Merry Christmas from Auckland Church leaders. Photo / File
Across every continent and language, millions of people will stop what they are doing this Christmas to remember the birth of a baby named Jesus.
It’s a radical story. The fact that our calendar is divided into two eras, one before and one after his birth, is a reminder of the influence Jesus has had on people and societies throughout history. How open you are to the story today is largely affected by whether or not there is room in your life for God to exist and to work beyond the constraints of what appears normal and natural.
As Auckland Church leaders, we want everyone to hear this story and to consider what it might mean to experience, as in the words of the Christmas carol, “glad tidings of comfort and joy”.
The story goes like this:
Two thousand years ago. A nothing and nowhere town, somewhere in Israel. A teenager, living in poverty, falls pregnant. An angel who visits her, praises her– the teen who does not feel worthy of such praise – and tells her that her child is God made into human flesh. Churning disbelief that gives way to peace. A man, destined to marry her, who almost abandons her but sticks with her. A forced pilgrimage to the man’s home town so that an oppressive Roman regime can register citizens and extract tax. A birth far from home, a baby’s soft skin and downy head laid on scratchy straw fit for animal feed. The outcasts of first-century society – shepherds, unwashed, illiterate, asleep in a field – shocked into wakefulness by the brilliance of angels proclaiming the birth of Messiah. The shepherds are the first to visit the child. They bring nothing but leave with hearts and minds full of wonder. Later, Magi follow a bright star to find the child they believe to be a king.
What mere human birth could be heralded by such cosmic significance? Later still, when the child hasn’t even hit two years of age, the ruler of the region, paranoid about the existence of this future king, orders a slaughter of all male children of that age. The child’s parents flee, setting the blueprint for an itinerant life that will end in bloody execution.
The current flare-up of aeons-old conflict in the region of his birth is perhaps a reminder of how easily we fall prey to othering, to enmity, to violence; of how easy it is to hate and fear our neighbours. This conflict, like many others, has layers and layers of history and meaning and hurt behind it. Yet, another person is never just a colour, or a creed, or an ideology; instead, we are all complex creatures, glorious in our contrasting traits, surrounded by the invisible clouds of our past, cherished more than we can ever know or understand.
The story of Jesus is a maelstrom of drama, paradox and hope. The very antithesis of power and glory, he is a servant King who, throughout his brief life, mixes with outcasts and behaves in inexplicable ways. Sharing a meal with a despised tax-collector. A travelling preacher, a performer of miracles. Touching and healing a man with leprosy, a blind man, a woman flooded with blood: those deemed worthless and useless by society. A man who makes everyone his neighbour, who treats everyone with truth and grace. Somehow, his topsy-turvy, mercy-saturated approach to the human condition works.
Who would have thought that this One, raised in a nothing and nowhere town, dying the death of a common criminal, would ignite the transformation of human lives across the world.
His existence is accepted as historical fact by most secular and Christian scholars. Historian Philip Schaff wrote: “This Jesus of Nazareth, without money and arms, conquered more millions than Alexander, Caesar, Mohammed, and Napoleon; without science [...] he shed more light on things human and divine than all philosophers and scholars combined; without the eloquence of schools, he spoke such words of life as were never spoken before or since, and produced effects which lie beyond the reach of orator or poet; without writing a single line, he set more pens in motion, and furnished themes for more sermons, orations, discussions, learned volumes, works of art, and songs of praise than the whole army of great men of ancient and modern times.”
Our modern celebration of Christmas feels divorced from its origins in poverty and homelessness. There is tinsel. There are jolly Christmas carols blaring in malls. There is the seditious grind of advertisements, reminding us to buy, buy, buy. Christmas can be a stressful time for many as we rush to finish work, shop for presents we feel we can’t afford, or plan meals where the threat of inter-familial warfare might simmer under the surface.
We come into this Christmas season, in particular, with the sense that the long white cloud of Aotearoa is fragmented and fragile. Our society is stretching, fracturing in various places.
Some of us thrive, others don’t, and thus the seeds are set for generations to come. Believing that a person is more than the worst thing they’ve ever done, believing that each of us is created in the image of God and thus infused with incredible dignity and potential, is the way Jesus chooses to see each of us. His message of truly loving our neighbours is a message of radical acceptance that we all too easily forget. “Safe?” writes C.S. Lewis in The Chronicles of Narnia. “Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
This Christmas season, let’s be fully present with our loved ones. But let’s not stop there.
Let’s widen our horizons beyond our own families and treat our neighbours with undeserved grace.
Some may also want to consider afresh this utterly unique figure who is Jesus of Nazareth.
We welcome you to attend a gathering or event at a church this Christmas.
On behalf of church leaders across Auckland city, Meri Kirihimete, Manuia le Kerisimasi, Kilisimasi Fiefia, Marau na Kerisimasi, Shèngdàn Kuàilè, Merry Christmas, in whichever language you are blessed with by God.
The woman was shaken by the incident.