An Address given in the Chapel of Pusey House at the Carol Service for St Cross College
9 December 2008
When a poet says that his love is like a red, red rose, we know pretty much the sort of thing he means, because he’s doing something we all do; we take words, or pictures, or both, to try to express what goes beyond words.
So what of the two Gospel writers, Matthew and Luke? They’ve given us some very memorable words and pictures, as we’ve been hearing – angels, shepherds, wise men, a newly born child. Yet just as we would never think that someone’s love is literally like a red rose, so, when we look at the pictures handed to us by Matthew and Luke, we make a big mistake if we take them only at face value. The stories of the birth of Jesus have a meaning far beyond what is obvious in them. Let’s look at just two of the most significant of those meanings.
Firstly, the Christmas stories are not simply about events. Their real importance is that they’re telling us about that source of reality whom we call God. These stories tell us that God works through events, and that God often works in ways which are not expected by us. In other words, Christmas reminds us of a vital truth – that God is God. God is not someone or something else. That’s an essential point. Whether we call ourselves religious believers or not, we all have various sorts of pictures of God in our minds, the most popular, I suppose, being that of the old man on the heavenly throne. Even very intelligent and sophisticated people can have very naïve pictures of God. These mental pictures are inevitable, but they can be good or bad, and some people have pictures in their heads of a very nasty god, a god who is out always to condemn and punish. So as we approach Christmas we need to let the Gospel writers give us a jolt by reminding us that our mental pictures of God are not themselves God. God is God. God is not someone or something else. Which is why when Moses, in the Old Testament, asked for the name of God, God gave only the uncompromising reply, “I am”.
The second thing which Matthew and Luke show us is even more disturbing, namely, that God is not far away from us and distant and conveniently forgettable. God is at work in all things, here and now, in things earthly as well as things heavenly. What’s more, God is working in all things to touch our lives. Matthew and Luke show us God at work in political upheaval, in the events of daily employment, in the situation of a pregnant girl. And the implications of this are truly mind-blowing, because they mean that God is everywhere working towards us.
So, to pick examples, if your business is sub-atomic particles, God is there, waiting for you in the smallest of the small. If, like Matthew’s wise men, your work is gazing at the heavens, God is ready to meat you in the infinite. And whether your occupation is plants or poetry, economics or engineering, correcting footnotes or doing housework, computing or college accounts, whatever your work and your relaxation – in every place there is the possibility that you may be surprised by God. And often it will be a surprise, because the God who approaches us is the God who is truly God – the God whom the Christian faith confidently assures us meets us in everything relating to our humanity. This God, as all the four Gospel writers show, is the God who addresses us in human terms, as we see in Jesus whose birth we celebrate at Christmas.
A great scholar and writer, Helen Waddell, wrote a prayer in which she spoke to God as the One “whose eternity dost ever besiege our life”, and that hits the target. But the besieging of our lives by God is not the siege which threatens us, but the patient waiting of the One who comes to set us free from behind the walls of our false pictures and our prejudices. This is the Good News about God which the Christian Church tells us every Christmas. The issue is then whether we listen to it, and what we do in response.
Let me end with Helen Waddell’s prayer:
“Lord God, Thy eternity dost ever besiege our life. Thou dost never depart from us....All our life Thou hast sought us: seek us still. By the mystery of Thy holy Incarnation, by Thy Cross and Passion, by Thy glorious Resurrection, speak to us yet. We ask it for the sake of that Life which Thou didst give for the life of the world. Amen.”
Father Barry Orford