Christmas in the face of uncertainty

21 December 2022

The public mood at Christmas this year has a little in common with that in Great Britain before King George VI’s encouraging 1939 Christmas address. He spoke after the Declaration of War but before the despatch and subsequent rout of the British expeditionary force in France. The future was uncertain, with no known way to survival.

In Australia we do not face the mortal immediate threat but we do share the same uncertainty. The catastrophic floods have demonstrated the effects of climate change. The Ukraine invasion and tension with China have illustrated the dangers of war. COVID continues to remind us how precarious is our public health. More immediately, we face a year of rising prices and interest rates and their threat to housing.

At such a time the cultural associations of Christmas are a source of strength. The gathering of families and friends to eat, drink, talk and play gives expression to the solidarity on which we rely in hard times. The altruism expressed in volunteering and in the Christmas appeals for ill children and other causes anticipates the generosity on which so many people on the margins of society will rely next year. This year the excess and sentimentality that so often mark Christmas have been trimmed down. Even Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol, so often presented as a cuddly story, reveals its sharp elbows in an economy where the wealth of the wealthy was built on the misery of the poor.

'In both of these stories, persons were given priority over systems. Solidarity contended over self-interest and likely defeat was followed by victory.'

The original Christmas story of the birth of Christ, too, recaptures its original seriousness as a presentation of the Gospel in miniature. It speaks of God’s coming into human life, not as an Imperial figure intent on conquest and security, but as a vulnerable baby born in unfavourable circumstances. They include an exhausting walk for a pregnant mother, giving birth in a field, forced flight to Egypt as a refugee to escape a murderous king, and — amidst the joy and promise of birth — omens of future pain. The Gospel then tells the story of a mission that ends in a dehumanising execution followed by a rising to life made available to all human beings.

In both of these stories, the British King addressing his uncertain nation at the beginning of a war which seemed unwinnable in the hope

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Christmas in the face of uncertainty

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