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The Bishop of Meath and Kildare's Christmas Sermon
We can be fairly certain that the most colourful stage direction in all English drama is that in the third act of The Winter?s Tale when the courtier Antigonus, after rather an eloquent speech, leaves the scene in something of a hurry under the stage instruction, ?Exit, pursued by a bear?.. It turns out - although we don?t get to see it ? that poor Antigonus (as the bear apparently catches up with him) is exiting not only the stage but life as well.
Now the whole business of making more dignified exits or (as we like to say today) ?having exit strategies?, is one that exercises the attention of both nations and individuals a great deal today. One of my most vivid memories, from thirty years ago, is the television image of the far from dignified exit that America made from Vietnam, culminating in the last helicopter leaving the embassy in Saigon, and leaving behind thousands of supporters of the former regime to their fate. We cannot know, although we may speculate as to whether such an equivalent scene will repeat itself amidst the morass and devastation of Iraq.
But exit strategies come far closer to home and to the personal. Do the governments of Ireland and the United Kingdom have coherent exit strategies to remove themselves from the setting up of a legislature in Northern Ireland should talks between the different groupings get nowhere soon? (Probably not, but it would certainly be interesting to know.) How does a business disengage itself from an ailing subsidiary ? what is the exit strategy for dumping a non-profitable business holding without losing dignity or being accused publicly of inhumanity? What is our exit strategy from a personal relationship which is no longer pleasant or attractive? And what has any of this to do with Christmas?
Surely this: That the central message of the Incarnation - of God among us in the person of Jesus Christ - is that God has rejected, and for all time, any idea of ever turning his back on humanity, of leaving us to stew in our own stupidity or vanity or greed. There is no exit strategy for God. There is no part of life on this earth where he does not have a place, or from which he can or will absent himself.
This is something we mouth and parrot happily enough in our more pious moments, but find it rather more difficult to integrate into our lives in times of pain and confusion. As we looked aghast at events in Ipswich over the past couple of weeks and saw in raw detail the fear, squalor and seeming hopelessness of life for those who work the red light district of any city in Britain (or for that matter in Ireland) and who can see no escape whatsoever, it seemed difficult not to believe that this was a place of horror and desperation abandoned by God. Yet there was a remarkable glimmer of light shining in darkness when we heard a local vicar speaking of a couple of those girls as people that he and his parishioners knew and cared for, that these girls were ?family? and the parish had lost part of its family with their murder..
Again, as this country pitifully grapples to come to terms with the realisation that our society has now casually spawned a gun culture which has become all-pervasive and where the murder of anyone can be bought at relatively low cost by anyone else, we have belatedly come to understand that it is no longer good enough for us to feel an unworthy relief or an unwholesome satisfaction when we are told blandly by the media that someone who has been murdered was ?known to the police?, as if this somehow made it all reasonable and palatable. In such a public mood of disbelief and of horror at what we have allowed to become part of everyday life in this country, it seems hard to accept that God has not made his exit from whole areas of Irish life. But then we heard on the news a few days ago that a Franciscan Priory is to be set up from scratch in one of the most violent estates in Limerick. All we can say is that God in Christ is not absent from anywhere in this world, and that when the Church is at its best, when it is doing what as it is called to do - which is to be Jesus Christ visible and active in this world - it has no exit strategy either from the pain and the fear of those whose who may have had little or no connection with anything that the Church signifies.
The French priest- novelist, Jean Sulivan, speaks of the uniqueness of Christianity in its belief in a God who is himself fragile and poor. Sulivan writes of this essential fragility as being akin to that of an unprotected child, and as being what he calls in a wonderful phrase, ?a wound in the absolute?. And if we are even to begin to understand the Incarnation, to begin to understand what Christmas Day is about, it must be in this sense of the woundedness of the world as the place of Jesus Christ, the place of God, a place of the wound in the Absolute. Even where love seems conspicuously absent from human behaviour or human aspiration, there is no exit strategy for God. Nor can there be an exit strategy from anywhere for us either, if we are disciples of Christ.
One of the most terrible of wounds in the life of this world over the past century was that of the Shoah, the Holocaust, when millions of Jews were murdered in concentration camps in the years of the Second World War. But there was another side, much less known and much less publicised. The Jews have a particular place of honour for those they term ?The Righteous among the Nations? - those who, although non-Jews, risked their own lives (and in some cases lost their lives) to save Jews from death. The idea goes back to biblical times when the two Egyptian midwives Shifra and Puah, defied Pharaoh?s command to drown all Jewish children in the Nile and when Pharaoh?s own daughter rescued the baby Moses from death. They are still remembered at Passover. During the Second World War there were many other good people who risked their own lives to save Jews, albeit not enough of them and not enough to save very many Jews. But today they are remembered with respect and admiration by many Jews as among the righteous of the nations. In a book entitled simply ?The Righteous?, the Jewish historian Martin Gilbert has written movingly of many of these heroes who would never have thought of themselves as such. Gilbert is clearly not writing as an apologist for Christianity, but he believes that Jews have a moral duty to honour those who risked themselves to help the Jews. ?The righteous? were not all Christians nor were they all motivated by religious belief, although - interestingly and ironically in view of the religious turmoil?s and suspicions of the present day - Christians and Muslims worked together in Albania during the Shoah (and extraordinarily effectively) to protect Jews from arrest and deportation to the death camps. But one of the things that many of the righteous seem to have had in common, as Martin Gilbert brings out, is that they did not believe that they were doing anything extraordinary. Again and again they said after the war that they did only what they believed they had to do. They couldn?t turn their backs on their Jewish neighbours, they couldn?t pretend they didn?t know, they couldn?t exit the scene. But in his conclusion to ?The Righteous?, Gilbert quotes another writer, Tzvetan Todorov, who wrote about how an upsurge in public conscience prevented Bulgarian Jews from being taken away by the Nazis. Todorov wrote that a community is powerless without those individuals who will stand up publicly for good, and who are ready to take the risks that goodness will inevitably entail and so he writes ? ?this is necessary for good to triumph, in a certain place and at a certain time; any break in the chain and their efforts might well have failed. It seems that, once introduced into public life, evil easily perpetuates itself, whereas good is always difficult, rare and fragile. and yet possible?.
As together we now recall the coming of Christ into the world and into our lives in this Christmas eucharist, we remember the essential vulnerability of God who will not abandon us, who will not leave us alone, who will not exit the stage of human sadness and fear. But also we remind ourselves that this world, wounded and wounding as it is, remains the place of God and of his people, the place where good is always difficult, rare and fragile.. and yet possible.