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There went out a decree...Address at Christmas Midnight, St Paul’s Cathedral, December 25th 2008 “There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered.”Mary and Joseph were summoned to Bethlehem to have their data captured. I only hope that Quirinius and his administration were better at looking after the results than some of our own public bodies.Capturing data, counting people and assessing wealth was a concern for the Rome of the Emperor Augustus and with us it has become an obsession. Morning and evening, the entrails of the latest retail sales figures are examined and the temperature of our economy is assessed by reference to the fall of the Footsie, the wobble on the Dow or the rise of the Hang Seng – they are our new matins and evensong.Is there any meaning in life beyond what can be captured in number-based descriptions of the world and served up as information?We seem to be trapped in some kind of Flatland. “Flatland” is the name of a book by one of the most neglected prophets of Victorian London, Edwin Abbott, Headmaster of the City of London School. He imagines a two-dimensional world where social class is deduced from the number of angles you have. The narrator is a square – one of the middle classes – who is visited by a three dimensional sphere who opens his mind to the existence of other dimensions. The possibility of a multi-dimensional universe is opened up (incidentally, some decades before Einstein), but the square is imprisoned for attempting to persuade the inhabitants of Flatland that there are in reality other dimensions.The world holds huge surprises if we are prepared to see them, but alas we are so often imprisoned by restricted vision. Genuine doubt is a gift to a spiritual adventurer, but if we fall in love with our own limited point of view in space and time then we shall not be open to the “blessed hope and glorious appearing” described in the letter to Titus.Flatland thinking has been turned on St Luke’s narrative of the birth of Jesus. We do not receive the message of the angels about this singular event because we are obsessed with the attempt to fit the story into a world in which the only things that are true are things that can be photographed or reduced to numbers.There was a birth, to be sure, of someone who was to transform the world. That is historical fact, better attested than most events from the ancient world. Looking back from beyond his life, death and resurrection, Luke and the other Gospel writers explored the transforming implications of the birth of Jesus in the light of the images and prophecies of their particular thought world. The story is full of echoes and resonances which are meant to open our minds to deeper truth. The prophet Isaiah, for example, laments that “the ox knows its owner and the donkey knows the manger of its Lord, but my people has not understood me”. The rare word used by the prophet, “manger”, is used by Luke in the story we have just heard of the place where Jesus is laid.Then ask yourself why Luke so explicitly sets the story of Christ’s birth in the context of the rule of Augustus? We know from inscriptions that the Emperor Augustus was hailed as “the saviour of the whole world” and that “the birthday of the god [Augustus] has marked the beginning of the good news for the world”. In Rome just before the birth of Christ a great altar was raised, and dedicated as the “Altar of the Peace of Augustus”. It still exists in its ruined state. The surface meaning of the times in which Christ was born was inscribed in stone and published by the imperial propaganda machine, but Luke is saying that the deeper truth was revealed in a far off province of the Empire, in a child whose mother laid him in a manger.The truth, which waits to unfold itself more and more to those who can contemplate and listen deeply to the story of the birth of the Christ Child, is more than mere informational truth, which gives us a few additional historical facts. It is transformational truth.To as many as received the Christ Child, says St John, God’s way of communicating himself, his Word, “to them gave he power to become children of God”. Many people look for a Messiah, but vulnerable and ultimately crucified Messiahs are less popular. But God comes not with coercive power like so many of the would-be Messiahs who have left destruction behind them, but as a child to draw us out of our fear and Flatland pre-occupations and to set us free to discover that the more we go beyond ourselves in love, the more we become our true selves. He has come to re-establish the connection between Flatland and the infinite mystery of the universe and to impart the truth that the more we lose ourselves in adoration and service, the more we shall find ourselves.Of course, since the story is not a sentimental fable, but deep truth, we are also confronted by the darkness and the real risk that instead of melting our hardness of heart, the baby will awake our destructive cynicism and that Christmas will soon be followed by the massacre of the innocents.If we approach and receive the story of the birth in the manger in the right contemplative spirit, then we open ourselves to the possibility of being grasped by the truth that life at its heart is not cold and pointless, to be captured by mere data, but created out of love and promise.The great enemies of making spiritual progress are religious and scientific literalism, superficial readings of life which stop at information and avoid the great deeps. Maybe this year, after all the shocks we have received, the light pollution generated by Flatland will be diminished to the point where we can see the light at midnight.So recently we were in the state described by the poet Czeslaw Milosz:When everything was fine and the notion of sin had vanishedAnd the earth was ready in universal peace To consume and rejoice without creeds and utopias.We are less certain now, and so once again this Christmas we have an invitation from the child who has come to be our teacher to follow his way of self sacrificing love and to discover in the journey that the Flatland is irradiated and revealed in all its colour and variety. When we begin to have the mind of Christ then we shall be able to see ourselves and one another and the mystery of this world in their true glory.May the Father, who has loved the Eternal Son from before the foundation of the world, shed that love upon you his children. May Christ who gathered into one things earthly and heavenly, fill you with joy and peace. May the Holy Spirit, by whose overshadowing Mary became the God-bearer, give you grace to carry the good news of Christ.> Return to talks index
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