The earth-shaking consequences of Christmas

Imagine Tolkien being born as a hobbit in the Shire, or J.K. Rowling going to school at Hogwarts. Explore the notion of the author entering his or her own creation.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

A nativity scene in bold colours in an illumination style.

The Nativity, Mesrop of Khizan, Armenia, 1615.

Public Domain, The Getty Museum.

The radical uniqueness of the Christmas story can be easily lost in a culture over-familiar with carols, nativity scenes, and Christmas cards. The birth of Jesus is not, for Christians, merely the birth of the founder of their religion, comparable to Muhammad, the Buddha, Guru Nanak, or Moses. The heart of the Christian claim is that in the Incarnation, the Almighty Creator of all things has irrevocably identified himself with the human race, standing in solidarity with every person who ever existed and ever will exist.

Imagine Tolkien being born as a hobbit in the Shire, or J.K. Rowling going to school at Hogwarts. The mind-bending notion of the author entering his or her own creation is far closer to the Christian idea of Jesus than any comparison between him and other great figures of history. For Christians, he was not just a moral teacher, not just an inspiring example – not even an object of adoration and love without further qualification. He was and is all these things of course. But all those things are put in the shade by something else, totally unique and unrepeatable: Immanuel, God-among-us.

The implications of this are staggering. Dorothy Sayers puts it this way (quote slightly adapted):

For whatever reason God chose to make human beings as we are – limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death – he had the honesty and the courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from us that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.

The Christian God is a God who plays fair, who keeps the rules he commands us to keep, who suffered the same pain, anxiety, and daily struggle that we all suffer in the world he created.

How is this possible? Only if we hold together two things that look like a contradiction at first sight: that Jesus is both fully God and fully human, at the same time, without confusion or separation. This is how Christian dogma has been enshrined in our creeds.

The early centuries of Christianity were a delicate balancing act. Theory after theory was tried and abandoned because it failed to hold the necessary tension between ‘fully God’ and ‘fully man’. The long councils with hundreds of bishops arguing over the precise wording of the creed may seem very remote to our daily concerns, but they were trying to protect something vital to the life of the Church. One word wrong could have upset the whole balance, and Christianity would have become simply another mystical apparition or set of moral guidelines along hundreds of others in the ancient world.

If we let go of the ‘fully God’ part, then we are left with a religious teacher who may inspire devotion, offer moral guidance, or even speak with the voice of God. But we do not have the Creator himself entering his creation to experience it as we do.

If we let go of the ‘fully human’ part, then we are left with a supernatural appearance of the one who made us. He might command us to live a certain way and punish us when we fail. He might leave detailed instructions about the right way to worship him. But he did not share our condition. He did not get sunburnt, jostled in the street, woken up, pinched, teased at school, or sold a dud.

The magic is in that combination of the two, almost impossible to grasp, that puts the source of all power, truth and beauty in a collision course with the deepest fears, sufferings, joys, hopes and longings of every member of the human race. The one who made us is not unaware of what it is like to live in this world. Whatever his mysterious purposes may be for his creation, they involve humanity in a prominent position. And whatever God destines for our race is a destiny he shares. As G.K. Chesterton writes of the Incarnation:

‘Since that day it has never been quite enough to say that God is in his heaven and all is right with the world, since the rumour that God had left his heavens to set it right.’

Article

Community

Creed

Sin

13 November 2024

3 min read

In the city of broken windows

Our fractures become fractal, breaking bigger and bigger windows.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Associate Minister at Holy Trinity Clapham, London.

a multi-paned window mural shows people while amid it are broken window panes.

A broken window mural, Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital.

Rhododendrites, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

We weren't expecting a knock on the door from our next-door neighbour on New Year's Day. It was pouring with rain, and said rain was pouring into the boot of our car, with the window smashed. Thanks for letting us know. Annoying, inconvenient and expensive. But just how expensive is a smashed window?

The 'broken windows theory', that visible signs of crime, antisocial behaviour and civil disorder begets more serious crimes, was introduced American sociologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling:

'Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one un-repaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)'

This is not an academic theory. Where I live in London, i took the local council 1,315 days to replace a local resident's broken window. The sense of decay extends beyond borders, with fewer than half the residents thinking they live on clean streets, with rubbish and weeds gone unchecked. It is also one of the worst boroughs in London for varying types of crime, and over the past few years often being the worst. It's hard not to think the little things and the big things are linked. In other news, the now-resigned CEO of the council has pleaded guilty to drink-driving, failing to stop after a car crash and driving without insurance, and not guilty to possession of cocaine.

Our problems in society all found their greenhouses somewhere inside of us.

Crime is on the move. As homes have become more difficult to burgle, crime has been pushed out onto the streets with shoplifting and bike theft. The Economist recently reported that 'stolen bikes and e-bikes have also become the getaway vehicle of choice for thieves, according to the Merseyside police. In one way or another, some 80 per cent of acquisitive crime in Liverpool involves a nicked bike.' It's going to be fascinating to see the wider impact, but simply by stopping suspicious riders and marking thousands of bikes across Liverpool, reported thefts have fallen by 46 per cent between July 2023 and July 2024 compared with the previous year.

These problems can't be solved by overstretched police or the council. Everyone's responsible so no one's to blame. Practical implementations of the broken windows theory have not been without controversy. But for those of us who live in urban environments, to look out from our homes is to see a city of broken windows. The impact is more than weeds 'uprooting' pavements: it's an uprooted society. Correlation and causation might be blurred, but that's the point. In Christianity, sin is understood as having a polluting effect. Just as fossil fuels in China will pollute the atmosphere for someone in Scotland, sin is not hermetically sealed. Our problems in society all found their greenhouses somewhere inside of us.

Jesus said 'what comes out of you is what makes you 'unclean'. For from within, out of your hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and they make you 'unclean'.' They pollute our lives. And they pollute the world around us.

The Christian church, much like many institutions, is reckoning with prioritising competency at the expense of character. Little sins are not so little when they permeate and promote a culture where certain sins are permissible. Our fractures become fractal, breaking bigger and bigger windows.

All this sounds pretty bleak and Dickensian when of course there's always another city to see: full of life, vibrancy and joy. But we'd be wilfully ignorant to ignore the disorder of broken windows and broken lives all around us. It might overwhelm us, or our eyes might glaze over as we see those broken windows. But we'd do well not to ignore the broken windows within us too. For our sake, and the sake of our streets.