesus promises to be especially present at times of ugly, painful conflict. God is with us (Emmanuel) in darkness, and in terrible suffering, and in conflict. Or, we might say, in Brexit, and in the anxiety-fuelled arguments we may have had with our nearest and dearest this year, and in the ceaseless pandemic panorama of despair and darkness – God especially promises to be present in these very situations.
As we try to muster the faithful resilience of Simeon, waiting for a vaccine yet unable to ignore the niggling doubts that “life as normal” may in fact never return as we would like;as we look back over a year in which so many dreams have had to be cast aside; as we react to the Brexit deal we, as a nation, feel deeply divided about; and as we mark Christmas, many of us alone, many mourning loved ones we haven’t been able to properly say goodbye to – the heralded presence of God with us at Christmas, far from being some disparate fantasy, is intimately connected with all these things. Because it was the will of God to become human precisely for circumstances of darkness and conflict,for such a time as this. And because the manger is the start of the journey to the Cross. On that journey, this God-man will teach and heal, and then be falsely condemned, suffer and die and rise from death,for us – so that we might have an intercessor and high priest who has been tempted in every way, and suffered in every way – yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15).
I’m not sure what it means to wish you a “Merry Christmas” in these circumstances. But I do wish you a peaceful Christmas. If you’re a Christian, I strongly commend to you a pattern of daily prayer and reading of Scripture, that have helped me to present my burdens, failures and hopes before God each day (I use the thoroughly unexciting though reliable Common Worship Daily Prayer resources from https://www.churchofengland.org/prayer-and-worship/join-us-service-daily-prayer for Morning and Evening Prayer each day).
And I wish you joy, not (this year) the quick-release fast-to-fade joy of a Christmas cracker-pull, but the slow, inexorable joy of a small, faltering ray of light, barely discerned in the gloom; the sign (if we but had faith!) that dawn is coming. It is unstoppable.
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