Snippet
Belief
Christmas culture
Creed
3 min read

My Boxing Day anti-climax

What if the most wonderful time has come and gone, and not much has changed?

Jonathan is a priest and theologian who researches theology and comedy.

A grump cat wears a red Christmas hat, sitting amongst Christmas decorations.
Amin Alizadeh on Unsplash.

Can I begin by sharing an embarrassing secret? 

Every year I find Christmas… a disappointment. 

This is because it turns out that I’m still basically a 10-year-old, and I still, in the core of my being, believe that the presents under the tree are going to be the key to the lasting happiness I seek. 

And, not only that, but I am also convinced that somehow all the candles, and the nostalgia, and the Christmas specials of Call the Midwife, will add up to some glorious, mulled wine inspired transcendence. 

Now I know all this is nonsense.  

I know that low expectations are the key to enjoying family holidays; that the presents are tokens of love, and sometimes obligation, which aren’t supposed to complete me. 

And yet, on Boxing Day there is always this sensation of anti-climax. 

The presents have been opened, and the people I love have done their best, and sometimes given me truly creative and thoughtful presents, but none of them are the specific thing I secretly craved. 

And the carols were stunning, and candlelight does make everything and everyone beautiful, and I cried at Call the Midwife, but I’m still me, with all my ambivalence and endless need and childish self-regard.  

The most wonderful time of the year has come and gone, and not much has changed. 

Which gets me thinking about that first Christmas, and how anti-climactic, in some ways, that was too.  

Christians believe that the birth of this particular baby in that particular stable, was a key turning point in all history, as God entered the world in human form, coming to rescue his people and restore humanity. 

But in the short term, how much actually changed? 

Mary and Joseph still faced the overwhelming task of keeping a new-born alive, in a stable far from home. 

The shepherds and the wise men seem to have wondered back to their respective lives, and are never heard from again. 

And evil still rages unchecked. The story doesn’t make it into many Nativity plays (strangely enough) but the next episode in the narrative is truly horrific – Herod, the paranoid ruler massacring all the babies in Bethlehem in a futile attempt to eliminate the new-born king. 

The light shineth in darkness, as we hear in the stunning final reading of Carol services, but the darkness comprehended it not. 

Christmas came and went, and the world kept turning. 

Christian faith always has to contend with this reality – that not much may change. And so for me there is actually hope in the recognition that the bible includes quite a lot of reality – quite a lot of disappointment, and non-transformation, and outright evil – in its telling of the entrance of God into the world. 

And yet, and yet. I also believe that that baby, that birth, that Christmas, really did sow concrete seeds of change into the midst of the darkness and disappointment. 

The darkness may not have comprehended the light, but neither could it overcome it. 

And somehow, the light shines still, even amidst the piles of wrapping paper and washing up and reminders of human failure that fill our post-Christmas days. 

Happy boxing day! 

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Article
Creed
Easter
Resurrection
4 min read

Easter is almost too big for our human minds to grapple with

How can we 'go figure' the seemingly incomprehensible?

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A star constellation resembles a cross.
Adrian Mag on Unsplash.

Forgive me for getting a bit ahead of myself, but I’d like to say something of the Resurrection. We’ve barely even started the Triduum and the Jesuit saying rings in my ears: “If we don’t die with him on Good Friday, we can’t rise with him on Easter morning.” 

But part of the problem this epigram presents is that it’s not so much Good Friday that we skip over, but Easter morning. In our determination to focus on the Passion of the Christ, Easter can perhaps be a joyful sermon, a jolly good lunch, an exclamation that “He is risen!” and we move on. 

So when it comes to miracles, too often it’s the Big One from which we avert our attention. And we can even skip the entire thing. I encountered two of my erstwhile Church primary-school children on a Holy Week dog walk. “Father George!” they cried. I’m afraid I spoke to them and their parents about clues for an Easter-egg hunt. 

Like the size of the universe, Easter is almost too big for our human minds to grapple with. So we confine ourselves to reciting facts and beliefs. Our universe is 13 billion light years wide and came from literally nothing. Jesus Christ was raised from the dead and appeared to his disciples. 

There is a real fear of the Resurrection among the faithful. Not in the way that scripture speaks of the fear of God, but a much more basic fear of the schoolchild that we’re not getting it right. It’s as if we’re meant to believe but can’t, with a dash of the awful dread that those who say that - rather like Donald Trump - it’s not to be taken literally but seriously might just be right. 

It’s the fear of the yawning abyss between literal truth (in Greek, logos) and metaphorical or allegorical truth (mythos). And it’s as if we’re being forced to make a choice that, in conscience, we can’t. As such, it becomes what St Paul might call a stumbling block, something that gets in the way rather than illuminates. And it’s one we quietly ignore. 

I think I want to say that we need to be liberated from the worry that there’s a right way to interpret it, or that there’s a binary choice to be made between literal and metaphorical truth. In the events of Easter morning, we’re being offered a both/and response rather than an either/or choice. 

In this model, historicity is useful but insufficient. We know as a historical fact that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified by the Roman authorities and we can very reasonably assume, in historical terms, that one of his disciples, a woman from Magdala called Mary, went to his tomb after the Jewish sabbath and found it empty. 

Thereafter the experience of the Resurrection becomes harder, if not impossible, to describe. Not just for us, but especially for the first witnesses to it. That’s partly why this gospel scripture is written in a way that is unlike any other, more breathless, more personal, more anecdotal and more experiential. It’s as if the insurgent Jesus movement is seeing in colour for the first time. 

If we’re looking for a miracle, incidentally, here it is. Whatever has happened, the utter defeat and dispersal of this small, provincial band of rebels in death and despair has been irreversibly transformed within three days. The two-word modern term for this phenomenon might be: Go figure. 

But we should not avert our eyes from less convenient phenomena, evidence that is not just metaphorical or allegorical but which may be downright worldly and motivated by expedience. It isn’t controversial to observe that there is a difference between the empty-tomb narratives and the apparitions (as the Roman Catholic catechism calls them) of the risen Christ, the latter in part arising from competing factions for patriarchal authority the earliest formation of Church. 

The empty tomb isn’t just evidence of the risen Christ. It’s there to show us symbolically where God is not. In John’s gospel, Mary sees cherubim sitting at the head and foot of the slab on which the body lay, echoing the mercy-seat of the ancient ark of the covenant, the empty throne of the invisible Jewish God, Yahweh. The Christ has “gone ahead” to continue the living work of God in his nascent Church of the new covenant. 

Above all (and those two words can be read literally), this dualistic approach to the Resurrection calls its observers to relax about it, to let go of our understanding of it. The words and actions of the risen Christ often seem to confirm as much: "Don't hang on to me", "Shalom" (Peace be with you), "Come and eat", "Feed my lambs". 

So, struggling to comprehend the Resurrection isn’t a deal-breaker. In a way, the divine message is that the biggest miracle of all is no big deal. Life really does go on. 

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