Well, I hope you’ve all had a very enjoyable Christmas – or perhaps I should say, I hope you’re all having a very enjoyable Christmas, as today’s only the first Sunday after Christmas, and we can surely go on celebrating until twelfth night, which is still a whole week away.
Christmas is such a wonderful season of hopefulness isn’t it? We surround ourselves, at this darkest, deadest time of the year, with symbols of hope. When all the trees are bare, we bring in a tree which cheers us with its greenness, and we decorate it with baubles symbolising fruitfulness. There is hope, too, in our use of lights at Christmas. Any number of candles are burned, and nowadays even more strings of lights are lit. Some houses are truly amazing, are they not? But behind it all is the sense of cheer in the dark times.
And the greatest hope of all, of course, is centred on that baby in the manger. As we return each year to focus our attention on that little scrap of life, we renew our bond with everyone to whom that baby brought hope: the parents, the shepherds, the wise men, and countless millions down the ages.
Now, of course, any baby, rightly conceived, is a bundle of hopes. Good parents hope for their children to have a good life. The child, too, is motivated by hope in his development and his urge to discover things in the world around him. But more than that, the bringing of a baby into the world is itself a sign of hope. It’s like a proclamation of positiveness. What I mean is that hope isn’t just a feeling that we might or might not be lucky enough to experience: it can also be a deliberate act of the will. We can say (or show) that we stand for hope.
That’s what I see when I look at all the Christmas decorations around us: that they are not so much an expression of hope-as-a-feeling, more an expression of hope-as-a-statement. I know when I put my Christmas lights up, I wasn’t feeling hopeful: I was feeling cold, and uncertain whether they would work or not, and a little bit frightened in the wind at the top of a long ladder. Those were my feelings. But what I knew was that with those lights I was making a statement.
And of course, it’s precisely at this dark time of year that we need to help each other with such statements. There’s no point in surrounding yourself with candles and glass fruits when you’re in the garden on a glorious September afternoon trying to decide whether you can manage another small helping of luscious fruit salad, some of which you only just picked ten minutes earlier!
When it comes to babies, though, the darkness is not just a matter of a winter solstice. It is true that some babies are brought into the world in what we might call favourable circumstances, and others who are comparatively less fortunate. But really there’s no baby that’s ever been born that’s been born into a world free from darkness. There have always been dreadful things going on all over the place: injustice, danger, cruelty and suffering have never ceased since the world began. We know that’s true. We are not stupid. We know that everyone who is born is born to die. That’s the darkness that surrounds us. And that’s the darkness in which our statements of hope are so vital, so brave, so faithful, and so much to be respected and treasured.
It would be so easy to be overcome by our awareness of evil and suffering in the world, to conclude that there’s not much point in anything, and to end up in the depths of despair. But what we say is, ‘No!’ There’s good too. There is justice, there’s safety, there’s kindness and there’s joy. And we believe in these, we support them, we promote them and we try to practise them. It’s not just that we feel these will be more powerful than the darkness: it’s doing something about it, and what we are determined to do is to play our part in helping them to triumph.
That’s what Mary did – and Joseph too. No-one can say they didn’t live in times of injustice, danger, cruelty and suffering. Add to that the darkness of disgrace at such a pregnancy. That’s the background against which we hear Mary’s astonishing words, “I am the Lord’s servant.” For this is her proclamation of hope. This is her saying, “I work for goodness. My allegiance is to the Lord of life. Come what may, I will remain faithful and never let circumstances put out my hope.” Isn’t that tremendous?
Joseph, too, showed how ready he was to hear and obey the word of God, and not let his very understandable negative feelings have their way. He’s such an unsung hero, Joseph. How open he was to those voices which came to him in his dreams! How he put himself out to support his family, himself risking disgrace, not to mention massive inconvenience, and all without even the satisfaction of being the biological father!
As for the darkness of the times in which these two made such a stand for hope, well they were pretty dark, weren’t they? The political situation was even more tense than usual. Many Jews were opposed to the rule of Herod the Great, despite his massive building projects in Jerusalem, and they feared his brutal suppression of anyone who opposed him. So the people of that time certainly had more than their fair share of injustice, danger, cruelty and suffering. To say nothing of the many ways in which life was more difficult in those far off days from what we enjoy today – in terms of reliable food supplies, health care, social services and education.
The whole point is that at Christmas it’s in the midst of darkness that we all join together in proclaiming hope. It’s an opportunity for millions of people (many of whom wouldn’t be seen dead inside a church) to share in this great celebration of new life.
So it’s a bit harsh when less than a week later, I as a preacher, and you as a congregation, have to be forced to face readings quite as tough as these. How can we hear the good news of the gospel of the love of God when the knowledge of that atrocity committed by Herod is brought to our attention?
Why is it there in St Matthew’s Gospel at all? What do you suppose he included it for? (For we can only suppose: we can never know for sure.) If only we could ask you: Matthew, why did you include it? Did it really happen or did you make it up; or did you pick it up as a rumour with no truth behind it? If it really happened, why don’t we read about it anywhere else – not in any of the other gospels, not referred to in the rest of the New Testament, and not recorded or even suggested in any historical source? You realise that if it is true, it makes the story of the wise men probably true too, cos why else would Herod have taken this pointless action? He wasn’t out to court unpopularity, only to suppress any threat to his supremacy.
But then, Matthew, why don’t you tell us a bit more about it? At the very least, we need to know how many children were killed, how the story got known, and how Jesus was affected when he found out. Do you realise that because you didn’t even say approximately how many children were killed, mediaeval authors could get away with exaggerating the likely number up to as many as 144000? But, seeing Bethlehem was such a small village, there could only have been 20 or so. Now, I know that’s 20 dreadful tragedies, but it wasn’t an event on a huge scale. So, couldn’t you just have left it out like everyone else? It doesn’t support your gospel of God’s goodness, does it?
And that’s even more true if you made it up. Well, you could have done! You might have wanted to put in something really nasty to discredit Herod. We know it’s the sort of thing he might have done, so well done for making it so believable! Or you could have intended to give more glory to Jesus as the one God saved. If that was it, well I can tell you as far as this reader is concerned your artistic licence has backfired and done you discredit. Or was it – well we know how strongly you believe in the fulfilment of Old Testament prophesies – was it simply that you needed to make some sense of that passage in Jeremiah about Rachel?
And while we’re talking about making things up, Matthew, there’s a couple of other things to ask you about. What’s all this about dreams? We know you were a tax-collector with – shall we say – things on your conscience, but did you have particularly vivid dreams at all? You’ve told us Joseph dreamed he had to marry Mary, the wise men dreamed they weren’t to return to Herod, and now here’s Joseph dreaming three more times to get his next move organised; once to go to Egypt, once to come back, and once to go to Galilee instead of Judea as Herod’s ruthless son Herod Archelaus is ruling Judea as his quarter of his late father’s kingdom. Well? Are we to believe you? Joseph told you about all his dreams, did he?
And the other thing: about going to Nazareth: how come you make it sound like he’d never lived there before? “He went to the land of Israel,” you say, but “withdrew to the district of Galilee, and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth.” You wouldn’t have put it like that if you’d known that he had already lived there before Jesus’s birth, and that that was where he travelled from when he went to Bethlehem with Mary. Well, what do you say, Matthew? On this point it’s you or Luke. You can’t both be right!
Or can you?? Here I want to take you round in a big circle. Remember we started with the idea of proclaiming hope in the midst of darkness, and now we seem to have got bogged down in questions about whether Matthew is historically accurate in his telling of the Christmas story. I’d like to share a few thoughts with you about why we read the scriptures. I’ve just started a fascinating book I got for Christmas called “The Bible – The Biography”. It sets out to tell the life story of the Bible: how it came into being, how it developed and grew, how it stabilised into a final form, and what it’s been up to all these years. I don’t know yet whether I’m going to read about its demise or not. I expect not: it’s probably an unfinished biography!
As we know, what we call the Bible started out as remembered stories passed on by word of mouth. Even after they were committed to writing, we are told that people didn’t really like the written form. They were afraid that, instead of them being a true expression of their own spirituality, fixing them in writing would encourage inflexibility, and an unrealistic and dangerous sense of certainty. We know only too well how dangerous false certainties about the Qu’ran are. And we know to our shame how true it has been of our own Bible: how it has so often been used not to help but to hurt people.
There never was any intention that the Bible should be read in order to be certain about the details of events. So historical accuracy has never been a priority. The problem about Nazareth which I mentioned earlier proves that. Traditionally Jews and Christians have relished highly inventive retellings of our religious stories. If that bothers us, it’s because we are coming to the Bible in the wrong way. We need to come for spiritual certainties, rather than historical ones. The paradox is that we must look for spiritual certainties in what, to our modern minds, reads like a historical account.
In terms of spiritual certainty, there is no disagreement between Matthew and Luke. The apparent factual differences are of secondary importance. If they hadn’t been, they would have been reconciled long ago. The certainty is that, whatever was going on around them, this little family never lost hope. They so easily might have done. “All this, and for what,” they might have said. “He’s born to die, like the rest of us.” But they didn’t.
And of course, he did die, and horribly. As a historical fact, that’s pretty discouraging: a good man ending up so tragically. But spiritually, it has a different value. Paul says, “We see Jesus crowned with glory because he suffered death, so that he might taste death for everyone. It was fitting that God should make him perfect through suffering.” Because he suffered, he has become one with us, and thus we have become one with him. What that means is that, however dark our world, Jesus enters the darkness where we are, as our brother, and illuminates it with the hope that springs eternal. There was surely no darker time than his crucifixion. Dark for him, for his followers, for his mother, and for the two criminals crucified with him. Even at this hour, one of them held firm to hope, and Jesus was able to respond with, “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.” The holy family held firm to hope, and were blessed. So, may that truth – which is so much more than historical truth – fill us with unshakeable hope, not only at Christmas and as we move into 2008, but at every one of our new beginnings, whether large or small.