The Celebration of Christmas
Christmas is a time of feasting and merriment, of good-will and fun and laughter; it is a time when people exchange presents and feel especially close to their relatives and friends; it is a time of decorations and celebrations, nativities and pantomimes, trees and mince pies, and much else besides. It is also a time when some people are especially vulnerable, especially the old, the lonely, the sick and the bereaved.
There are a great many different aspects to Christmas, and right at its heart there is something very special. At Christmas we celebrate the birth of a child; ‘a child is born’ and the whole earth rejoices. A child is born, and you and I stand in amazement that in anything so weak, helpless and vulnerable as a new born child, God should make himself known to us.
That is something we consider all too rarely, the vulnerability of God in his giving himself to us in the birth of a child. And in our Christian reflection on the life of Jesus we take that same vulnerability into account all too rarely. Paul says of Jesus that he was ‘born of woman, born under the law’. His solidarity with us extends even to this, that he shares the conditions of our birth, and he shares the conditions under which we live our sinful lives. And he shares too – although that is the story of Easter – in our death!
The Christmas story tells us that ‘a child is born’. In this it tells of a beginning; the beginning of God’s coming to us in the person of Jesus Christ. And who could tell, looking at that baby or at any new-born child just what the future would hold? We know very little of his infancy or childhood; we know nothing of his growing up into manhood, and we are not told of the influences that shaped his life. But it would not be too surprising if the ordinariness that marked his birth also marked his home life and upbringing.
In the stories told by Matthew and Luke, besides the unusual things we usually think about at Christmas, the angels, the shepherds, and the magicians, there is something very ordinary in the manner of his birth. His birth is overshadowed, in Luke at any rate, by the political situation that required his father Jospeh to register for taxation purposes in their own place of birth. And in Luke, too, the stable – or is it the street? – provides a make-shift home into which he is born. Born in poverty and visited by shepherds. And in Matthew’s Gospel, we have the story of the flight to Egypt, and then to Nazareth. He is hardly born when his life is threatened, and he is vulnerable to the threat of Herod. His parents have neither the power nor the influence to ward off the threat. They can only escape by running away.
Strip away the unusual things and you are left with something very ordinary indeed. He shares the birth of the poor of all the earth, of the outcast and the refugee, of the dispossessed and the homeless. His parents are humble folk of peasant stock, vulnerable to the whim of a king or the threat of a tyrant.
Vulnerable and ordinary as his birth may have been, it is nevertheless presented to us in the Gospel as a triumph, a cause for rejoicing in earth and heaven. The angels, the shepherds, and the magicians are all part of the story; their worship is genuine, and it is appropriate, for this child who is born will indeed walk closely with God in a way that the rest of us cannot really match. In him God will walk more closely with men and women than in other times and in other places. And so he will also be known by that great name taken from the Old Testament, Immanuel – God with us!
So let us take time this Christmas, to look once again at the birth, and think deeply about it. A child is born, in all the vulnerability of every birth, his life is threatened and with his parents he becomes a refugee. Yet in this birth, ordinary and humble, we discover that God has entered into our experience, to share in our birth, our human living, and our death, and to transform all of that by his presence, to lift us up so that we can experience life in all the fullness of humanity as God intended it to be. God with us, now, this Christmas, in the New Year, always.