Readings: Isaiah 52:7-10; John 1:1-14.
“We’re all in this together”, said the Chancellor George Osborne over and over again in his speech to the Conservative Party Conference in 2009, as he introduced his ideas for one severe cut in public spending after another. If we experience financial difficulty now – and some have lost their pensions, homes, jobs – if times are hard, then is it a comfort to know that, “We’re all in this together”? Probably not, but I don’t think Mr Osborne meant it as comfort. More a stark reminder of shared liability and shared suffering to come.
But now, gathered around this symbolic manger, imagining in our mind’s eye Christ the newborn King, shared liability and shared suffering are far from our thoughts. Now we’re basking in the newborn King’s glow, and in the joy of the angels, Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, and even the animals. From the highest to the lowest, “We’re all in this together”. And, so is God. Because if the Church’s message at Christmas can be summed up in a catchphrase, this does it as well as any other. We – and that includes God – are all in this together. For at Christmas we believe that God became a human being in Christ the newborn King. He is not only like us, he is one of us, with our limitations, and our weaknesses, even the grinding material poverty which few of us here will experience, but millions of others do every day. But like us, he relied on a mother’s love and care to grow, and one day to become the adult who would make his own way in the world, like us becoming subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Only, fortune was more outrageously cruel to him than it will ever be to us – beaten half-to-death, nailed on a cross, and mocked until he died slowly and in agony, all for speaking out about a dream. If we’re all in this together, then he’s more so, he who showed us the dream by making the ultimate sacrifice.
Why is this a message of joy and hope? If even God didn’t escape the hard knocks of life, how is that a comfort? How does it help those who’ve been ruined these past years to know this story? How does it encourage the poorest people of the world to hope for resurrection, when they experience bitter pain and loss relentlessly every day? If we’re all in this together (which does seem a bit hollow when I compare my own situation with the poorest of the world), but if we are, then how does it help to know that God’s in it too? I suppose there’s some sort of comfort in shared suffering. Not much though. The conclusion I must draw is that, if God’s in this together with us, then we’re in it together with God. The fathers of the early church put it like this: God became like us, that we might become like God. God stoops to our level, to raise us up to his own. If God shares in human suffering, we share in God’s glory. And God’s power.
The Christmas Gospel we heard said: “to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God”. What is that power which we children of God possess? We do, after all, have immense power as a human race. Power to search for (perhaps even find) the Higgs boson, the “God particle”. Power to blow the planet to dust if we wanted to. And as children of God, perhaps we even have the power to end child poverty, and Third World debt…if we wanted to…if only we realised that, “We’re all in this together”.
The thing is, this power is unlike anything else. It’s not obvious, for one. But then, God’s ways rarely are. If you were God, do you think you would choose an unmarried teenage girl, Mary, in a stiflingly patriarchal age, to be your main collaborator, via a controversial pregnancy? Probably not. Would you come to earth in the weakest, most vulnerable form, as a newborn baby, born amongst animals and squalor, in an age with sky-high infant mortality? Again, probably not. Would you get the message out by terrifying the shepherds on the distant hills with an army of angels? Would you put a star in the sky and leave it to chance whether anyone notices and does something about it? I suspect not. But such is the way when love comes down at Christmas. Love, which is not our way, but is true power. True power, which is love.
And this is the only kind of power which the newborn King recognises now, just a few hours old. Not the power to solve the mysteries of physics, nor the power to deprive, nor to kill nor tear nor destroy. But the gentle power to warm, and to feed, and to nurture. This is the exercise of true power.
So I wish you all a Happy Christmas: children of God, one and all. May you know the power of God now. In this season when we’re told that family feuds break out like no other time of year, along with loneliness for many, isolation for some, over-spending and over-indulgence for everyone, may you find true happiness in the knowledge that, in spite of all this, true love has come to stay, to transform us and resurrect us, if only we’ll let it. Because it’s God’s promise, made real in this newborn King, that “We’re all in this together.”
