Christmas: More than peace and goodwill

Amidst all disenchantment around us we need to affirm our faith – in life, in ourselves, in others and therefore, in God. We need to hope – hope against hope until as Shelly says, “Hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates”. And we need to love to rediscover that universal principle of life.

Bertrand Russell who explained to us why he could never be a Christian slipped back in another context to the core of the Christmas message when he said, “The thing I mean, please forgive me for mentioning it, is love.

If you feel this, you have a motive for existence, a guide in action, a reason for cou-rage, and an imperative necessity for intellectual honesty… although you may not find happiness, you will never know the despair of those whose life is aimless and void of purpose”.

There is more to Christmas than peace and goodwill. The story of the birth of Christ begins with a revelation to a peasant girl that she would be the mother of the Messiah – the Saviour of the world. She would conceive by the Holy Spirit and give birth to the Son of God.

Song of Mary
She was so overpowered by the message that she breaks into poetic utterance:
“My soul doth magnify the Lord
And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Saviour…
He hath showed strength with his arm
He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts
He hath put down the mighty from their seats
And exalted them of low degree
He hath filled the hungry with good things
And the rich he hath sent empty away...”

This Song of Mary is called the Magnificat. Mary sees a vision of a new order of things where the weak and the poor will throw off their shackles.

It is a song of liberation for all humankind. It reflects the teachings of the prophets of the Old Testament who denounced the oppressors of the people who would sell the needy for a pair of shoes.

The prophets were constantly exhorting the people to “untie the knots of the yoke, and loose the fetters of justice, to set free those who have been crushed”. Mary belonged to this oppressed section of the people.

It might seem strange that in this momentous hour of her life when the angel had cast her in this stupendous role, she should be preoccupied with justice for her people. But one can well imagine that, then as now, this was a burning question.

Cry for social justice
The Jews were under the Roman yoke and longed for the Messiah who would liberate them. Mary’s Song is a song of deliverance not only from foreign domination but from the oppressor within the gates.

She did not know then, that beginning with the Magnificat the road would end at the cross where she would stand weeping for her son who would show the world an entirely new way.

It is a cry for justice, liberation from the tyranny of the rich and the exalted. Thus,
woven into the message of peace and goodwill is also the lesson that these conditions can only come when there is social justice.

The Church has side-stepped this problem by dispensing charity while ignoring the deeper claims of equality. The Song of Mary is a reminder that charity without justice is an insult, and peace only a graveyard where there is no equality.

The voice of Christmas cries in the wilderness. It is not a call to violent revolution – for violent revolutions always end in tyranny of one kind or another. Christmas calls for a change of heart, a turning away from oneself to one’s neighbour, and therefore to God. We like to imagine that religion is a love affair between man and God, but that affair is possible only when one loves one’s neighbour.

Christmas reminds us that in a creative relationship there is God, man and always his neighbour – only in such a cooperative partnership can we hope for a restructuring of the social fabric, which will be permanent.

In short, Christmas comes to remind us that we are all inextricably bound together in this brief sojourn on this troubled planet; that either we are ‘all’ saved or we are ‘all’ damned; for we are all human, all vulnerable, and all in need of one another.