The awful truth

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31/07/2009

Paul's Personal Pages

The Awful Truth of Christmas

(Christmas midnight, 2005)

Of course, all births should be celebrated, each birth is an ordinary miracle, each birth gives us a living example of the wonder of God’s creation and our part in it.

But this birth is particularly special. We have smothered it with kitsch and disguised it with ritual, we have trivialised it with sentimental carols and pretended it’s just for children.

But beneath all that there remains a awful, holy truth which will not be easily dismissed.

We celebrate this birth because in Jesus of Nazareth, in his teaching and in his death we glimpse something more than ordinary. We catch a fragment of God.

Perhaps that’s why we have to dress it all up in this way – to disguise the force and the power of our insight, our instinct that this is not only amazing – it might have some transformatory claim on us.

We celebrate this birth

Because in it we catch a glimpse of the fullness of God revealed in and through this historical person
Because God who made all things and who redeems all things – the beginning and the end (and the middle too) is somehow crystallised in the image of this new baby.
And, of course, because death is implicit in birth. All lives have their beginning and their end (and middles too) – and to observe any life is to see is a terrible beauty, a mystery of pain and love, of suffering and delight, a dance of evil and creativity – full of possibilities and hope – right until the inevitable end.

We see in the birth of the Christ child all this – and something more. In Jesus there is the hint, the rumour, the possibility of something greater still – of transcendence, of purpose – in traditional church language, the possibility of salvation.

This is a night for reflecting on birth, on new beginnings. With this birth the light of God has shone in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

This is a night for reflecting on endings, on the transcendence of all created things in into God. For the birth of Jesus, of God with us, is the birth of hope – God candle lit in the dark tunnel of daily life. From our beginning God is our end.

This is not some Panglossian conviction that all will be well in the best of all worlds – as long, that is, as we close our eyes and ignore what is happening and deny the dreadfulness of so much of human life.

This is to look directly in the face of human experience – and still to assert the ultimate victory of God over all that is evil.

In the face of natural disasters like the tsunami or the Asian earthquake; in the face of the deliberate disasters of war; in the face of personal tragedies, of life-threatening illness and bereavement; and also in the face of the deliberate harm one person may inflict upon another – in the face of all our day-to-day reality the birth of Jesus asserts: God is good, God is love, and God will craft us into his holiness.

God will take each pain, each evil, each sorrow, and transform it, crumbling it (so to speak) in his fingers to mix it with love and mould it something new: to turn tears and sadness into songs of praise and light, to turn grief into glory.

So this Christmas– and every Christmas – may we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ as an ordinary miracle, and as a door to the divine; as the birth of faith and the guarantee of God’s love; and as awful truth - held in the tiny hands of Jesus Christ are God’s gifts – in the darkest night he brings hope and salvation.

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