Intimate communication from another world is what, in my opinion, Christmas is all about.
I know there are different ideas about the arrival of the baby in the manger. Some say it's an invasion: 'Enemy occupied territory is being invaded by the liberator, dressed in the garments of a defenceless child'. And this is a helpful camera angle to see it from. Others see it as solidarity: Someone is seeking out, serving and identifying incarnationally with the weak and dispossessed of this world in a war torn occupation zone.
It's challenging to rich Christians in an age of hunger to go down that route of meditation. Or, it's a work of art: The decor has been prepared over the centuries, the publicity is out, and the main players have been engaged: A powerful empire, Rome; a prophetic people, the Jewish nation; spiritual hope and expectancy are fermenting; history is turning on a hinge. God the supreme artist gives the most beautiful, the most telling, the most talked about sign: The sign of a scrap of a boy whom kings come to worship.
A parable of hope
Just before writing this today I was shown round Modern Art Oxford, the art gallery on Pembroke Street, which has been newly 're-looked', as the French say. Among some typically controversial works by Tracey Emin, there was one that stole my attention. It is an exhibit that fills the entire space of one of the rooms (pictured below). Gallery director, Andrew Nairne explained to me the 'sermon' of the work: a battered wooden bridge on stilts leading to a neatly furnished tree-house high in the air. The bridge had nearly collapsed but you could still get over it. I was told it was a parable of hope.'
Some say Christmas is like a huge priceless canvas portraying mysterious yet irresistible hope. Personally, I like wondering about images in this way. I wonder about how to express the power of the Christmas story. One way of course is by loving deeds. Many readers of The DOOR will be involved in particular acts of mercy and kindness at Christmas, from visiting the sick, helping the homeless, befriending the lonely, creating a meal or a party for those who otherwise would eat alone.
For the past ten years, I have lived and worked in inner city Paris. It was a poor, grimy, multicultural area, which at times felt like a scene out of George Orwell?s Down and Out in Paris and London, a book about the poorest of the poor in Europe. Every year our church would put on a Christmas-eve meal with wine and cabaret for around two hundred homeless people. I'll never forget the privilege of serving on those occasions. I remember seeing a Lebanese executive come in, invited by his brother. So moved was he by what he saw that it wasn?t long before he left everything and became a Christian. One year someone said to me that they thought it was like the kiss of heaven, and that's the image I come back to again and again.
The kiss of life
I think of Christmas as the kiss of life for a world that is on the point of death. It is intimate communication from another world.
Christianity is the story of an apparently distant God hearing a cry. If we listen, we can hear it too. The cry of the lonely, the cry of the lost, the cry of the sick and the suffering, the shout on the streets, the cry of a youth culture madly searching for intimacy. It is the cry of the age. It is the story of God stooping earthward with the kiss of life.
The kiss of life is when a stranger blows air into a lifeless corpse in mouth to mouth resuscitation. It is a shockingly intimate image, but vital: without it, in some circumstances, death comes quickly.
In the same way, Christ coming into the world, God taking on the tent of a human body, is shockingly intimate if you think about it. But the Bible suggests that without this personal kiss of life from above we will all die. With it we live. The difference is we have a choice to allow His love to touch us and invade our system. I pray that many will receive that intimate offer from heaven this Christmas.
Charlie Cleverly
The Revd Charlie Cleverly is the newly appointed Rector of St Aldate's, Oxford and the author of The Discipline of Intimacy (Kingsway 2002) a book on prayer which explores themes parallel to those in this article. A review will appear in the February DOOR.
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