** FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 660 16 December 15 CHRISTMAS REVOLUTION

THE REVOLUTIONARY, TRUE MEANING OF CHRISTMAS. SHOCKING? GOOD! CHRISTMAS IS NOT FOR WIMPS.
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Christianity is ‘an explosion’ wrote G.K. Chesterton. Unless the Gospel sounds like ‘a gun going off it has not been uttered at all’.
So indeed is Christmas. A gun going off. I dare to utter that the coming of Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour and the Judge is like that. A mighty explosion. A supernatural shock, a tremendous event that shatters, pulls down and destroys all the cosy certainties, all the bourgeois simulacra. So, be not reassured. The pretty, rosy child in the cradle, the cute little babe ‘Away in a Manger’… Sweet, isn’t he? Bollocks! Think rather of a sturdy stripling, a precocious guerrilla, a revolutionary infant who wields a Kalashnikov and…geddit?
In some non-canonical gospels and in the Qur’an you find the baby Jesus speaking from the cradle, proclaiming his awesome truth. I saw an Iranian film in which the babe’s thundering voice overwhelms the wicked bystanders who had dared question his mother’s virginity and his status. It enrages them. They gnash their teeth, stop their ears and rush at the cradle to kill the child, before a bolt of lightning strikes them dead. Frightening? Sure! Christmas, despite your illusions, is not for wimps.
Chesterton’s apologetics may appear menacing. Christian firebrands like him are unfashionable, even odious to a secular culture. Fancy seeking to defend a straight absurdity, like the Incarnation. God made man! A logical contradiction. Like a round square. The infinite imprisoned in the finite. The eternal shrinking into the temporal. The omnipotent humbled into powerlessness…and so on. Hopeless, eh? What is to be done then? Dump celebrating this mad belief? Go shopping, have a lot of food and booze and sex and…that’s that. A hedonist’s heaven. What else?
Alain Badiou offers a way out. Wot?! Badiou, the trendy, abstruse French left-wing guru? Yes, him! In Being and Event he preaches a revolution. A forceful, radical action that detonates like a bomb into the ordinary scheme of things, smashes it into smithereens and brings on a future totally unlike the past. If you grasped the real meaning of this extraordinary event you will glue yourself to it, like a limpet. Hug it, make it your own and, above all, stick to it, stay faithful to the Event, the revolution, the explosion of the new era – Christmas - whatever the ups and downs of historical contingency.
Badiou of course does not mention the Incarnation. But he speaks of St Paul. His encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus. Again, the key idea is that in yoking himself to the Jesus he had hitherto persecuted the Apostle embraced and made his own that extraordinary Event. Accepting Christ as his Lord was St Paul’s ‘Islam’, so to speak, his submission, but also his unique paradigm. And Paul’s holy activism galvanised the nascent Christian Church and propelled it on the way to creating a new type of revolutionary man.
Despite this provocative Pauline point, Badiou’s favourite Event is the 1789 French revolution. Predictable, because, as a thinker of the Left, Badiou’s perspective is limited and essentially flat, horizontal. The pseudo-achievements of the Jacobins he admires were confined to a merely temporal and ethnocentric European sphere. (The vaunted Rights of Man lack genuine universality – to many cultures like India and China they remain bizarre, incomprehensible.) Instead, the Christian revolution is both horizontal and vertical. That is, it is anchored in transcendence. In God. In the reality of the universal. Such is the subversive truth of Christmas.
Fidelity to the Event, to the revolution – Christmas - for Badiou must result in commitment to four domains: science, love, art and politics. Few people excel in all four but love and politics are the priest’s own vocations. Love, the Agape of the New Testament, overarches and rules all. A love not just carnal but the cosmic force ‘that moves the sun and the other stars’, as Dante puts it at the end of the Paradiso. Politics, true politics, must entail ruthless jihad on the crumbling world of liberal-democratic, capitalist-parliamentarism. On the idol of the free market. On the simulacrum of globalisation. On the malignant, organised and stubborn refusal to recognise the One True God as the only source of right, goodness and truth for humanity.
Fidelity to the Christmas-even must also entail a reckoning with fake, degenerate forms of pseudo-Christianity, betrayals of Christmas, like the Church of England. Actually, a rotten, decomposing affair. An anti-church. Despite its faddy-daddy, benign façade of silly, swinging vicars, old ladies and jumble sales, the current Anglican Establishment is harmful. First, it props up the anti-Christian regime that holds sway over this ancient Christian land. 26 bishops sitting in the House of Lords, those mitred donkeys, lend a spurious veneer of credibility to basically pagan legislation. Second, it confuses good people into believing that parliament still acknowledges Christ. And third, it commits sacrilege by hindering worshippers from realising what genuine Christianity really is.
If God, the Divine really appeared on earth what would he look like, Chesterton asked? He would seem ‘extreme and violent’, he answered. A revolutionary. A being who sometimes acted ‘like an angry God’.
No the sorts of platitudes you’d expect from an Anglican vicar, eh? But pretty close to the real meaning of Christmas.
Merry Christmas from Father Frank. A merry revolution to you all!
Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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