Christmas Midnight Mass 2021
Isaiah 9:2-7; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2: 1-14
It is another strange Christmas: who would have believed it? Congregations are masked again, there is still no communion from the chalice, no sign of peace, and vulnerable people are still inclined to stay away. Who would have thought it?
Something about it reminds me of what I have read and heard about the First World War. First, there was that conviction that it would all be over in a few months; then there was a death toll way beyond anything which anyone could have imagined—do you remember the government scientist who predicted that Britain was facing a death toll between 7,000 and 20,000? If only! Finally, a sort of dull resignation, a feeling that it would go on forever; that normality would never really return; that life would never be the same again.
Will life ever be the same again? It will probably never be totally the same, because it never is. “Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis” as they say in Hest Bank: “times change, and we change among them”. Life is constantly changing, war or no war, pandemic or no pandemic. Just think of the social changes of the past half century: the rise of co-habitation as a preparation for, or an alternative to, marriage; all the issues around sex and gender; the almost total disappearance of manufacturing industry and of jobs for life; more changes in more ways than you could shake the proverbial stick at.
Perhaps one of the problems after the First World War was that not enough changed, at least at first, though seeds were being sown. Women gave up the jobs they had been doing, and returned to a background role, though 1918 saw some advance in the cause of votes for women, and women were finally given the vote on equal terms with men a decade later. The men returned, not to a brave new world, a home fit for heroes, but to the same old drudgery, mixed now with unemployment and a lack of practical support after all that they had suffered. Yet here too seeds were being sown which would lead to massive changes—and to another world war.
What about today? Will masks become a part of everyday life? Will working from home become the norm? Will health service waiting lists continue to grow?
And what has any of this to do with Christmas? Quite a lot, even if only because this is Christmas, and this is our situation. Yet surely there is far more than that. The Son of God was born into a world every bit as turbulent as ours. The Roman Republic had become the Roman Empire, but its territorial ambitions had not changed, and its rule pressed just as heavily on subject peoples, which is how the Holy Family came to be in Bethlehem in the first place. Before the century was out, the rumbling discontent among the Jewish population would flare into open rebellion, with disastrous consequences whose effect on Judaism is still felt today.
Poverty, displacement, war, and violence formed the background to the birth of the Saviour, as they form the background to much of human life today. Upheaval, disruption, something resembling chaos surrounded Mary and Joseph, all their plans thrown into confusion by angelic messages; childbirth taking place far from home, separated from loved ones, in a far from salubrious, far from comfortable setting.
This was the world into which the Redeemer was born, not a peaceful, comfortable world of painless childbirth, gently lowing cattle, and comforting angels. We know how the angels behaved: they gave their orders, then cleared off. Don’t forget that the final sentence of St. Luke’s account of the Annunciation is “And the angel left her”. Angel choirs may have sung at the birth, but you can bet that they gave no practical help.
This was the world in which the Saviour was born, which He came to redeem: messy, disorganised, confusing, and confused—not very different from our world today. Indeed, many a mother giving birth in a refugee camp or a displaced persons’ hostel must endure a situation very similar to Mary’s.
And our own disordered, Covid-ridden society must seem very familiar to that Saviour whose whole human existence was set among disorder and distress. A dirty stable in a world of pandemonium was enough for Jesus to be born 2,000 years ago: a disrupted Christmas among a puzzled people is an ideal setting for Him to be born anew in you and me today. May the joy of that birth fill and transform you, as it filled and transformed a similarly mixed-up world at the first Christmas of all.
