WHY WE CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS

CHRISTIANS BELIEVE that the world, and the Universe of which it is a part, are not the product of some cosmic game of chance, but that they exist through the deliberate will of a Creator whom we call God. We believe that God reveals himself through the created order of things: in the beauty of Nature, for example, but supremely through human beings. That part of the Bible which we call the Old Testament tells us of how God has made himself known to particular people at particular times in the past.

What makes Christianity so radically different from other world religions is the belief that God became a part of his creation in the form of a human being —     Jesus Christ.

Jesus was born in Bethlehem, an obscure village south of Jerusalem in the Middle East. It is the birth of Jesus to his Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, that we celebrate at Christmas: the living Word of God coming to us in human form - in a way that everyone can understand.

For about thirty years Jesus was known as the carpenter’s son, sharing the life of an ordinary home. He spent the next three years travelling around, healing sick and troubled people, welcoming society’s outcasts, and teaching anyone who would listen to him about the Kingdom of God and the Love of God. He gathered together twelve ordinary men to help him. He had no money. He had no university degree. He never wrote a book. He commanded no army, and had no political power. He was executed by crucifixion by the Roman occupying forces when he was in his early thirties, in Jerusalem. Yet over a thousand million prople all over the world today, regard this man, Jesus Christ, as God— Among-Us.

HOW DO WE KNOW?

The part of the Bible that we call the New Testament is not just a single book by a single writer. It is made up of twenty seven separate manuscripts, the work of several authors. Chief of these are the four Gospels. Each one tells the life of Jesus from a different angle, and each one is based on eye witness accounts of what he did and said. The existence of Jesus and his followers is also recorded by non-Christian writers of the period. No other historical person of the time has so many different sources of evidence. Atheists and agnostics do not deny that Jesus was an actual historical person.

Jesus taught us to trust God, regarding him as a loving, merciful father; and to talk to him in prayer, trusting God to give us the help we need, in all circumstances of life. Jesus taught us that God cares for all people, and longs for them to live in harmony with him as his beloved children. God gives us his Spirit so that we can treat one another with love, understanding, respect, and forgiveness. He taught us to thank God for all that he has given us, and to be sensitive to other people’s needs, especially those who are ill in mind or body, lonely or sad. Jesus taught us that God put us on earth to train us for a fuller life with him in eternity.

Towards the end of his earthly life Jesus endured cruelty, suffering and death. in other words he experienced to the full the ugly side of life that many humans experience — nothing was spared. After his death on the cross, however, God raised him to life to show to people for all time that Goodness will always triumph over evil, Love will always triumph over hate, and Life over death. Without the resurrection of Jesus, there would have been no Christian Faith, no Christian communities, and this lovely church of St. Chad’s would never have been built.

Jesus may be experienced today through the pages of Holy Scripture and through both public and private prayer. He promised to be with his people until the end of time, and he gave us a very special way in which this can happen - the act of worship which is variously called the Mass, the Eucharist, the Holy Communion. ‘Do this,’ he said, ‘as a memorial of me’. This is an act of love in which Jesus enables his followers to renew and deepen their sharing in the mysteries of his death and resurrection and gives them strength to live the Christian life.

‘No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple—shaking bells

Can with this Single Truth compare –

That God was Man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine.’

John Betjeman

Fr. Michael Fisher