Christmas story trumps the games that power plays

Dec 22, 2016

By Fr Andrew Hamilton SJ
For most people, Christmas concludes a gasping sprint to the end of the year. It also offers an opportunity to reflect on the events of the past year.

For Christians, it offers the additional invitation to evaluate both, the events of the year, and the cultural celebration of Christmas in the light of the story of the first Christmas and the values embodied in it. As in all comparisons of this kind, the evaluation will always suggest a mismatch.

The mismatch and the weariness associated with its recognition are caught sensitively in the last lines of TS Eliot’s Journey of the Magi:

‘I had seen birth and death / But had thought they were different; this Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. / We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, / But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, / With an alien people clutching their gods. / I should be glad of another death.’

The poem seems freshly minted when we reflect on the large movements of 2016: the denial of hospitality and solidarity involved in Brexit and the exclusion of refugees fleeing from conflict in Syria and Libya; the brutality of rhetoric and the countenancing of brutal action in the United States election; in Australia, the acceptance of brutality and discrimination as a normal response to strangers and the fragmentation of interest groups; in Malaysia, the growing acceptance of corruption at all levels and the rise of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious political system that challenges the nation’s foundation, that is, engraved in its heraldry as ‘unity is strength’!

Taken together these amount to a birth of something quite unwelcome.

The first Christmas story stands out against that dark background, just as it stood out against the dark background of its own day.

An occupied nation in which citizens could be compelled to walk for many days so that they could pay taxes to a distant Emperor; a local ruler ready to kill children in order to eradicate potential rivals; the lack of hospitality in a tourist town; the constant compromises, rivalries, revolts, rumours of revolts and bloody reprisals that punctuated public life were the stuff of people’s lives.

“The newborn Jesus is caught up in the savage games that power, wealth, competitiveness and violence play; his last days ended brutally in a death devised to alienate, deter, intimidate and to speak power to powerlessness.”

In the foreground of the story was a God who became poor to join the poor, dependent to join the powerless, vulnerable to join those without security, who was born outside Jerusalem, even outside Bethlehem, with despised shepherds for company. It spoke of invitation and not exclusion, welcome and not refusal, breaching of walls and not building them, connection and not isolation, cooperation and not competition, constancy and not violence, vulnerability and not armour plating, trust and not anxiety, simplicity and not wealth, love and not power.

This is the path of constancy, of faithfulness to little people in small things, of being a midwife in the hard labours of a Birth like Death.--Eureka Street