Midnight Comunion – Christmas Eve/Christmas Day
Over the past three weeks I’ve sung “Once in Royal David’s City” at least 10 times. It’s always fun to see if the soloist can stay in tune, so that when we all join in there isn’t an immense change of key. It’s a tough call for a young singer, and my own attempt, aged 10, was not, I think, a success.
10 times for “Once in Royal” means ten times for the words “Christian children all must be/mild obedient, good as he” as well. The whole verse can be heard as an idealised “children should be seen and not heard” picture of early Victorian authority and rigidity. The carol has Jesus lying in Mary’s arms and gazing at her, obeying her through all his “wondrous childhood”. How many times must an exasperated parent have used these words to bring their wayward child into line?
I’m not sure we should see the words completely in that way though. The carol is clear that this was a real birth of a real child. For all of us a birth is frightening, uncertain, joyful, painful, wonderful. All births have elements in common, and all are unique in the way they combine the emotional, relational, physical and spiritual. The elements may be shared, but each one is its own thing. I’m told that the best midwives are those who are able to adapt to events as they unfold rather than following an unbending process.
Jesus shares with us the beginning of human life. In the words of a friend’s poem, it was “like all but like no other”. He was a child like us. Which meant he had “tears and smiles” and was “weak and helpless” until he could help himself, and was dependent on his parents until he could stretch his wings and test his boundaries. The one story of his childhood in the Gospels is of him doing just that, getting left behind on a trip to the big city, and being blithely unaware that he’d caused a crisis. Following this he returns to family life in Nazareth, and we get the clue for the carol: clue for the carol: he went back to Nazareth and was “obedient” to his parents, says Luke.
How might he have been “obedient”? Did he learn from his father about the line of “Royal David” into which he was born? Did he drink in the hopes and desires of a proud nation who found themselves under hostile occupation, longing for freedom? Did he learn from his mother how God overthrows the powerful and raises the humble, scatters the proud and fills the hungry, sending the rich away with nothing? Did he learn from his father the laws of his people and the call of the prophets, raging against injustice and longing for the day of the Lord to come? Did he learn from his mother the sacrifices of her priestly tradition, facing people with their wrongdoing and calling them to turn from their sins?
Did he learn from them how to worship, how to listen to God in the scriptures, so that he could see where his people weren’t getting it right? Did he suspect with them that the religious authorities didn’t always have the right answers? Was it that kind of obedience which called him to speak truth to power, overturn tables, face up to people of rank, do the remarkable thing and touch the unclean, associate with the outcast and the unloved, affirm children when his followers wanted to shoo them away and tell people that an addiction to power and money wasn’t going to satisfy them?
Did Jesus learn from his parents that he would be the promised one who would save his people, save the world? Did he learn from them that it would be his obedience to his heavenly Father which would lead to giving his life up to death, a sword piecing his mother’s soul too? Did he learn from his mother how to ponder these things in his heart, just as she did? Obedience is about listening and learning and acting. His parents taught him well, as he grew to know he was the Christ.
We learn many things in childhood. Some things have to be unlearnt. Many things stay with us gloriously for life, and the Christmas season is a good time to reflect on them. There is a temptation with “Once in Royal” to keep Jesus as a child, locked into a festive snow globe, helplessly gazing at his mother for ever. Christmas celebrates the birth of a child who learnt what it was to be a child of God, and who took that obedience, that radical trust and hope into an adulthood which changed the world, changes the world, changes us.
As we look at a world ever more uncertain, at a city where the young grow up in fear of violence, in a country split into many factions with communication ever more hostile, may we learn the obedience which reconciles, which overturns, which challenges and which loves. May you know that you are a loved child of God this night, because you share birth and flesh and blood with the Word made flesh, whose wounded flesh and shed blood brings life. And may you then be a obedient Christian child, joyfully changing the world in the name of the “God and Lord of All”. Amen