CHRISTMAS DAY 2014
Isaiah 9.2-7; Ps. 96; Titus 2.11-14; Luke 2.1-14
[15-20]
Midnight celebration
Eternal God, who made this most holy night to shine with the
brightness of your one true light: bring us, who have known the
revelation of that light on earth, to see the radiance of your
heavenly glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Other celebrations
Almighty God, you have given us your only-begotten Son to
take our nature upon him and as at this time to be born of a pure
virgin: grant that we, who have been born again and made your
children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by your Holy
Spirit; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and
reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and
for ever. Amen.
DESPITE secular pressure, the nativity play is a stalwart
survivor in a Western world that has lost so many enacted community
rituals. Cynics might say that its resilience testified principally
to churches' desire to find ways of involving people, and
particularly of giving children something exciting to do. Yet that
does not seem an adequate reason for the energy and devotion that
go into costume-making and rehearsals year after year. They seem to
belong much more persuasively to a longing, not only to enter into
the action, but to reinterpret it, so that it lives again for those
who take part and also for those who are both outsiders, as the
audience, and insiders, as they join in the carols that flow
through the drama.
Nor do we need self-consciously avant-garde touches or
aggressive updating to convey the message. Sometimes the greatest
illumination comes through the mistakes, the forgotten lines, the
timing faults, and the improvisations that threaten the perfection
of any amateur production.
The parish church in South Africa in which I appeared for
several Christmases as a supernumerary angel still, years later,
involves the children of its Sunday school in performing the
nativity. After one recent rendition, my mother described the
unusual costume of a small shepherd, whose regulation striped
dressing gown and tea towel were enhanced by a pair of gauzy wings.
She, with the benefit of long experience, suspected some
altercation backstage. But the audience may have found themselves
wondering, as the characters in the story of Jesus's birth
continually find themselves doing, what this strange thing might
mean. Asking the question in the light of Luke's narrative offers
one answer: here was a shepherd who, having seen the glory of the
angels, was not going to leave it behind when he went to greet the
Messiah.
And it is glory, perhaps still shining on their faces, that the
Lucan shepherds present to Mary and Joseph and the infant. The
sense of wonder and joy is made more powerful because it
momentarily occupies a complete silence: they do not speak until
they are quite sure that what they see in front of them is what the
angels have predicted. Then the overwhelming news tumbles out,
amazing all present, but also finding its own wondering silence in
Mary's heart (Luke 2.15-19).
Luke arranges the historical circumstances surrounding Jesus's
birth to point irrefutably towards the fulfilment of Micah's
prophecy of a ruler who would rise up from Bethlehem (Luke 2.4;
Micah 5.2-5). Scholarship has challenged the identification of
officials (Luke 2.1-4) on chronological grounds, but Bethlehem has
held its own. As the rest of this Gospel will show, however, this
fulfilment is both already and not yet. The only way to follow
Jesus's life as it unfolds into a ministry of teaching, healing,
and fearless challenge to time-serving authority is to know from
the outset that this is God the Saviour. The only way for Mary to
discover what the shepherds' message means is to stand by her son
as he lives and grows, and as he dies.
In different circumstances, Isaiah held out to an audience
living under Assyrian domination the promise of a king who would
return to David's throne to rule for ever. He tells the future in
the present tense (Isaiah 9.2-6), reminding his hearers how God
stood by a small army under Gideon's command as they defeated the
Midianites (Judges 7.15-25). In the evocative rhythm of marching
feet achieved by the translators of the RSV and adopted in the
NRSV, he paints the picture of a time of "endless peace" (Isaiah
9.7), when "all the boots of the tramping warriors and all the
garments rolled in blood shall be burned as fuel for the fire"
(Isaiah 9.5).
This year, that picture is more vivid than ever, as the
centenary of the outbreak and advance of the First World War
imprints itself on the national consciousness. Opportunistic
supermarket advertising has not in any way diminished the wonder of
the Christmas Truce in which that vision of peace was briefly
realised; and a growing online letter archive preserves the memory
of the war in the ordinary and domestic prose of soldiers writing
home (www.christmastruce.co.uk/hertfordshire.html). They had
glimpsed - for the most part unconsciously - the grace that brings
salvation to all (Titus 2.11). It continues to encourage us as we
wait for hope and the glory that are to come (Titus 2.13).
Dr Bridget Nichols is Lay Chaplain and Research Assistant to
the Bishop of Ely, and a Visiting Scholar of Sarum
College.