This is the text of the Christmas Day sermon preached by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, at Canterbury Cathedral today.
Luke 2:1-7
We are drawn to stories of freedom and purpose. In Star Wars an
abandoned orphan on a desert planet turns into a knight leading the
struggle for freedom. Platform 9 and three quarters takes Harry Potter
into a world of magic and purpose.
Not so in the gospel stories, even those of Christmas. Yes, the
shepherds see angels. Yes, Mary and Joseph have dreams and are chosen as
special people.
Yet after the moments of miracles life goes on almost as before - the
shepherds return to their sheep, Joseph settles back as a carpenter,
Mary raises children. They flee as refugees, like over 60 million people
today. Yet their story is the beginning of ours, it is an invitation to
lives of freedom, found through God’s freely offered love.
Delivering freedom is usually seen as the role and the promise of
political leaders. The French philosopher Rousseau famously started his
book on the social contract by writing, “Man is born free, and
everywhere he is in chains “. But he goes on and sets out the problem
that besets all offerings of freedom: “One man thinks himself the master
of others, but remains more of a slave than they are.”
In the manger is something completely different from all human
strivings for freedom. The baby in the manger is a paradox from the
first breath he draws in his mother’s arms to the last cry he utters on
the cross. He is power seen in humility, and He offers freedom expressed
in loving service.
It is this Christly paradox of freedom springing from the overflowing
of love that leads to salvation, to the common good and human
flourishing. There is no power in the universe stronger than God’s love
and it is directed towards the liberation of human beings.
This liberation begins with the risky, counter-intuitive birth of God
in the form of a baby of a teenage single mother, in a poor family in a
war-torn country ruled by an infant slaughtering, family murdering
psychopath. Jesus’ life continues mostly in obscurity and appears to
ends in betrayal, abandonment and humiliating execution.
Even Jesus’ brief periods of fame, of celebration and decisive action
look like God’s apparent mistakes. An host of angels appears to a bunch
of shepherds. Shepherds were the low life in those days – the butt of
many jokes. They were armed, used to fighting, lived rough and were
often untrustworthy. Bethlehem is less than ten miles from Jerusalem,
the angels could have announced the Messiah to the important and
influential just down the road. Instead a bunch of shepherds confuse the
sheep by leaving them, frighten the town police by entering Bethlehem,
surprise a mother who was probably, having just given birth, not
entirely in the mood for entertaining, and then return. One could be
forgiven for thinking that this was a good plan badly executed.
Yet this is no mistake, but the greatest plan there ever could be,
because this baby is the way God calls us to relationship with Him, to
lives of purpose and to being witnesses that God is with us.
The manger offers a compelling invitation to life. Each year at
Christmas we have a guest Carol service at Lambeth Palace. We hear from
those who have recently begun to find the life Jesus offers. They come
from all sorts of places, from people who have been trafficked into
slavery to people who have known only power. Their stories of responding
to the invitation of the manger born baby are the best part of my year.
Not only is the manger an invitation to life, but of life abundant,
full and free. Mary is the second of God’s beautiful apparent mistakes.
Surely, God should have chosen someone accustomed to the demands of a
political life? Yet in Mary we see the kind of life that is ours when we
accept the invitation of God. It is abundant, suffering, dramatic, but
above all a life of fulfilling freedom. This divine-human leader Jesus
does not subdue, or diminish His followers, but enables them to be all
that a human being could be, to be truly liberated.
This self-emptying, helpless, stable born baby who is God has brought
and continues to bring more freedom than all earth’s most powerful
leaders. The nature of those who have power is to seek to hold onto it.
In 2017 we have seen around the world tyrannical leaders that enslave
their peoples, populist leaders that deceive them, corrupt leaders that
rob them, even simply democratic, well intentioned leaders of many
parties and countries who are normal, fallible human beings. We have
experienced across our country terrorism that kills the innocent,
claiming that it is the path to freedom in God.
The nature of God who has all power, and from whom all power comes,
is to lay it aside for love’s sake and thus without fear, force or
manipulation to offer true freedom for every human being. God is showing
all truth in its completest form, all love in its purest aspect, the
true light of freedom all wrapped up in the baby in Bethlehem.
The light needed witnesses at the beginning and needs them to this
day. It is the calling of every Christian to be a witness to the light,
in word and deed, in all circumstances.
In Coventry Cathedral is one of my favourite pictures, the Stalingrad
Madonna. It was drawn on paper in charcoal on Christmas Day 1942, 75
years ago, by a German medical officer under siege from the advancing
Russian armies near Stalingrad. It shows Mary huddled against the
terrible cold, holding Jesus, sheltered, to her cheek. Round her are the
words “Licht, leben, Liebe” (Light, Life, love). Christ offers
life of true freedom in love, in the darkest places his light shines.
Every human being is invited to share that life and freedom. Christians
are its witnesses.