The Word is Very Near You: Feasts and Festivals. John Pridmore

‘While mortals sleep, the angels keep their watch of wondering love.’ There is a history behind this story – Luke insists on that – but the truth of the nativity is in its poetry, not its prose. Jesus made our night-time his, as he made our winter.

      Jesus is born outside and it is outsiders who find their way to him. The shepherds’ home, such as it is, is the hillside, but their ‘outside’ status is more than a matter of where they live. Shepherds, like the silly sheep they tend, are Sabbath-breakers, and as such are condemned by the pious. The magi come to Christ out of the desert. They were never at home in their summer palaces ‘with the silken girls bringing sherbet’ (‘The Journey of the Magi’, T. S. Eliot). Matthew will contrast these pilgrim spirits with the paranoid Herod. Outside they watch the stars. Inside, he can only watch his back (Matthew 2.1–18).

      Where is Christ this Christmas? Inside or outside? At St Martin-in-the-Fields we erected a Christmas crib in ‘the courts of the temple’, in the market by the church, where they sold boxer shorts emblazoned with the Union Jack. The curate’s flat, my home for five years, overlooked this market. I looked out of my window one Christmas morning to see that, in the night, the baby Jesus had been turfed out of his crib. In his place, curled up in the straw, was a ‘rough sleeper’, one of London’s homeless.

      At midnight mass we place the figure of the newborn Christ in the crib. We welcome him into our houses of prayer. We ask Jesus in. In some of our churches his presence inside our four walls continues to be affirmed long after the crib is taken down. The gentle light in the sanctuary says, ‘There he is. God is with us.’ So has Christ come ‘inside’ at last? If he has, it is only to break down the barriers we still build, in Church and society, between the included and the excluded. The distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ was drawn when Adam was driven out of Eden. Christmas signals its destruction.

The Epiphany of the Lord

      6 JANUARY

      Isaiah 60.1–6; Ephesians 3.1–12; Matthew 2.1–12

      WHO IS MANIFESTING CHRIST TO WHOM?

      In the Uffizi Gallery in Florence there is an unfinished painting by Leonardo da Vinci depicting the Adoration of the Magi. Behind the magi, behind the child and his mother, there is ruin, confusion and conflict. Stone stairs in broken buildings lead to empty space. Distracted figures ignore the momentous event unfolding nearby. Horsemen struggle to control their terrified rearing mounts. No doubt Leonardo wishes to suggest the collapse of the pagan world, but his treatment of the story reflects Matthew’s. The backdrop to the Gospel-writer’s story is as dark as that drawn by the artist. A vicious tyrant rules. Innocent blood will soon be shed. Christ is born in a world awry. As at the passion of Jesus, so it is at his birth. Those in authority, both in Church and in state, dread the one who, were he to reign, would put down the mighty.

      The obduracy of Jerusalem is contrasted with the openness of the East. Matthew audaciously turns a traditional theme – the haplessness of heathen quackery – on its head. Those who search the stars are more responsive to this new thing God has done than those who search the scriptures. It is as if the Egyptian magicians had outdone Joseph (Genesis 41) or Nebuchadnezzar’s enchanters had got the better of Daniel (Daniel 4). T. S. Eliot, whose ‘Journey of the Magi’ is quoted from a thousand pulpits at Epiphany, has another account, less often cited, of the kind of characters these magi are. They are those who, ‘communicate with Mars, converse with spirits, report the behaviour of the sea monster, describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry’ (Four Quartets). The first magi may have come from Persia. Today they’d set out from Glastonbury. We’d be appalled by their New Age superstitions and give them a lot of stick.

      Matthew sees the magi as the first of that great company of pilgrims from all the nations who at the last day will come to yield obeisance and obedience to this child. They are the forerunners of the many who ‘will come from east and west’ to feast at the messianic banquet (Matthew 8.11–12). They are the first of the kings of the earth to bring their glory into the City of God (Revelation 21.24). If there are trumpets in church this Epiphany, let them sound a fanfare before the tremendous Old Testament reading. ‘Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn’ (Isaiah 60.3).

      But – big ‘but’ – our triumphalism needs to be tempered.

      At this season I am troubled by a memory. I took the train out of Khartoum and got off at the little village of Kubushaya. On one side of the tracks were fields and the Nile. On the other side desert and, on the horizon, crumbling pyramids. I set off for the pyramids, very foolishly, in the midday sun. The pyramids are all that is left of Meroe, the capital of biblical Ethiopia. The queen of Meroe was the ‘Candace’ whose steward Philip met in the desert and whom he baptized (Acts 8.26–40). To this sumptuous court, now nothing but sand and broken stones, the steward returned with the Christian gospel. I reached the pyramids and collapsed. Mercifully, out of that apparently empty desert, someone appeared. A man on a camel. He had compassion on me. All these years later I remember the love in his eyes. He put me on his own beast and brought me to an inn – or at least back to the railway station. The date was the 6th of January, the Feast of the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.

      There is no church in Meroe today and my Good Samaritan was a Muslim. Who on that distant day, I wonder, was manifesting Christ to whom? And as we Anglicans bicker and posture, what kind of a clouded epiphany are we offering to today’s ‘Gentiles’?

      And what of the wise men’s gifts? It is unlikely that Matthew meant each one to mean something, but of course what Matthew meant no longer matters. Matthew entrusts his marvellous story to us to make of it what we will. That is not to say that any interpretation goes. It is to insist that such an inexhaustibly suggestive story requires imaginative reading. So, yes, we may see gold as a tribute to a king, incense as a present for our great high priest, and myrrh as a grim gift for one who must suffer and die. But such interpretations are all too familiar.

      I hope that one day I’ll have another opportunity to produce a Christmas play I wrote long ago with the title ‘The cactus, the cuckoo-clock, and the big red balloon’. The point of that frolic was to reflect laterally on an entirely serious question. ‘What can I give him, poor as I am?’

The Presentation of Christ in the Temple

      2 FEBRUARY

      Malachi 3.1–5; Hebrews 2.14–18; Luke 2.22–40

      UNCOMFORTING CONSOLATION

      We tend to treat the Nunc Dimittis – Simeon’s song with the infant Jesus in his arms – like a mug of Ovaltine, as a nightcap guaranteeing a good night’s sleep. It’s what we sing at Evensong when the day’s work’s done and at Compline when it’s time for bed. The familiar cadences are like gentle lullabies, easing us into dreamless slumber.

      ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.’ Simeon is satisfied that all he has longed for is now fulfilled in the child in his arms. He’s an old man. His life is now as light as a feather on the back of his hand and one puff of wind will blow it away (‘A Song for Simeon’, T. S. Eliot). Now he can contentedly take his leave in the sure knowledge that his saviour has come. As we sing his words we catch his mood and our own worries begin to drain away. All’s well. We can curl up and go to sleep.

      Simeon, we read, was looking forward to ‘the consolation of Israel’. This term was used to describe the Messianic age. It takes up the cry by which an unnamed prophet announced his message of hope to the exiles in Babylon, ‘Comfort, comfort, my people’ (Isaiah 40.1). Simeon had craved that promised comfort. Now salvation is in sight, not only for his own people but for the Gentiles too. Now at last he can go to God with a serene heart.

      But if our impression of Simeon himself is of a contented figure with an unequivocally comforting message, then we’ve mistaken our man. We have sung his song too often and with too little regard to its setting. ‘The Song of Simeon’ ceases to sound like soothing mood-music if we return it to its context and take account of what he actually says about the child he is holding. His words to Mary paint a darker picture. People believed that the promised ‘consolation’ would follow the path mapped