The twin dimensions of Christmas

Photo at PxHere

To understand the Christmas story, we need to grasp two dimensions that are apparently contradictory but which, on closer scrutiny, are both showing us the same thing. The first is what we could call the wide-angle version; the second, the close-up picture. 

Let’s start with the wide angle, says the Rev Dr Samuel Wells, in a Christmas sermon. He is the vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, London, and Visiting Professor of Christian Ethics at King’s College London.

The universe is impossibly large to imagine, stretching to trillions of stars; and who knows if there are plenty other universes beyond this one. But that which lasts forever, which we know as “God”, seems to have a particular interest in this tiny planet in this obscure galaxy. It seems useless to speculate why this planet, in this galaxy, in this universe; the point is, that which lasts forever seems to have so ordered things as to be in relationship with one part of creation — in short, us.

The whole epic magnitude of existence has come about in order for God to be among us as one of us and to be our companion and dwell with us. That’s the wide-angle version of Christmas. It answers the perennial question, “What’s the meaning of life?” The answer is, the meaning of life is for God to be in relationship with us and for us to reflect the joy and glory of that relationship by relating to one another and the wider creation in the same way. That’s the meaning of Christmas — the wide-angle version.

And so to the close-up picture. The three accounts of the coming of Christ, in Matthew, Luke, and John’s Gospels, are significantly different from one another. But they all agree on one thing. Matthew talks about a man called Joseph who discovers his fiancée is expecting a baby and is told by an angel that the Holy Spirit has brought this about. Luke sees it from Mary’s point of view, and locates the conversation in Nazareth. Luke adds the story about the census, and there being no room at the inn, and tells us about the shepherds and angels. John misses out the personal detail and describes how the animating force in the universe became a human being, but, interestingly, he adds this sentence, which we seldom talk about at Christmas but seems to me very significant: “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.”

What these three contrasting accounts have in common is that the entry of the creator of all things into the human drama didn’t happen in the way we might expect. It happened in an obscure backwater of the Roman Empire. It the happened to an ordinary woman and a bewildered man with no social prominence. It happened in a shed. It was witnessed by lowly herdsmen.

I discovered what God was up to some while ago when I got to know a woman and a man who told me they wanted to get married. It was a difficult situation. The man had been married before, and for a long time had been partly estranged from his wife. The woman was much younger than the man, and from the very start of their relationship felt she had to tiptoe around her family, because it was clear they didn’t approve.

To be fair, she’d spent her whole life tiptoeing, because her family had been a scene of constant wrangling and great pain almost since she’d been born, and she couldn’t see why her finally finding happiness was taken so badly by a group of people, many of whom it seemed had never found the way to any happiness of their own. But then she became pregnant, and those who disapproved, or took offence, or just couldn’t bear the idea of someone in the family being happy, all decided this was the moment to say the whole thing was terrible, and everyone should be ashamed, and ask what did they think they were doing? But they all turned up to the wedding, and when the bride walked down the aisle, her elegant simplicity, her utterly unpretentious grace, took the wind out of the whole congregation, and all misgivings were set aside for the day.

Two months later, she gave birth. And she wrote to me and said, “You’ll never guess what’s happened. My family has been visiting and have been very kind to everyone including my husband. It’s as if this tiny child heals something inside them when they are with him, and their troubles vastly reduce or disappear around him. It made me think of the wonder of God. This little baby has achieved what my husband and I tried to achieve and couldn't over many years. And so effortlessly!” Those were her exact words.

It was one of the most moving messages I’ve ever received. And not just because this new child had changed the whole dynamic of two troubled families. But because in seventy words, this new mother had shown me what God is doing in coming among us as a baby. God is doing just what this baby was doing: something no argument, no loud voice, no lit-up sky, no heavenly vision could achieve. It’s called a dismantling of the heart. A disarming of resistance.

God comes to us at Christmas — not to blast us into submission, not to make us guilty for what we’ve got wrong, not to stir us to take up cudgels in the latest battle. God comes to us under the radar. God surprises us by appearing as a tiny baby. It’s a high-risk strategy. It’s such a vulnerable way to come among us. But it shows us unmistakeably, irrevocably, eternally, who God is and what kind of relationship God wants to have with us.

God doesn’t want us to worry about the wide-angle story our imaginations can’t encompass anyway. God says, “Receive me as you receive this tiny child. Allow me to dismantle centuries of enmity, heal decades of hurt, transform depths of antagonism. Be mesmerised by me the way you’re captivated by a tiny baby. Let me melt your heart."

❒ Rev. Dr Samuel Wells  

❒ Sermon source here 

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