John’s Notes: Parish Magazine Editorial
December 2018
If Jesus was born today what would it be like? Well, Mary was an ordinary girl, so if it happened today I picture the angel Gabriel appearing to her at home while she was sitting reading the TV Quick or tapping her on the shoulder in Aldi. And Joseph was an ordinary man, a carpenter, a worker with wood. So if it happened today I picture the angel Gabriel appearing to him while he was out shop-fitting or sitting in his van at traffic lights. If Jesus was born today he would come into the lives of ordinary people like you and me.
If Jesus was born today Mary wouldn't be worrying about finding room at the inn: she'd be worrying about getting a bed at the nearest maternity hospital. Joseph wouldn't be thinking about hiring a donkey to get her there: he'd be tidying out the van, topping up the oil, fixing that dodgy brake, to make sure there'd be no problems once her waters broke. Maybe the choir of angels would be singing outside A+E. Maybe a group of hospital porters would be the first to hear the good news.
For today the good news is just the same. The good news that repents of that old spiteful, violent God intent on bringing misery to the world and sets our eyes on a loving, gracious, giving God bringing peace to all who look for it.
The good news shows us God in a vulnerable child born to an everyday couple in the midst of a complex, conflicted world. And asks us to be the midwives who do our bit to bring his new world to birth.
The grown-up Jesus invites us to live with eyes wide open to the new world he’s creating in the midst of the old one: ‘This is but the beginning of the birth pangs,’ he once said. Meaning that our troubled land, our aching world, is pregnant, expectant of the birth of a new ‘kingdom’ in which human conflict and its consequences (poverty, famine, disease) will be no more.
God does come to earth today – inviting all people of goodwill to embrace our task to nurture this new kingdom into being. We are the midwives of the new world. We occupy the tension between the present, troubled, reality, and the new, transformed, world which he is bringing into being. And we play our part in bringing it into being through the way we live our lives. Just as competitiveness, conflict and violence are learned behaviours, so are love, grace and peace.
Happy Christmas – and may the love, grace and peace of God be with you and all your neighbours.
