Posted Thursday 18 December 2008
A Christmas Message from the Most Rev Dr Idris Jones, Bishop of Glasgow & Galloway and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church.
Christmas - The Christ Mass in its very name reminds us of a time when Christians belonged to one Church whose central act of worship was the Mass in which at Christmas and at Easter the great events at the heart of Christian belief were celebrated. Jesus was born, Jesus died, Jesus was raised by God from death.
As The Season approaches there is a sense of unity as thousands of pilgrims flock to the newest and brightest shopping mall where in defiance of any sense of credit crunch and urged by HM Government to go out and spend, healing is sought in ‘retail therapy’.
Surely Christians can urge that the message of Christmas reminds us of a deeper and more urgently needed sense of being together than that?
As Christians gather in worship we celebrate the way in which the birth of Jesus makes access to God open to all. ‘This is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us.’ That love of God is for all humankind and we are bound into an equality of need and the chance to respond. The Christmas story makes this real in a number of ways.
The physical reality that there was ‘no room for them in the inn’ means that the coming of Jesus is not in some exclusive place but in a very public and open situation that is accessible to all. The first response to this act of God comes from a section of the community that was by the nature of its employment at the margins of society. The shepherds were ‘out in the fields’ but prompted by the message of the angels they come to ‘see this thing which has come to pass’. Whilst most folk were in Bethlehem in order to comply with orders of an occupying power, the shepherds responded to an initiative from God and the marginalised are the first to come to the manger . There is room for all here, whilst in the inn there was no room. The ministry of Jesus was to constantly remind those who heard His teaching that this was how God chose to reveal himself and to call everyone without distinction to know God as ‘Father’. Jesus’ mother had spoken in prophecy about the God who had ‘put down the mighty from their seat and exalted the humble and meek’. This was to happen in the birth of Jesus.
Here indeed is a bringing of all into one for it makes us equal. Even the distinction between the religious and the secular - the earthly and the heavenly - becomes obsolete as expressed in the Christmas devotion ‘O blessed night in which the earthly and the heavenly are made one’. If that distinction is shattered then so are all the other divisions and distinctions that humankind creates - ‘now there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female’.
That being the case, the Church is called to live it and proclaim it, and here is good news indeed that offers a sense of unity that can change the way we see the world and the possibility and the longing that ‘all may be one’.
Category: Bishop's Office, Thought for the Month
