“He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God…” (NRSV, John 1:11,12)

The relevance of the Christian religion is to be found at the point where it seems most irrelevant – at Christmas time. What two things could be farther removed, at first sight, than the Christmas narrative and our current age? And it is not merely a question of over 2000 long years separating them. There are other and apparently irreconcilable differences.

On the one hand we have the tranquil fairy-like picture of a Baby born in a stable one starlit night; of a cluster of shepherds on the hills outside; of angels singing of peace and goodwill.

And, in violent contrast, we have the brutal unsentimentality of our modern scene – two World Wars and their legacies, ongoing civil wars in different parts of the world, torture, human trafficking, terrorism and the desperation of those fleeing their homelands to escape conflict and the constant threat of death. The sight of man’s appalling inhumanity to man is evident almost daily on our television screens.

And yet it is Bethlehem which alone makes sense of this age in which we live.

That Christmas scene of over 2000 years ago was not so romantic and peaceful as we may like to think. Five miles away in Jerusalem was the country’s ruler, King Herod the Great. He had already murdered in succession, his brother-in-law, his wife’s grandfather, his wife, his wife’s mother, and his two sons, so that the Emperor Augustus said that it was better to be Herod’s pig than his son.

He died within a year of that first Christmas, and during that final period of his reign, in a vain attempt to kill the Holy Child, he massacred all the baby boys in Bethlehem. One of his last acts, four days before his death, was to murder yet another of his own sons.

Herod had ruled by the permission of his overlords, the Romans, whom later a British chieftain in far-off Scotland was to call “the plunderers of the world”. “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace”. (1)

As soon as Herod was dead, Jewish patriots in Judea took advantage of the occasion to vent their revenge on the security forces, and this brought the Romans on the scene. The disturbances were ruthlessly suppressed by Varus, the Roman military commander who, as a punishment and a deterrent, had 2000 men publicly crucified. (2)

Thirty years later Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, sentenced to the same death the Man who once had been the Holy Child of Bethlehem.

So the difference between those times and our own is not so wide after all. Human nature is the same, and the lust for power, the ready resort to violence and all the callousness and cruelty which comprise “man’s inhumanity to man” – all that is with us still.

But what illuminates and transfigures the whole sombre, brutal scene is the fact that that Child so dear and gentle is not only Man but the Lord God himself, who was born into the world which he himself had made, who lived in it and suffered in it.

It is that cardinal fact which alone makes sense of this otherwise senseless world and which alone makes sense of God.

Suppose for a moment that the Holy Child in the manger was much the same as any other child; that the figure on the Cross was just another man, and that his crucifixion was just another execution. Suppose that whole series of events was on the purely human level, and that God was not involved in it at all.

What picture would that give us of God? He would be a God who created the world and then deserted it: a God who, fully knowing all the suffering human beings would bring upon themselves, nevertheless made humankind and left them to suffer alone; an unmerciful God who, like the Priest and the Levite in the parable, passed by on the other side, and whose precept therefore would be “Do as I say, not as I do”.

In a word he would not be a God of love.

And what would be the significance of human life? It would be this: after all the hopes and fears of human beings, after all their joys and sorrows, after all their endeavours and sufferings, they would either be snuffed out like a candle flame by the icy blast of death or would pass after death into hopeless misery, endlessly left to themselves with all their sins and frustrations and inadequacy – each one a spiritual failure among spiritual failures. As for God, human beings could find no happiness with him – a loveless being whom they could never love or even respect.

But the blessed truth which the Holy Babe enshrines is that God is love and that therefore human beings can find their eternal happiness in him. For when God made human beings to enjoy the infinite bliss of sharing the life of their Maker, he did not evade the responsibility of his action.

And so, when human beings by their own rebellious sins separated themselves from God and cut themselves off from their destined bliss, God himself of his own freewill was made man to restore us to himself, to heal us of our sins, to renew us in his own likeness and thus to make that lost destiny realisable after all. It remained only for human beings to accept him or reject him, to remain the children of darkness or to become the children of light.

It is in the context of that choice that the Babe of Bethlehem was born. In his love he took human beings at their worst and shared their life at its worst.

“He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him”. There was no room for him in the inn at his Birth, and by the time he reached the end of his earthly life there was no room for him anywhere except on the Cross – and in the hearts of those who loved him.

For “to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God…”.

So it is Bethlehem, set in the midst of a cruel and largely hostile world, which provides the key both to the nature of God and to the ultimate meaning of human life.

References

1. The works of Tacitus (trans. 1904) The Life of Agricola, chapter 30, London: George Bell and Sons.

2. The works of Flavius Josephus (trans. 1861) The Antiquities of the Jews, Book 17, Chap 10, para 10, Halifax: Milner and Sowerby.