Veiled in Flesh?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Image credit: Gage Skidmore

There are some great lines in Christmas carols. My favourite is in ‘Joy to the World’, where we’re told that Jesus ‘came to make his blessings flow, far as the curse is found’. That’s a great, one-line summary of why Jesus came into the world. It would be hard to find anyone who would disagree with the statement that the world is not as it should be. Why is that the case? Some would say lack of education. Others would say inequality. Still others would say religion. The Bible’s explanation is that this world has been under a curse ever since humanity’s rejection of God back in the Garden of Eden. It was the effects of that curse that Jesus came to reverse.

Other carols are more problematic, however. ‘Silent night’? – no, it definitely wasn’t! ‘No crying he makes’? – real babies cry. ‘We three kings?’ – they weren’t kings and we're’ not told how many there were. ‘Mary, did you know’? Yes, yes she did. And as for the little drummer boy…

Another problematic line is from a carol originally entitled ‘Hark how all the Welkin rings’. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s now known to us as ‘Hark! The Herald Angels sing’. The line in question reads: ‘Veiled in Flesh, the Godhead see’. It’s saying that in Jesus, we see God, albeit veiled. Surely it should be the opposite, however: Jesus was not God veiled – but God revealed.

He is, as the Bible says elsewhere, ‘the image of the invisible God’ (Colossians 1:15). John’s gospel begins by telling us that while ‘No one has ever seen God, the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known’. Jesus’ own testimony is that he is the Revealer of the Father: ‘Whoever has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14:9).

As someone has put it: ‘The Godhead was not veiled in flesh. The Godhead was revealed in flesh. God makes himself known, not hidden, in flesh’

Why does any of this matter? Because if Jesus is the revealer of God, then if we want to know what the invisible God is like, we need to look at Jesus.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was a major figure in the New Atheism movement, along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens. The latter once described her as the ‘the most important public intellectual probably ever to come out of Africa’. Last month, she announced her conversion to Christianity. Brought up as a Muslim, she became a prominent critic of Islam, opposing forced marriage, honour killing, child marriage and female genital mutilation. In a recent interview, she said ‘the god I grew up with was a horror show’. Her therapist once asked her what she thought that God should be like if he existed; the answer she came up with was Jesus Christ. Ali says that she once hated God – but the ‘god’ she hated was not like Jesus. Similarly, many people today reject a ‘God’ who is nothing like Jesus. If Jesus is the one who reveals God however, he must be our starting point in coming to see what God is like.

Author and Seminary President Michael Reeves used to have an almost physical reaction to the word ‘God’. It was not a word that brought him any ‘comfort and joy’ (to quote another carol). He describes an experience surely not unique to him: 

‘I found myself interested in heaven, interested in salvation, even interested in Jesus, but not attracted to God. I longed to escape hell and go to heaven, but God’s presence was not the inducement. Quite the opposite: I would have been far more comfortable with a Godless paradise’.

So what changed? Through reading some of the great writers of church history, Reeves came to realise that ‘there is no God in heaven who is unlike Jesus’. The great truth of the incarnation is not God veiled in human flesh – but God revealed in human flesh.

And what sort of God does Jesus reveal? A good of perfect compassion, perfect tenderness, perfect justice, perfect love. A God who we were created to be like – but are very unlike.

Jesus’ coming into the world is significant because of how the story would end: with his death on the cross. Far from being a tragic accident, his death was the very reason he came – so that the sin that separates us from God could be dealt with. Truly that is ‘glad tidings of great joy!’

Published in the Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press, 21 December 2023

Another take on the same theme, but aimed at a different audience, appeared on Gentle Reformation earlier this week.

The Real Advent

Have you got an advent calendar yet? Growing up, I remember having one where you just opened a little door every day and that was it – no chocolate behind it or anything! Never mind some of the fancier ones available today, with various wines and spirits inside. The most expensive one I’ve seen is a £570 Dior one you can get from Harrods.

Some would say that the true meaning of advent – counting down to the birth of Jesus – has been forgotten. You might be surprised however to learn that the true meaning of advent was lost long ago – when it was first associated with Christmas!

A few years ago, Mark Forsyth, a Sunday Times bestselling author, wrote a great little book called ‘A Christmas Cornucopia’. If you’re into myth-busting, it’s a great read. You’re probably already familiar with some of it. For example, the Bible doesn’t tell us when Jesus was born, but we do know that it definitely couldn’t have been the 25th of December, because if it had been, the shepherds wouldn’t have had their sheep outside.

And did you know that the twelve days of Christmas song is actually a recipe for a Christmas dinner? One of the long-running traditions of Christmas is to eat different types of birds. Today, we tend to eat turkeys. 150 years ago it was geese. And actually, if you go back and look at the words, you’ll see it’s a list of twelve different birds, listed in descending order of size. The smaller birds would have been stuffed inside bigger ones; even the five gold rings were most likely ring-necked pheasants.

The song ‘Jingle Bells’ was originally written about the American holiday of Thanksgiving.

One thing Forsyth keeps coming back to is that there are two fairly common beliefs about the origins of Christmas. One is that it was invented by pagans, and then taken over by Christianity – the other is that it was invented by the Victorians. Charles Dickens, according to a recent film, is ‘The Man Who Invented Christmas’. Forsyth concludes that Christmas is neither pagan nor Victorian. However lot of the things we associate with Christmas today did only start in Victorian times – such as Christmas carols, which were originally pub songs, that were Christianised. But basically, what we tend to think of as Christmas is just a hodge-podge of different traditions that have come together over time.

One of the traditions he puts under the microscope is Advent. ‘Almost everybody knows that Advent is about the coming of Christmas – and almost everybody is wrong’. Why? Well as he goes on to say, the word advent certainly means coming. But originally it wasn’t talking about the first coming of Jesus, it was talking about his second coming. Not the time when he came as a baby, but the time when he will come again as judge. In fact, the traditional readings in churches for Advent Sunday are all about Judgement Day, with the stars falling from the sky, and so on.

As Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem, put it in the mid-300s: ‘We preach not one advent only of Christ, but a second also, far more glorious than the first’. He goes on to spell out the contrast: ‘In his former advent, he was wrapped in swaddling clothes in the manger; in his second he covers himself with light as with a garment’. In his first coming he endured the cross, despising shame, in his second he comes attended by a host of angels, receiving glory’. 

And that, according to the Bible, is why Jesus’ birth matters. Because he’s coming back.

I think that at this time of year, we get a sense that we haven’t been living the way we should have been for the previous eleven months. We recognise that we’ve probably been a bit self-centred. And so we try to redeem ourselves with acts of kindness. With giving to charity. In short, with the sort of things that we should be doing all year round.

But that’s the opposite of why the Bible says Jesus came. It says that he came to redeem us, because we couldn’t redeem ourselves. He came, not primarily to be a good example, but to live and die in the place of his people. The manger was part of the journey to the cross.

His first advent was to achieve and offer salvation. And only by receiving that gift can we be ready for the real Advent.

Published in the Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press, 30th November 2023

Can we save Christmas?

One of the big themes of recent weeks has been the need to ‘save Christmas’. In the build-up to the announcement of Christmas ‘bubbles’, more than one newspaper headline declared ‘Two weeks to save Christmas’! When the announcement did come – three-household bubbles for five days, combined with the reopening of shops in many places – it was enthusiastically greeted as Christmas being ‘saved’. However, our political leaders continue to warn us not to get carried away, and news in recent days of a new strain of coronavirus has dampened enthusiasm. For a completely normal Christmas, we’ll have to wait till 2021 – if God spares us.. But still – the message remains that our actions over these days will be what saves Christmas this year.

Yet surely it’s all a bit ironic? Cast your mind back to the Christmas story and it couldn’t be more different. There was a ruler and a crisis summit, but King Herod had no intention of ‘saving Christmas’. In fact, it was the opposite; he did his level best to put the baby Jesus to death. The wise men were sent to Bethlehem under instructions to come back and tell him where Jesus was – ostensibly in order that he could worship him, but really so that he could kill him. So the idea of a government ‘saving Christmas’ is somewhat amusing since the government of Jesus’ day did everything it could to stop it before it started.

Now, as a Christian, I have to admit that the Bible doesn’t tell us to celebrate Jesus’ birth. The idea of doing so didn’t occur to Jesus’ followers until hundreds of years after Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem. Charles Dickens may not quite be ‘The Man Who Invented Christmas’ as the title of an enjoyable 2017 film declares, but many of the supposedly age-old traditions we associate with Christmas are newer than we realise. ‘Jingle Bells’ was originally written for the American holiday of Thanksgiving, carols are Christianised Victorian pub songs, and it is very unlikely that Jesus was born in December (the shepherds and their sheep would not have been outside!).

In fact, if you need an inexpensive stocking filler, I would recommend a cracking little book called A Christmas Cornucopia by Sunday Times bestselling author Mark Forsyth, which aims to uncover the hidden stories behind our Yuletide traditions. An endorsement on the front cover by Matthew Parris sums it up: ‘Everything we thought about Christmas is wrong! Great stuff!’

In light of the evidence, it’s too simplistic to write Christmas off as either ‘Victorian’ or ‘Pagan’. But it also a bit much to talk about ‘Getting back to the real meaning of Christmas’, ‘the commercialisation of Christmas’ or indeed ‘Putting Christ back into Christmas’. Many have a desire to ‘get back to’ something that never really existed in the first place.

One of my favourite quotes from the book reads as follows: ‘Once upon a time, there was no such thing as Christmas And then Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and after that there was still no such thing as Christmas. For hundreds of years’.

And yet the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem is still the most significant birth that has ever taken place. And if we take ‘Christmas’ as shorthand for Jesus coming into the world, then there is an even greater irony in the calls for us to ‘save Christmas’. Any time a leader tells us to “do our bit to save Christmas”, they unwittingly get things back to front.

Before Jesus’ birth, the angel told an apprehensive Joseph that ‘he will save his people from their sins’ (Matthew 1:21). As Jesus grew up, he lived the life of perfect obedience that we have so dismally failed to achieve, as a precursor to something even more significant than his birth. Bethlehem’s joy culminated in Jerusalem’s sorrow as Jesus faced the agonies of the cross and the perfect justice of God was carried out. The manger was just a step along the path leading to the one who was without sin becoming sin for us.

Strip away all the traditions, and the angel’s message to Joseph is at the heart of the Christmas story. That is why the idea of us ‘saving Christmas’ is so back to front. We can’t save Christmas; Christmas saves us.

Published in the Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press, 17th December 2020

What does bombarding them with presents teach our kids?

I read a newspaper article last week about a couple who had decided to ‘cut down’ on presents this year and set a budget of £600 for each of their two children. However, they have already gone over it, and that’s just on toys – they hadn’t even started buying clothes yet. And that’s for one child aged three, and another who’s only ten months! Yet it’s a story that could be repeated up and down the country. The couple were included as an example of ‘generous’ givers, but that’s not quite the word I’d use to describe it.

My problem is not so much with the ‘commercialisation of Christmas’, or even a desire for people to remember the ‘reason for the season’. As Sunday Times bestselling author Mark Forsyth writes in a book about the origins of Christmas traditions: ‘Once upon a time, there was no such thing as Christmas. And then Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and after that there was still no such thing as Christmas. For hundreds of years’. The Bible doesn’t tell us to commemorate Jesus’ birth, and the idea of doing so didn’t occur to Christians for hundreds of years after the event.

My concern however is that what we do at Christmas often shows what really matters to us. So we buy a lot of stuff for our kids because, as adults, we get our identity from what we have. We get them the latest iPhone, the latest ‘in’ toy, the latest fashion accessory. Are any of these things wrong in themselves? Not at all. But in bestowing them on our children repeatedly, we confirm to them the lie that their identity is found in stuff. And then we wonder why they grow up insecure in who they are in themselves – and easily become victims of social media anxiety. When actually it’s largely because we have trained them to measure their worth by what they’ve got and how they compare to others. And even though we have always got them the latest, the newest, the best – we still wonder why they grow up with a sense of entitlement!

Or we use stuff to compensate for what they really need and want – our attention and affection. We’ve been working too hard, we know they haven’t seen much of us, but here have the latest doll/iPad/flatscreen TV to see how much I love you. And we try to buy our way into their hearts.

I’m currently reading a book by a pastor who says he’s amazed at the number of adults he comes across who still struggle in life because they could never get their mums or dads to say ‘I love you and am so pleased with you’. It turns out that it’s much easier to buy children stuff than spend time with them or say those simple words.

But do our children really think they can be bought with shiny things? As the years pass they learn to measure their love by what they’re given. And then we wonder why they grow up to see love as some sort of contractual arrangement – ‘If you love me, you will do this/give me this’.

These are not small matters. They are foundational to shaping and framing our children’s identity. And their identity will shape how they see life, how they respond to trials, disappointments and loss. What we do in December shapes them for January to November. And then repeat.

If all year we worship money and belongings, why stop at Christmas to remember Jesus? We have already chosen our saviour—the one who loves us, supplies what we need, brings us joy, secures our future, defines who we are. ‘Behold you shall call his name Stuff, for he shall save his people from their griefs’.

Except that it doesn’t. Simply having more stuff doesn’t bring happiness. The maddening pursuit of possessions will not save us, but starve us – leaving us at the whim of every upgrade, and every recession. In teaching our children to hang their identity on what they have we set them up for a crashing fall. Only God is a strong enough hook to hang our identity, future and joy on. There is more to life than stuff. We are made to be more than consumers. But the lessons start well before Christmas.

To be published in the Stranraer and Wigtownshire, 24th December 2019. Based on a similar article a few years ago by Mark Loughridge

The Wrong Advent

by Mark Loughridge

’Tis the season for baby Jesuses and mangers, wise men and shepherds, as people give a passing acknowledgement to the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Carol services will be had, children perform their parts, and we will all go home will rosy cheeks and glad hearts, to mince pies and mulled wine, feeling suitably imbued with the Christmas spirit.

This is Advent—marking the coming of the Son of God into the world. The problem is that it is the wrong Advent. I don’t mean simply that we have layered extra detail on top of the Bible’s story, or that we have likely picked the wrong time of the year—although all that is true—I mean that we have picked the wrong advent event.

The word advent means ‘coming’. The Jesus whose arrival we ‘remember’ at Christmas is coming back. That’s the one we are told to be looking for, counting down to. It will be entirely unlike his first arrival. If you’ve missed the point of his first arrival, here’s how you will experience his second—as Jesus describes it.

Imagine the following scenario: You are getting on with a perfectly ordinary day, dropping the children to school, calling in at the shops, sitting at the desk in work. Suddenly you feel the earth start to tremble, a lorry going past?—no, the rumbling and shaking grows. You run outside, and the sun has grown dark—extinguished; you see the moon a strange bloody colour, the stars seem to be falling as if the very fabric of space is being torn apart. You look up into this writhing mass of darkness where sky used to be, and there is a blaze of glorious light, and an awesome figure on a white horse appears wielding a sword. This is no hallucination or comic book hero. This is the divine judge, God the Son, here to bring judgment and retribution on all who have defied, rejected or ignored him. In terror you watch as the sword falls on enemy after enemy. None stands against him. In unbroken horror you watch as he treads the winepress of the fury of God’s wrath.

You run, claw at the dirt, trying to dig a hole to escape, calling on the mountains to fall on you. You would prefer being buried alive in an avalanche to meeting him.

This will be no ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’—where did he go? Oh, he came before, and offered forgiveness and peace, and hope. He laid down his life, bearing all the judgment rebels deserved. He welcomed rebels to come, giving lots of time and opportunity.

But time has run out. Now he has come to Judge the earth. He offered to bear your judgment, but if you rejected his offer, you’ve missed your chance. Now only judgment awaits.

Yet there is still time—that baby Jesus who lies in the manger grew up to take your Hell at the Cross if you entrust yourself to him. Don’t miss the point of his first coming, for you won’t miss his second coming.

… And now we open another door on our advent calendar… 6 days to go…

Mark is the pastor of Milford Reformed Presbyterian Church and New Life Fellowship, Letterkenny. This article first appeared on GentleReformation.com.