Covid Christmases were tough. For many, though, this year will be tougher – a lack not of intimacy this time but income. Budgets squeezed, rent and mortgages up, public service provision down, foodbank use escalating even before the current crisis, inflation carving into everything. Even the supermarkets have sensitively toned down their dream-inflating Christmas TV ads.
And yet, are tougher times closer to where Christmas began? “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” Not the words of a political revolutionary, or a newspaper headlining a tycoon’s downfall, but the song of Jesus’ mother Mary after the angel’s visit. The start of the Christmas story.
For Palestine 2,000 years ago was the toughest of times. Roman subjugation meant insufferable tax burdens. It meant daily fear of abuse for women by the occupying soldiers, fear of death for any man deemed to rebel. ‘In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered,’ begins the familiar Bethlehem tale. This was no innocent civic exercise but a tax-turbo-charging tool. ‘To you is born a Saviour,’ the shepherds heard, and from the bottom of the social pile heard it as heralding simple economic freedom more than we imagine. The Christmas story was birthed not in a romantic manger but in raw physical struggle. The Romans have moved on. But global financial systems and immense corporate power now shape our lives. We may be a Mary feeling under the cosh – and Mary must have been tough and resilient more than meek and mild. We may be a shepherd – hard-working yet weighed-down. To both, God came. For both, God cut across their lives and met them in their plight. Solutions weren’t instant, but hope for a new order was born.
Wherever this Christmas sits on the toughness scale for you, may it embrace you with the joy that ambushed Mary and the shepherds. And may we know the hope brought by the one born in Bethlehem whose self-proclaimed mission became to ‘bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, and let the oppressed go free.’
