CHRISTMAS

CHRISTMAS

I showed my visitor ticket to the Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town at the barrier. When it was returned it was stamped in bold red letters: REDEEMED.  One day I will show my permanent resident ticket at another barrier and I hope it will be similarly stamped.  I have been thinking of religious language straying into, and finding a home in, normal converse and this is an example. Redeemed?

Christmas is like the rings of Saturn.  On its periphery there is the shopping and the tinsel.  Moving inwards, on the next ring there are the staff parties and the pantomimes.  Moving further in there are the family get-togethers and the sharing of presents.  And deeper in are the Christmas themes – enjoying Handel’s Messiah or King’s College carols. And finally there is the planet itself: here, an image of Christmas, the birth of the Redeemer.  A small percentage of humanity stop in homage at that manger in a small provincial town a long while ago.

They know that something extraordinary happened. The four and a half billion years of the universe had been leading up to this moment.  The beautiful reality of life had grown and developed and was seen in many species of animal and plant.  Even the mountains and hills, the sea and sky, heat and cold – all were a celebration, a symphony, of this experience we call life.  Then came the time when life gave birth to choice and that is when things started to go wrong.

Good choices were made but so were bad ones and the latter clogged the ways of the former. The peak of life, the human person, was stuck in the swamp of their own choices.  Their advance, their development, stalled and there seemed no remedy.  But, at the same time, the human person was aware of their longing to break the bonds that held them, while being equally aware it was beyond their power to do so. 

There had to be a way forward.  It was written in their bones: life had to achieve its goal.  But it needed the author of life to intervene.  He was divine but he chose to become human to lift his brothers and sisters out of the swamp.  He was born in that manger and grew to contest those bonds.  It was a battle and he seemed to lose it for he too was buried in the swamp.  He shared everything of human life, even its end. But there was one thing different.  He wasn’t just a human; he was a divine human.  That made all the difference.  The swamp could not hold him; he escaped its grip and in doing so he opened the way for life to resume the task of advancing. And this time there would be no limit.  This time the divine human showed the way to move beyond the limits and enter a world that would satisfy, not just the confused longings of their limited feelings and imagination, but a totally new reality they could not even dream of. They would be ‘redeemed.’

25 December 2018