Thought for the Week

by Revd Richard Walker – Vicar of St. John’s Church, Yeadon

The Christmas season tends to heighten our emotions in a variety of ways. The TV soaps often play on this with Christmas and New Year episodes contrasting the joy of one person with the bitter sadness of another. As the closing credits appear and the theme music breaks in there is usually someone who is left broken-hearted, grieving or dying – while everyone else is celebrating in the local pub.

In our own lives we may well find that the Yuletide season causes us to feel and think more deeply about life than we do at other times of the year. For some it will be a fresh appreciation of the value of loving relationships, as we experience the gathering of family and friends. For others it will be a painful reminder of broken relationships, of mistakes made, of opportunities missed. Some adults still sense a little of that ‘Christmas magic’ most of us knew when we were small; the rest of us perhaps observe it wistfully in the excitement of our children and grandchildren. Sadly, for others, this time of the year serves only to remind them of loved ones that are no longer present in this world. This season, more than any other, brings into sharp focus the joys and sorrows of life.

Christmas is, of course, the celebration of the birth of Christ. But we must not be too hasty in condemning modern society for losing the religious significance of the season in the pursuit of sentimentality, overindulgence and commercialism. The whole point of the Christmas story is that Almighty God broke into our rag-bag world of beauty and depravity, in the person of Jesus born at Bethlehem, and very few people noticed – apart from a few unkempt shepherds and a handful of New-Age travellers.

So today God is closer to us than we often perceive. He is found not only in the local carol or midnight communion service. He is present in our family celebrations and in the empty room after friends have left, in the laughter of our children and in the lines of old age. He is with us in the hotchpotch of emotions we experience in the aftermath of Christmas - speaking to us in our hopes, regrets, gladness and pain. He is there in those thoughts we have from time to time: “perhaps there is a better way to live, perhaps there is a greater purpose, perhaps there is a deeper reality that can satisfy my hopes for forgiveness, freedom and love”.

That baby born in inauspicious circumstances 2000 years ago grew up to change the course of human history. Likewise, God is with us in often unseen ways, yet longs to break into our existence and change our lives beyond recognition. This journey of discovery begins for us, as for those ancient worshippers, when we make the effort to seek the God who comes to us in the person of Jesus Christ. Like them we too may discover that the God who reveals himself in the ordinary things of life, can make an extraordinary difference in the ups and downs of our frail and fallen lives.