The Bishop of Lichfield’s Christmas Message – The Bethlehem Nativity Play

The Christmas card from the Archbishop of Canterbury this year is a photo of a little boy and a little girl, dressed as Mary and Joseph for a nativity play and holding hands. That normally makes for a cheerful card, but these two are Palestinian children from a primary school in Bethlehem and their solemn expression is difficult to read. Is it foreboding or sullenness, shyness or fear?

The Israeli travel industry is doing its best to attract tourists/pilgrims back to the ‘Holy Land’ but there is not much mention of Bethlehem these days. When I visited the biblical sites, the trip to Bethlehem was cancelled at short notice because of the violence. Today the great dividing fence and the numerous checkpoints would not be conducive to a good holiday, though the locals have to put up with it permanently. Even a nativity play can’t have its usual cheering effect. My abiding memory of the country is of almost palpable hate between the communities – and no wonder: each has suffered so much violence and each mourns for so many innocent victims.
But that is just the point. When we ask, “Where is God in all this suffering?” the answer lies in the nativity play. When God decided to intervene in our/his world, he didn’t go first to the United Nations/Caesar or even to the local faction leaders. He came to Bethlehem, where oppressed people like Joseph were forced to do what foreign soldiers decreed and where pregnant women were hassled. No doubt the hate and bitterness were fully expressed over drinks in the inn all those years ago. But round the back, in the stables, unnoticed by all the principle players, God was doing a miracle that would do more to defeat hate through love than anything else in the whole of human history.

Looking at the unsettling faces of those two Palestinian children on the Christmas card I couldn’t help wondering what it is that turns a child into a terrorist. It must surely be a sense of outrage at terrible injustices done repeatedly to one’s family and friends, together with a blindness to the terrible wrongs done by one’s own community. Only love can lance that poisonous kind of hate. To change enemies into friends when generations have been feuding seems impossible to us; and yet the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the end of Apartheid and the growing peace in Northern Ireland encourage us to believe that love can still defeat hate.

The key to world peace lies again in Bethlehem and the Middle East. The problems there are just as intractable as they were in South Africa or Northern Ireland. And we have our own individual and family quarrels. Christmas often points up our private tragedies, the intense loneliness of consumer society, and the petty hatreds we find difficult to get rid of. The barriers and checkpoints are there in our own lives too when we come to think about it. Whatever our situation, we can still pray for the Prince of Peace to be born again in our hearts and in our world; and we can pray that one day the children of Bethlehem may smile again at the prospect of taking part in a nativity play. The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.

Jonathan Gledhill
Bishop of Lichfield
December 2007