A Christmas Message

By Robin G. Jordan

I began writing this message at little past 2 o’clock on Christmas morning. I had wanted to write a Christmas message to post on Anglicans Ablaze. But I fell asleep early in the evening and did not wake up until almost midnight. I had a late night supper and read a chapter or two from Terry Pratchett’s I Shall Wear Midnight. I am partial to Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching adventures, Witches Abroad, The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky, and Wintersmith. Tiffany does not appear in Witches Abroad but a number of the characters that later appear in her adventures do. I have not read Wyrd Sisters. Its title suggests that it belongs with the other books I have listed.

“Poison goes where poison’s welcome,” Tiffany says at one point in the story. We live in a world in which there seems to be an awful lot of poison. I can think of other names for it—animosity, bitterness, hatred, ill will, maliciousness, meanness, nastiness, rancour, and spite, but poison seems to describe it best. In my lifetime it seems that the world has become filled with even more poison.

Maybe the poison was always present but the older I get, the more I notice it around me and the more I discover it in myself. It is something that I do not like to find in myself. It is something that when I find it, I seek to dig it up root and all and not let it flourish and grow as some people unfortunately do. It does not require much bidding to enter our lives and quickly takes root. Its roots are long and tangled and eradicating it from the heart is hard work. Thankfully God has given us His Spirit to be our helper. Without the Holy Spirit we could accomplish nothing. We would not even have the will to do so.

We celebrate Christmas in the early winter, a few days after the winter equinox. Christmas was in centuries past especially a time of generosity and kindness to the poor. Despite the increasing scarcity of food due to the onset of winter, men could make merry with whatever provisions they had stored to tide them through the winter and could be generous and kind to those less fortunate than themselves. The Christmas carol, “Good King Wenceslas” celebrates such generosity and kindness.

Christmas was not just a celebration of the birth of our Saviour but also a celebration of God’s generosity and kindness to us. It was only fitting that we should be generous and kind ourselves to those around us. Nowadays, I fear that we largely reserve that generosity and kindness to family and friends, to those closest to us.

Among the things that Jesus taught during the three short years that he ministered among us was that his disciples, those who took him as their lord and teacher, should be generous and kind to others. They should be merciful and forgiving as well as open-handed and gentle. There is, of course, more to Jesus than his teaching. But for those who call themselves his followers one way that they show their faith in him is in their obedience to what he taught. They abide in his words.

The Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Current English defines mercy as “abstention from the infliction of suffering on the part of one who has the right or power to inflict it, spare; capacity or disposition to mercy….” The Pocket Oxford defines merciful as “disposed to mercy, showing mercy….” We often find ourselves in a position to inflict suffering upon others even though we may not have the right. Jesus teaches that we should refrain from doing so.

Jesus also teaches that we should forgive others when they wrong us. We should pardon them, abstain from punishing them, and not hold the wrong against them. We should not bear a grudge or keeping bring up past wrongs. Jesus, I suspect, recognized the human tendency to take umbrage, to believe oneself wronged even when there has been no wrongdoing. We need to forgive the imagined wrongs as well as real ones.

Jesus calls those who follow him to not only be generous with money and material things but also with our mercy and our forgiveness. God was not unsparing in his generosity in sending His Son that the world might be saved through him. We likewise must not stint with our generosity in being merciful and forgiving to others. In doing so, we say to the poison, “You are not welcome here.” “There is no room here for you.”

Jesus spoke of God’s kingdom, His righteous rule, being both in the present, the here and now, and in the future. When we put our trust in Jesus and his atoning death on the cross for our salvation, when we put our trust in his words and seek to live them, we have stepped as if through a door into God’s kingdom. God is now reigning in our hearts and wherever he reigns is His kingdom.