Lightening our darkness

IT WAS cold enough to snow when I arrived at the church. The first thing I saw when I got inside was a box full of Christingles - oranges with candles sticking out of them, ready for the children's service. My mind went back to an old joke about two Arctic explorers comparing notes about how cold it had been in their particular expedition.

"Where we were," said the first, "it was so cold that the flame of our candle froze and we couldn't blow it out."

"Oh, that's nothing," said the second. "Where we were, it was so cold that the words came out of our mouths in lumps of ice and we had to fry them to hear what we were talking about."

Christmas is about candles and words - or rather, about Jesus as the Light of the world, and Jesus as the Word made flesh. These powerful images take us back to the early days of Christianity, when those who had been with Jesus struggled to express the meaning of what they had seen and heard.

Their world was dark indeed. We take much for granted: democracy, free speech, a measure of social stability, modern medicine (even if there are long waiting lists), a standard of living (for most people) that our great-grandparents could only dream of. Imagine all that taken away. Imagine we were living instead in a dangerous world where all kinds of diseases could cripple or kill you. Where people in power bullied you into paying huge taxes, fighting their wars, and, literally or metaphorically, licking their boots.

Then imagine the birth of a baby who might just change it all. Imagine people who knew the stories, who could read the runes of ancient prophecies, and who knew in their bones that this was the long-awaited child. It would be like lighting a candle in a dark room. That's what they felt like when they heard about Jesus. And, of course, it's how people felt when Jesus grew up and went about healing the sick and announcing that God was at last becoming king.

Sometimes, though, when I look around the Christmas celebrations in shops, offices, and even in some churches, I get the feeling that the flame of the candle has become frozen. There is a fixed grin, a forced merriment, tinkly music and twinkly decorations. It all suggests a flippant jollity which denies both the darkness that's out there and the significance of the new light. There seems no connection between the tinsel and the reality of the world, between the trivial fun and the battle between good and evil.

Is that over-dramatic? I don't think so. We've seen a century full of wars, bombs and holocausts. New forms of terror have been invented by governments as well as outlaws. And now, with the century only three years old, we've seen the Twin Towers crash, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, famine in parts of Africa, and an iron curtain in the Holy Land. In our own country, we only need mention Soham to be reminded of the presence of malevolent evil. Let's not fool ourselves. The line between good and evil isn't between 'us' and 'them'. It runs through every community and every single one of us.

Faced with all that, I can imagine some people saying they don't feel like celebrating Christmas at all. But that would miss the point. The point of Christmas, as of the whole Christian message, is not that the world isn't such a bad place after all, but that the world is indeed in bad shape and that God has begun to do something about it. Only when we take evil seriously will we be ready for the surprise and delight of discovering that God has lit a candle in the middle of the darkness. Only then will the flame of that candle start to flicker with life instead of freezing into shallow and hollow 'celebrations' which aren't really about anything much.

As well as the candle, there is the word. One of the most mysterious and haunting passages in the whole Bible is the one we often hear towards the end of carol services. "In the beginning was the Word; and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... In him was life, and the life was the light of the whole human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not swallowed it up... And the Word became flesh, and lived in our midst, and we saw his glory.' The candle and the word go together. But what does it all mean?

Words, and the way we use them, are one of the chief signs of the difference between us and the other animals. We can do all sorts of things with words. We can heal and harm, we can love and threaten, we can cheer people up or make them miserable, simply by speaking words.

We set great store by words, mainly because we assume that people say what they mean and mean what they say, so that the words give us an entry into their heart and mind. One of the most striking things about the God of the Bible is that he speaks. He speaks to the world; he speaks to his ancient people Israel; he speaks to prophets and mystics and ordinary people too. And one of the most profound early Christian thinkers, pondering the significance of Jesus, came up with this way of putting it: the person we know as Jesus can be identified as God's eternal speaking, God's self-expression, the message of love spoken by the creator from the very beginning.

And precisely because the message was one of love, the most appropriate thing to happen was that this Word would turn into a human being. That's what happened at Christmas.

But, again, we live in a world where words have lost their value. There's so much spin around that we're all getting dizzy. There are so many lies and half-truths about that we don't trust anyone. I remember seeing an advertisement for a particular brand of floppy disks. It said: 'Reliability you can trust.' Is there any other kind? That tells you what sort of world we live in: we have to say everything twice in case people don't think we're genuine. We need to fill in more and more forms because nobody trusts our words any more. Being suspicious of each other's words is a sign of a sick society. The words have frozen on our lips, and we have to cook them up to hear what we're talking about.

Into that sickness, into that frozen world of untrustworthy words, comes the Word of God, God's warm breath turned into a living, breathing human being. Christmas is about truth, truth without spin, truth in human flesh. Philosophers argue about the nature of truth; Jesus came and lived it.

It's time we left behind our chilly way of life, our frozen candles, our iced-up words. It's time to celebrate the true light coming in the darkness. It's time to listen to the Word made flesh. It's Christmas time.