To readers expecting this month's SCPO Interview, apologies;
we have not been able to write one this month. Instead here
is a reflection for Christmas time.
Shepherds were the first to hear the good news. Low
status, at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. Yet they
were the first to hear. The babe they saw at Bethlehem grows
up to wield great power - but not the authority of kings or
law-makers, but with the people, through his teaching, healing,
ministry and friendship.
Wise men brought gifts and honoured him highly.
Foreigners, but powerful and important, they recognised what the
boy means for the world. And so he grows up and inspires not
just his own people but all humankind in the way of truth, love and
grace.
A political leader feels threatened by an unknown
opposition. He tries to defend his position by ordering
others to do his dirty work - and by abandoning moral standards and
his obligation to protect his people. And so the boy flees, a
refugee to escape death and violence. His message of love for
enemies echoes down the centuries but remains unheeded by many.
Stephen Holmes' new pamphlet The Politics of Christmas
argues that we need to refocus on the radical political message of
Christmas as a moment where God's will for freedom and justice
breaks through into the world. Our sanitised, secularised
Christmas, with its cosy carol services, trivial decorations is
some way removed from what the Bible actually says. Stephen
Holmes says that the Victorians have largely shaped Christmas as we
know it today, and that the message of goodwill and peace to all
somewhat misses the point. The message isn't just peace and
goodwill - it is the prophecy of the overthrow of the established
order and the promise of freedom for all people. God was -
and is - interfering in, and transforming, the political
order. Where Dickens' Scrooge helped to shape our thinking
about Christmas, in the end the ghosts make Ebenezer more generous,
but not political - Tiny Tim still has to rely on the random
kindness of benefactors, rather than see a social and economic
upheaval that would give him a better chance to flourish and
thrive. Dr Holmes writes:
"The politics of the Christmas we know is limited to giving a
goose to Bob Cratchit, or a shoebox of goods to a Romanian orphan,
or a few pounds to famine relief; the real business of politics is
off-limits. At Christmas we are not permitted to ask why
Cratchit cannot afford his own goose, or how Romanian orphanages
became overcrowded and underfunded, or what went so wrong as to
thrust millions of people into life-threatening poverty in Ethiopia
in the 1980s."
Wishing all our Update readers a thoughtful and inspiring
Christmas.