Christmas is upon us now.
I did my best to keep it at arms’ length during four weeks of
Advent. But I am asking, what does this
Christmas mean to me, at my age and stage, and in a world increasingly strange
to me. I fixed on two quotes. The first is from the Gospel for Christmas:
And the Word was made
flesh and dwelt among us… [John 1:14]
The other comes from one of the medical staff in what was a
week or so ago the last actually functioning hospital in Aleppo:
Aleppo is a place where the children
have stopped crying.
We are acquainted with the journey from Auckland to
Wellington. Bethlehem, where Jesus was
born, is about that distance from Aleppo where children have been starving, living
in terror, shot at in the street, barrel-bombed and gassed. I have been trying to think whether any
culture, any society, any religion, really ever has had a good record with
children over the centuries. The
harshest words Jesus spoke were for those who harmed children.
God’s definitive Word to us was not a command or
instruction, carved into stone or copied down on sacred parchment. It was not that the heavens opened and anyone
heard a voice. It was not a sermon or a
papal edict. God’s Word was a baby, born
to a peasant couple, and as vulnerable, as frighteningly dependent, as any baby
newborn in the Middle East or anywhere else.
And if we are to hear God’s Word, it will be by receiving
and loving this child. So God is
speaking first to our hearts, to that part of us that immediately knows the
cost of such love – that were it required we would unhesitatingly take that
child’s place in suffering or death. God
appeals to the best in us, at another level altogether than all our thoughts
and ideas and religions and prejudices, all our possessions, plans… This Word, if we hear this Word, takes
precedence.
It’s not a word we speak or read. This Word is made flesh, a baby, unique and irreplaceable. We understand that, in the mystery, this
child is the icon of the invisible God.
This is God’s Word. It is not a
word of power, but it is a word of rebuke.
It is a word that calls us to silence, and to hearkening, and to
humility.
Google Maps would not give me a route to drive between
Bethlehem and Aleppo, presumably because no one in their right mind would try
that. So I asked for a walking route
instead, and got a trail up around the hills which, they said, I could do in 6
days if I kept walking and if presumably I was a mountain goat. But
all the way I would need to hide from men of violence, men assuming that
disputes are resolved by killing and maiming, men who have known no other life,
and no other way of remedying things.
Far away from there, as far as you might want to go… to the USA, to
South America, to Africa, to South-East Asia… there are more and more men and
women who assume violence is the way forward, including inevitably the
exploitation of children, of women, of the needy.
I do hear, from where I am, recognisable echoes of that Word
from time to time, sometimes from surprising places. But there is also now all the din of
secularism that has no time for the church, in any of its variations or reformations
or presentations. The Word is clearest
and nearest, it seems to me, where the simplest aspects of Jesus’ teaching are known,
humbly and quietly, not stridently, and followed… where people are friends with
silence, and refuse to have enemies… where grown-up faith can be strong and
wise for others as well as ourselves… where fear is conquered because our lives
are hid with God in Christ…
Muddled, I know… but those are my thoughts this Christmas.
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