'Santa is expected to gift sunny skies to much of New Zealand on Christmas Day but wise men will keep a brolly close at hand' (NZ Herald, December 1). This optimistic take on the weather forecast for Christmas Day combines two elements of the Christmas season: the annual world-wide travel of Santa Claus as he completes his almost impossible task of present-delivery, with the perhaps lesser acknowledged present-givers, the wise men of the biblical story of Christmas. The challenge is to determine which of the two present-giver identity options actually point us to what Christmas Day is all about.
In so many ways, Christmas is almost over before it has even begun. Months ago, Christmas wrapping paper and Halloween chocolates were competing on the supermarket shelves. Signs for sales and opportunities to purchase next year's Christmas presents are already beginning to appear. The pressures placed on consumers and families are immense, so much so that we might just want it all to stop! But spare a thought for the reality of the message: that it is not so much the presents that matter at this time of year as the presence of a small, weak and helpless baby born into relative poverty in a town called Bethlehem 2000 years ago. Christmas is so-called because on Christmas Day we are invited to remember and to celebrate Christ's-mass: Jesus' birth, which heralded God stepping into human history and living among us. This event has the power to herald new beginnings in our own lives today.
Perhaps not surprisingly however, Christmas has rather lost its true meaning in the face of more seemingly attractive and colourful displays that light up our shop windows and streets. While not wanting to dismiss light, colour and creativity, and opportunities for festivity and spending time with family, if we completely ignore the presence of Christ over the presents that we share, we are ourselves ironically missing out on the greatest gift of all: God becoming one of us so that we might know him and be able to live in good relationships with each other. There is a rich imperative in the Christmas story to seek out those in our midst who might be forgotten. The shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night would hardly constitute a priority to be told the good news about Jesus' birth, you might think, and yet the angels went to them first.
The Christmas story can look very attractive and even delightful, particularly in a church or pre-school nativity play, where there is the added hazard of wise men who go on strike, and sheep who get stage-fright, refusing to move and thus blocking the crucial manger scene. But the reality of the story is far more gritty and challenging: a young village girl encounters an angel who informs her that she is to give birth to a child. She risks misunderstanding, disgrace and shame; her fiance struggles to understand what has happened, but stands by his young wife-to-be. Shepherds encounter a heavenly host of angels; and wise men come looking for a king and find him in a humble dwelling rather than a grand palace. God's gift to humanity came in a most unexpected way. It's a radical story of power made perfect in weakness, and of grace found in an unlikely place. Above all, it's a story that tells us that conventional models of power often are not the strongest ways of effecting deep transformations in our communities today. The story of Jesus' birth is told in the New Testament Gospels against the backdrop of the might of the Roman Empire. In such a context, the ruling authority of the elite enjoyed all the privileges of wealth and status. Jesus' birth indicated that real power was from among the weak and dispossessed, and with those considered outcasts and irrelevant. It involves a line-up of characters that certainly wouldn't make the pages of the glossy magazines of today, but which none the less has all the drama and intrigue to equal the highest-grossing blockbuster movie!
