Wilful resistance Christmas joy
by Rev. Jean-Daniel O’Donncada, national pastor
We do not know, by any Biblical source or historical proof, the day of Jesus’ birth. But we choose to celebrate it with over a billion fellow Christians in solidarity with a tradition of symbolically connecting the birth of Jesus with the darkest day of the Northern Hemisphere. (You may notice, we would nonetheless be off a few days still, by this logic, but centuries of calendar reforms… leave us here.)
St. Augustine, four centuries after the birth of Jesus wrote, “Jesus was born on the day which is the shortest in our earthly reckoning and from which subsequent days begin to increase in length. He, therefore, who bent low and lifted us up chose the shortest day, yet the one whence light begins to increase.”
Christmas, then, among its meanings, is a deliberate wilful declaration of hope against dismay.
The land of Jesus’ birth is torn by violence. His city of birth, Bethlehem, is occupied by a government its residents consider foreign. Exactly as it was 2025 years or so ago. For all our human progress in the intervening centuries, I see ongoing colonialism, occupation, marginalization as proof that our ancient stories are not irrelevant. It is a defence of the importance of the Bible that I would love to lose.
How do we, even how dare we, celebrate the birth of our saviour in a world whose news reveals so clearly that it has not been saved?
I recoil at the kind of Christian positivity that denies the suffering in the world or in one another’s lives. My Jesus wept. After his friend’s death in the Gospel of John, Biblically certainly. After his birth, the little Lord Jesus, lots of crying he definitely made, a personal pet theory I hold against the carol. We need to look honestly at the world. The occupation of Palestine. The resurgence of antisemitic violence abroad and at home. The ongoing conquest of land in Ukraine. The prolonged violence in Sudan. The hatred directed towards the migrants and refugees. The coldest part of the year with the longest nights.
I developed a personal cliché of pastoral care advice in my years in chaplaincy. It is this, the simple question, in face of all that is indeed and undeniably wrong, “What else is true?”
It is winter. The sunsets early than ever. What else is true? The light of the world has come.
We hold all these observations and experiences at once. Many of us, myself included, find Christmas painful and lonely as we mourn those who have left our lives or perhaps who have never come. And yet, we also have people who do love us around. We have violence in our world. We also have peacemakers.
If you are struggling, I ask you to join spiritually with a displaced family in an oppressive empire who brought a child into the world under horrible circumstances. But had that child and surely had a holy moment of looking at his arrival in the midst of all that was also true. Wilful celebration of new life in a world still so obsessed with death is denial, it is resistance.
If you are joyous, without abandoning that joy, ask how to expand and share it with others.
May we all have a blessed Christmas surrounded by love and new life.