Snippet

Awe and wonder

Christmas culture

Creed

Music

23 December 2024

4 min read

Nine Lessons and Carols needs to be long

The carol service that take time to pull at the golden thread of Christmas.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

Choristers stand and sing in choir stalls in a church

BBC.

I have decided that I will make it an annual ritual to grumpily defend a Christmas tradition that I love. Last year it was the traditional Nativity Play. This year it is the traditional carol service. For over a hundred years, at King’s College Chapel at least, the traditional Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols has borne witness to the very best of Anglican liturgy. The service combines candlelight, communal and choir carol singing, and lessons from Holy Scripture in a beautifully evocative manner. I adore the service, and it is very much a highlight of my Advent contemplation.

I am thrilled to say that carol services seem to be as popular as ever! I can hardly name a church that won’t be putting one on, either solo or uniting with other parishes. This warms my heart…and yet a shard of ice remains. A small, but very important gripe: editing. I notice that many services don’t follow the traditional pattern of nine lessons. Some have six. Some five. Some only a few, focusing as much as possible on the carol singing. I have a few clergy friends who enjoy giving me a gentle ribbing when I tell them my plans: “Oh you’re not doing ALL NINE are you!? Oh dear! It’ll be so long!”

Brevity can be a virtue, and the Church hasn’t always cultivated it. I understand people have busy lives, and that very few of us want to be out late on a cold, wintry evening. I know that mince pies and mulled wine are as close to an irresistible temptation as there could be. I know that 30 to 45 minutes of hymn singing with a bit of Bible seems so lovely and compact. I understand all of this.

However, I want to argue in favour of keeping all nine lessons: the length is the point!

We end with a meditation on primordial concepts that cannot be truly comprehended by any mortal, and can only be put to paper in poetry.

Some of the lessons are long (I’m looking at you Genesis!), and some a wonderfully pithy. It starts at the very beginning of the Bible and spends a good deal of time – nearly half of the readings – meditating on Genesis and Isaiah before we even begin to get to the baby Jesus, and the manger, and the shepherds, and the wise men. We seem to take ages not actually reading about the Story of Christmas…and this is VITAL!

The traditional carol service concludes with the Prologue of John, that masterful exposition of the theology of the Incarnation, the perfect encapsulation of what a Christian believes is the truth, and the light, and the meaning of Jesus being born in a stable in Bethlehem. The service concludes with mention of the Word, of pre-existence, of Creation, of light defeating darkness, of salvation wrought through spirit and not flesh. We end with a meditation on primordial concepts that cannot be truly comprehended by any mortal, and can only be put to paper in poetry…and yet this is the true meaning of Christmas, and the true meaning of the Scriptures. Everything from Genesis 1.1 has been leading up to this, and everything written in Scripture only makes sense in light of these remarkable verses by John (or so Christians believe).

When defending the traditional Nativity, I wrote about narrative and story and how they are fundamental to understanding our place in the world and the very meaning of our lives. The same can be said about the full nine lessons. Starting at the Fall of Mankind in the Garden of Eden, stopping to ponder the mercy and promise of God to Abraham and Isaac, being confronted with the wonderful Prophecies of Isaiah (the promise of peace and joy in the Kingdom of God), and then charting the story of the miraculous Birth of Christ, we see the underlying narrative thread of all Scripture: God loves His creation, God makes a promise to His creation, God keeps His promise and brings salvation and reconciliation to His creation. The Christmas story is wonderful and joyous, but it is an act in a larger drama, and we cannot truly understand it (or how it relates to the Prologue of John) if we don’t allow ourselves to encounter the whole story.

Perhaps I’m putting too much emphasis and expectation on a single service in the year. Carol Services are celebratory, and anything that makes them accessible to as many people as possible is not something I want to malign…but…I pray that the full sweep of Scripture, the full and precious golden thread of the narrative of Scripture, is not lost. It is the meaning of Christmas, and it is the meaning of life, and it fills me with joy when it is celebrated with fellowship, singing, and worship.

Anyway, grump over. I’m going to eat a mince pie.

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Snippet

Creed

Easter

Eating

26 March 2025

3 min read

Simnel cake and the power of forgiveness

All-encompassing mercy can be hard to swallow.

Katherine Amphlett

Katherine is a counsellor based in the West Midlands.

A close up of a Simnel Cake shows 12 balls on top.

James Petts, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Simnel cake, yum – I love it. Though because it’s a rich heavy fruit cake, quite a lot of people disagree with me. It also has a layer of marzipan running through the middle which is an equally divisive issue, at least in our household.

Anyway, like it or loathe it, Simnel cake is a traditional Easter delicacy that’s been eaten in Britain since at least medieval times. And the way it links with Easter is that it also has marzipan decorations on the top, in the form of eleven ballies placed around the edge – one for each of Jesus’s loyal disciples. The twelfth, missing, one represents Judas Iscariot, who forfeited his place on the cake by betraying Jesus to the Romans. Famously he accepted a bribe of 30 pieces of silver to lead the soldiers to Christ as he sat with his friends in the Garden of Gethsemane, and marked him out as the one they were after by greeting him with a kiss. It was the act, in short, that precipitated the events that subsequently resulted in Jesus’s trial and crucifixion.

Such treachery, clearly, brands a person as the worst of sinners, and history has consequently judged Judas as exactly that. Literature too. Dante for example, in his Inferno, has him being chewed eternally in the mouth of Satan (along with Brutus and Cassius, betrayers of Julius Caesar) down in the lowest circle of Hell, specifically dedicated to traitors. It doesn’t get worse than that.

But last Easter something interesting happened, which has made me feel rather differently about Judas. We had a new vicar arrive in our church, who came into the nave at the start of one of the Easter services holding a Simnel cake – minus the decorative ballies. He also had a pack of marzipan. He handed both cake and marzipan over to the children of the Sunday school, and sent them off to go and make ballies (along with suitable instructions on handwashing) for the top of the cake. They reappeared proudly at the end bearing their handiwork… one festive looking Simnel cake, complete with disciples. Eleven of them.

Only what was this? Lo and behold, the vicar had another marzipan ball – a twelfth one, that had been lurking in his pocket. He held it up between finger and thumb.

‘Uh oh children,’ he said. ‘I’ve just found Judas. Now I want you to imagine for a minute that I am God. What do you think I should do with him?’

One little girl, round-eyed with alarm, gasped, ‘Are you going to eat him??’

Chuckling from the congregation – and a few approving nods here and there, it has to be said.

But the vicar just smiled. ‘I think the whole point of Jesus’s death was to give all of us a second chance… everyone that is, no exceptions,’ he said. ‘With God, forgiveness is universally available, particularly if someone is sorry – and in Matthew’s gospel, it says that Judas tried to give the money back because he knew he had done something terrible. I think that God would say Judas belongs back with the other disciples. And I also would like it if we could be the sort of church that says all are welcome, whatever they have done. So let’s put him on the cake with the others shall we?’

I thought of all this as I was making a Simnel cake this year ready for Mothering Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent, when they were traditionally produced. And yes, my cake has twelve ballies on it… Peter, Matthew, James, John et al, with Judas alongside. I keep pondering this idea of all-encompassing mercy. It was completely and utterly revolutionary in the violent period of history that Jesus lived in, and I’m not sure things have changed much. The thought of every person being offered forgiveness, no matter what, sounds mad in these days of cancel culture and moral indignation. Imagine what the Twittersphere would say.

But actually, I think the vicar was right: I’m pretty sure God would want Judas to have a spot. And let’s face it, as a very small side benefit, it’s also much easier to space twelve disciples evenly around a cake than eleven.

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