+ In nomine Patris…
“After the border check the couple
continued on their way. It was all getting very hard. The woman was pregnant,
expecting her first child, the man carrying as many of their possessions as he
could. His paperwork was checked to confirm that he was authorised to be in
that town. So they had arrived, but would they have anywhere to stay?”
You may be
wondering what that account is of. What’s it got to do with Christmas?
It could be
an account of Joseph and the pregnant Mary arriving in Bethlehem, having their
papers checked, and yet finding nowhere to stay.
Or, it
could have been a contemporary report of a family of refugees today, on the
borders of our European comfort zone having journeyed from Syria or Iraq.
It is, of
course, both.
And after
the birth of Jesus, as we know, King Herod sought to kill him. And again Mary
and Joseph were on the move, fleeing into Egypt as refugees, to avoid the
massacre of innocent children.
These
journeys of flight from war, terror and murder are not how we want to, or should,
live.
Humanity
itself needs to go on a journey of transformation, and this is what Christmas
invites us to: a changed, renewed world as we live the promises and purposes of
God.
God does
not will for us a world where we see, ‘the boots of the tramping warriors and all
the garments rolled in blood’ (Isaiah 9.5) as the prophet Isaiah described, but
rather, a world in which all authority rests upon the shoulders of the one
named, ‘Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace’
(Isaiah 9.6)
Journeys,
transformation and the movement of people are central to the Christmas story: journeys
to God and from God.
Shepherds in
the fields leave their task of looking after the sheep and go on a journey to
Bethlehem and seek the new born child, the Good Shepherd.
Magi, who
today might be known as the ‘boffins’, the equivalent of today’s academics,
searching and researching after knowledge, wisdom and truth, got up from their
desks, walked out of their labs, as it were, and sought and found truth in the
Child of Bethlehem.
The journey
of the Magi is interesting because they came by one route and, as the gospel
tells us, they went home by another route, signifying a change of life and
purpose (Matthew 2.1-12).
That change
of purpose is effected through the person at the heart of Christmas: Jesus
Christ, the beginning and the end of all our journeying.
Our final
reading from St John’s gospel, in deeply mystical language, tells us two really
significant things that challenge us today.
The first
challenge is that God, in Christ, ‘dwelt among us’, which literally in the
original Greek of the New Testament should be translated, ‘pitched his tent
among us’.
Someone who
pitches a tent is on a journey. A journey stripped of everything but the basics
for life.
Tents
pitched in camps have become the sign of the refugee, and just as God in Jesus
Christ shares our lives, so he is with those refugees today.
The second
challenge is that Jesus, just like the refugees today, received no hospitality,
neither in the inn, not ultimately in the world: he died on a cross outside the
walls, the comfort zone of the city.
The final
reading tonight, from St John’s gospel, tells us, ‘[Jesus’] own people did not
accept him’ (John 1.11).
But with
those two challenges, of God dwelling among us in a tent and not receiving hospitality,
is a promise.
That
promise, St John says, is that, ‘to all who received him, who believed in his
name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or
of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God’ (John 1.12, 13)
At
Christmas, today, every day, Jesus Christ is on a journey towards you and me,
unworthy as we might think we are, and he comes and stands knocking on the
doors of our hearts (Revelation 3.12). ‘You are precious, worthy and loved’, he
say. ‘Do you hear me knocking?’ he says. ‘Will you open the door and allow me
in?’ he asks.
May you be
most blessed this Christmas: and being blessed, hear the cry of the refugee,
the lonely, the homeless and outcast. Hear the knock of Jesus, the one born in
the manger, give him the warmth of your life and receive his love.
© Andrew
Bishop, 2015.
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