Birth and Death at Christmastide

The baby Jesus has barely been put down in his rudimentary cradle before the Church Calendar starts its heavy hints that his life, for all its glory as the life of God Incarnate, is one that will end in a painful, though salvific, death.



Even on Boxing Day, known in Church as the feast of Saint Stephen, whose martyrdom is drawn to resemble closely the death of Christ (read Acts 7.56-60 with Luke 22.69; 23.46, 34), our attention shifts from swaddling-clothes to grave clothes. This continues into 27th December with the celebration of Saint John the Evangelist, the writer through whom, yes, we most clearly behold God’s glory in Christ; but it is through the prism of the Cross that this comes into sharpest focus. On 28th we consider the Murder of the Innocents (Childermas) and the Flight into Egypt, thereby contemplating Pharoah’s first slaughter of Moses’ contemporaries, which was followed eventually by the Hebrews’ Exodus from Egyptian slavery. In the New Testament recapitulation of the story, the new Exodus is from death to life, and is brought about by Christ on Calvary. Indeed, even when Herod dies and the Angel declares it safe to return to Galilee, the threat of destruction is postponed rather than definitively removed: Matthew uses the same murderous verb to describe the malign intentions of the King (2.13) and of the Chief Priests who wait till the end of the story to do their worst (27.20). This is further clarified for us on 1st January with the feast of the Naming and Circumcision of Christ. This isn’t some cutesy celebration of babyhood. It is, rather, a statement that Jesus’ name means ‘the one who saves’. How he saves is made clear as his first miniscule drops of blood are shed by the sharp blade of circumcision.



This ‘Salvation cycle’, as we might call it, will spin throughout the Forty Days of the Christmas season. The wheel is turned again on the Sunday after the Epiphany, as we celebrate the Baptism of Christ, his own symbolic Crossing of the Red Sea. All is then concluded on the very last day of Christmas – Presentation or Candlemas on 2nd February – with the request by the aged Simeon that he be allowed to ‘depart in peace’ having seen the world’s salvation in the infant Christ.



The second ‘Epiphany cycle’ spins as Simeon insists that Christ’s glory does not belong exclusively to Israel. Jesus is ‘a light to lighten the Gentiles’ (Luke 2.32; cf. Isaiah 2.2). This is why figures of the Magi (added to crib-sets on 6 January) are depicted as coming from all parts of the globe: they personify the Psalms’ prophecy that ‘All kings shall fall down before him; all nations shall do him service’ (Psalm 72.11).



For us to live through these days of festival and seek to receive the new-born Christ, two responses are invited.



1. In sharing this global gospel, we should be careful to turn no-one away through insensitivity or tone-deafness. Of course we cannot reduce the gospel to a set of bespoke individual preferences; but neither should we blare it out unthinkingly, or without proper attention to dialogue and mutual understanding.



2. Equally important is making ourselves entirely available to the transforming work of the Holy Spirit. No New Year’s resolution or eventual Lenten discipline can hope to soften our hard hearts or unstiffen our stiff necks (Exodus 7.13; 32.9) unless we are wholly open to the God-made-flesh-in-Christ who continues to come calling in Spirit and Sacrament, Word and World. His universal offer of salvation and global call must be matched by our wholehearted response. This will naturally entail a rooting-out of other habits and dispositions, and may feel like Eliot’s ‘Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death’ (TS Eliot: ‘Journey of the Magi’).



Indeed, if it is to lead to the abundant life of the gospel, it will inevitably be a sort of death, strong enough to fling wide the necessary gates.