CHRISTMAS MIDNIGHT MASS 2022
May I ask you a question? When you were in Primary School, did you take part in a Nativity Play? If so, was it in the Infants or the Juniors, or even both?
In my Primary School over sixty years ago, the Nativity Play was a very serious business. It was very much a matter for the top forms, with weeks of rehearsal and a complex and sometimes quite witty script, parts of which have remained in our heads across the decades.
A few years ago, someone who had been a couple of classes ahead of me in Primary School, quoted some of the lines which she recalled from the Nativity Play of her final year. She had been the innkeeper’s wife, and she recited from memory her lament about the rising cost of goods, before scolding her husband, a genial lad named Wieslaw Muhler, one of the sizeable contingent of Polish pupils whose parents had come to England at the end of the Second World War, fleeing the Soviet invasion of their homeland. (Substitute Ukraine for Poland, and consider how history repeats itself.)
I was able to respond with some of my lines as First Shepherd at Christmas 1960. After commenting to the Junior Shepherd, played by the smallest lad in the class, “You’re very late, my boy”, I had the task, much later in proceedings, of explaining the situation to that year’s innkeeper, whose identity I do not recall: “In that stable, host, in the manger, lies the Saviour of the world. A child has been born there this night who will redeem Israel.” Clearly, this was a shepherd who was thoroughly theologically literate.
The Nativity Play was probably the most important event of the year bar the eleven plus, and involved only those who could learn their lines and deliver them with a due degree of decorum. It saddens me, therefore, that in many schools, if it hasn’t been abandoned altogether in favour of some sort of Winter Wonderland, it tends to be reserved to the Infants, over whom parents can drool, whilst the Juniors follow it with some supposedly more serious drama about any subject under the sun.
In other words, the birth of the Redeemer has been reduced almost to the status of a fairy story, something to be depicted by tiny tots, but not to be taken seriously by older children, and certainly not by adults.
That isn’t good enough. The Nativity is a thoroughly adult story, perhaps deserving of an 18 rating—adults only—because it concerns the destiny of the human race. It tells us that the eternal God has broken definitively into the world of humankind in the most radical way possible, by becoming Himself human, and so making humanity divine.
This event assures us that the history of the human race, and indeed of Creation, isn’t “a tale told by an idiot”, but a matter of supreme and ultimate significance. The birth of this child, and all that was to follow, is the final piece of the jigsaw, a jigsaw which began with the Big Bang, or whatever if anything preceded that, and which will remain intact even when the universe folds in on itself, or whatever it is that the scientists predict will happen.
Christmas says, or indeed shouts, that there is no such thing as futility or pointlessness; that all the mess and ugliness of the world is potentially beautiful, capable of transformation, because eternity has descended into time, and humanity has become divine. This is far too important a message to be left to the Infant classes, though it certainly begins with them. It is an adult reality, on which every one of us needs to ponder, and in which everyone is invited to rejoice.
