The Eucharist of Christmas Night, 2007

Quietly she holds him, cradled in her arms,
rocking oh so gently, protecting him from harm.
Her tears are flowing freely, off her cheeks they race,
always heading downwards, then dripping from her face.
A mother holds her baby, as close as close can be
and as his eyes stare skyward there’s only her to see.

Tender lines on a mother’s love for her child: they might have been written for Christmas night. But in fact they have as their context not a stable in first century Bethlehem but an estate in twenty-first century Liverpool. They are the work of Stephen Jones, and were written for his son Rhys. And they do not end there, but continue:

Now fast forward eleven years, the scene is much the same.
A mother holds her baby, whispering his name,
ruffling his matted hair, his face covered in blood,
telling him to stay with her and wrapping him in love.

Eleven year old Rhys was murdered in August this year, shot dead as he returned from football. He is just one of the twenty-seven young people who have been killed with guns in this country in 2007, some of whom have lived their short lives, and lost them, only a few miles from this place.

These are uncomfortable truths to contemplate in the candle-lit warmth of Christmas night, hard truths about the life of this city: about its huge wealth and its grinding poverty, its limitless potential and its utter hopelessness, its overweening confidence and its cringing fearfulness. Yet if the birth we have gathered to celebrate has nothing to say to Rhys and the others, if it has nothing to say to our world city and to its bitter divisions, then I believe it has nothing to say.

Can the manger speak to Merseyside? Can the stable speak to Stockwell? What can this night offer a city that is so cynical and so weary?

John tells us that this night the Word is made flesh. This night the world becomes the place to which God is actually present, the place in which God becomes embodied. In other words this is not some forgotten planet in a far-flung corner of an isolated solar system. This is the very place in which God chooses to dwell and in which he chooses to reveal himself to humankind. So the deaths of Rhys and of all the others are of supreme significance. They are the deaths not only of God’s beloved children but also of his beloved brothers, whose human life he begins to share this night in Bethlehem. God’s is the first heart to break when a young life is taken, God’s are the first tears to fall and it is God’s revulsion we share when we contemplate such a crime, such a sin.

Yes, this night the Word is made flesh. But it is such vulnerable flesh, the flesh of a newborn baby, tiny, naked and utterly dependent. God comes not as a weapon-wielding hard-man, subduing the streets of Liverpool and Lambeth before him, but as a child. Thus does God show us what it is to love one another. It is not to bend one another to our own will; it is not to coerce one another into a pattern of behaving and thinking that is really our own. To love one another is to trust one another; it is to place ourselves in one another’s hands. So love needs allies in the world. If firearms are ever to take their place alongside slingshots in the museum of humankind; it poverty is ever to be driven from these shores; and if hope and opportunity are to flourish in place of drug use and gang violence then love needs spokesmen, advocates and activists. Love needs you and me. Tonight we reaffirm our adherence to love’s cause.

So this night speaks to us of God’s love for humanity, and of the precariousness of that love’s endeavour. But can it possibly address the third, despairing stanza of Stephen Jones’s poem?

But the child will never answer, forever to stay young.
Dying in a car park, it’s not where he belongs.
A mother holds her baby, her child, her world, her son,
his life has been robbed from him, she can’t believe he’s gone.

The manger does not hold the Word made flesh for very long, for the Word grows to mature adulthood. Thirty-three years pass, and a day comes when another mother cradles her son’s lifeless body in her arms, wiping the blood and sweat from his face and weeping over him. And then, perhaps only then, do we discover the significance of this night for our broken lives and disturbed times. For we discover that just as the wood of the manger bears Christ’s life to the world so too does the wood of the cross bear Christ’s life to the world: glorious life, life unending, life in all its fullness, life as God had always intended that life should be. Because of the life that begins this night death has no ultimate power over the children of Croxteth Park or over the children of London. It has no power over the young soldiers of Congo or over the orphans of Baghdad, or over any child in any place.

For this night heaven is once more joined to earth, and God comes to dwell with his people and they with him, for all time and beyond all time, full of grace and truth. This night we gaze upon his glory, and we know it to be glory as of a Father’s only Son. Thanks be to God. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Amen.