I know. It's nearly Christmas and by now we should be immersed in the surround-sound of carols, soaked in images of stars and mangers, keeping company with shepherds and angels, and carried along by the story we know by heart, and most times want to live in, and live into.
The Nativity is the prelude to the Passion. At least the Scottish theologian James Denney thought so: "Not Bethlehem, but Calvary, is the focus of revelation." To be sure, an over-sentimentalised Christmas story that is uncomfortable with the dark shadows of Herod, Empire, swords and the murder of children is hardly good news for a broken world overshadowed by darkness.
When Mary was told "You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins", that was a statement of divine intent, a recognition of darkness and evil, oppression and cruelty, greed and lust, and the whole Gordian knot of the sin that entangles, invades and occupies God's creation like Japanese knotweed in the Garden of Eden, and in our contemporary life in the world.
Ironically, a Nativity story without sin erases the reason the coming of Jesus is good news in the first place. Matthew tells of the slaughter of the innocents, the refugee status of the holy family, and the weeping and mourning of mothers every bit as loud and penetrating as the earlier songs of the angels. And if we are not careful, we may well be telling a story of sanitised sentiment, in denial of the dreadful consequences of sin for all those caught up in the misery and suffering of human evil, individual and institutional, personal and corporate, past and present. In words first aimed at those flirting with or embracing such a theology, Richard Niebuhr once warned of the dangers of distorted good news:
'A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.'
Oh, I know. None of us mean to mess about with the story that defines our identity as Christians. We are those who take with utmost seriousness and ridiculously hopeful joy, that promise than in Jesus God comes amongst us, Emmanuel, God with us, Saviour from sin, Light of Life shining in the darkness.
So let joy be unconfined. The good news is not that sin doesn't exist, or should be airbrushed out of the realities of our lives. The good news is that sin isn't the final reality. Ultimately, sin can't win. God has seen to that. And what kind of God? That is what takes us from Bethlehem to Calvary, and notwithstanding Denney's words above, the Christian story is of the God revealed at Bethlehem, and on Calvary, and early in the morning in a garden.
So this Christmas, I for one go back to a favourite hymn, a poem that has shaped my thoughts and prayers and theologising for over 40 years. The Good News is that "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting our sins against us", but bearing their full consequence, absorbing their potential for death, and holding within the eternal purposes of Divine Love all that is created and destined for glory when God will be all in all.
Morning glory, starlit sky,
Leaves in springtime, swallows’ flight,
Autumn gales, tremendous seas,
Sounds and scents of summer night;
Soaring music, tow’ring words,
Art’s perfection, scholar’s truth,
Joy supreme of human love,
Memory’s treasure, grace of youth;
Open, Lord, are these, Thy gifts,
Gifts of love to mind and sense;
Hidden is love’s agony,
Love’s endeavour, love’s expense.
Love that gives gives ever more,
Gives with zeal, with eager hands,
Spares not, keeps not, all outpours,
Ventures all, its all expends.
Drained is love in making full;
Bound in setting others free;
Poor in making many rich;
Weak in giving power to be.
Therefore He Who Thee reveals
Hangs, O Father, on that Tree
Helpless; and the nails and thorns
Tell of what Thy love must be.
Thou are God; no monarch Thou
Thron’d in easy state to reign;
Thou art God, Whose arms of love
Aching, spent, the world sustain.
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