Tonight, Christ is born for us. St Luke tells us the story magnificently year after year. It’s the core of Christmas. Round it gathers the poetry of Isaiah and the Psalms, the carols and hymns, the decorations and cribs and time together with family and friends, the moments of prayer. They all aid and abet our Christmas. Year after year it’s hard not to be moved, not to be enchanted and entranced, not to have our imaginations and emotions rekindled, not to be stirred at some level. May Christmas take hold of us once again! May it do so ever more year after year!
And what does it convey? St Luke with his shepherds and angels, St Matthew with his wise men? The whole experience?
Perhaps we can put it like this: we sense that something else is going on, something else is in our own lives, our world. Something has happened – and not just two thousand years ago, but ever since; it’s alive. It’s like the first smell of spring, a new channel coming on air which can’t be closed down. There’s a new kid on the block, literally.
Caesar Augustus goes on, of course: the archetypal ruler. Think of all the political faces that our screens present to our eyes, day after day, the names that ring in our ears when the newscasters speak (which I needn’t repeat). They are Augustus’ followers over time. And as his registration policy – all about taxation presumably – shaped the lives of Mary and Joseph, so do the policies of his successors, and sometimes far more callously, in ways more reminiscent of Herod than Augustus. There are children in Ukraine who have lost the ability to smile. There are children in Gaza, and not just there, with no Mary and Joseph of their own anymore. The massacre of the innocents goes on. So too the sheer battle to survive goes on: to find food and shelter and work and health care, just as the people in Palestine struggled two thousand years ago. There is so much to absorb and enslave us, so many of the yokes and rods Isaiah speaks of, so much the “ungodliness and worldly passion” of the world of St Paul.
But is that all? Isn’t there something else going on as well? Something that happened in the sheltering cave Mary and Joseph shared with the animals, something that has grown with the boy in the manger and spread out and spreads out still? A light Isaiah calls it, a new song the Psalm says, an apparition of grace according to St Paul, a peace that angels announce.
Yes! And every Christmas reignites it.
The poets have sung of it too, Tolkien for example, some ninety years ago, in his Noel:
“Grim was the world and grey last night:
The moon and stars were fled,
The hall was dark without song or light,
The fires were fallen dead…
The world was blind, the boughs were bent,
All ways and paths were wild:
Then the veil of cloud apart was rent,
And here was born a Child…”
And the voice of a woman broke out:
“In the dale of dark in that hour of birth
One voice on a sudden sang:
Then all the bells in Heaven and Earth
Together at midnight rang.
Mary sang in this world below:
They heard her song arise
O’er mist and over mountain snow
To the walls of Paradise…”
And other voices join, angels’ and ours:
“The bells of Paradise now ring
with bells of Christendom,
And Gloria, Gloria we will sing
That God on earth is come.”
Someone else is here now, Someone new, slipping in under the radar, hidden among the world’s forgotten. Another music can be heard.
And from Him something flows out, to cleanse man’s inhumanity to man and the sordid things we do, to refresh our stale old selves. A purifying, life-giving stream. There is a love embargoed now, sealed and stored in one frail child, and ready every day to be released in us as faith and hope and love. There is life in the Spirit now and life together in peace. He gathers rather than scatters. He can bring shepherds and emperors to their knees, young and old, women and men. He fills even life’s ordinary things with a new laughter and loveliness and raises human beings to heights of holiness. He’s started a movement every one of us can join. No wonder the angels sing. Saints are possible now. There’s something more than power and pride at work in the world.
Year after year St Luke’s story is there for us to hear, and year after year this Child can be born in us, and life begin again from him.
Earlier tonight, in Rome, the Holy Father opened the bronze door to St Peter’s Basilica, and so opened the Jubilee Year of 2025. “Dear sister, dear brother, he said, on this night the ‘holy door’ of God’s heart lies open before you. Jesus, God-with-us, is born for you, for us, for every man and woman. With him, joy flourishes; with Him, life changes; with Him, hope does not disappoint.”
Yes, there’s Someone else around. Glory to God in the highest!
St Mary’s Cathedral, Aberdeen, 24 / 25 December 2024
