FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - CHRISTMAS IS A THOROUGHLY REVOLUTIONARY EVENT. IT SHOULD SCARE THE RICH AND THE POWERFUL AND UPLIFT THE GOOD AND THE RIGHTEOUS.

Rant Number 611             4 December 2014

CHRISTMAS & REVOLUTION

The revolution is nigh! Russell Brand? No, Christmas. When God comes down to earth to overthrow the powers that be. To pull down and to build up. To scatter the proud, to put down the mighty from their seat, and to exalt the humble and the meek. To fill the hungry with good things and to send the rich empty away. So, Che Guevara is back. This time not waving the hammer and sickle, but the Cross!

Empty churchy rhetoric? No – plain Christmas theology. But…how so?

Christmas is the feast of the Incarnation, the doctrine of the God-Man. The becoming flesh of the divine Logos, the Word, in Jesus Christ. That means that the radical separation between world and God no longer obtains. Sacred and profane are bound together. Hence, because the Divine is essentially united, involved in humanity, religion and politics become one. And Christmas, the annual feast of Christ’s birth, is also a revolutionary social event. QED.

Crude? A bit. However, the idea that the Incarnation of Christ may be the basis for radical action is not new. It was an inspiration for the Anglo-Catholic movement within Anglicanism. It motivated many public school-educated young priests to quit their comfortable homes and livings to work in the urban slums of the Victorian era. Political militancy also could come into it. I recall Bishop Trevor Huddleston, a foe of South-African apartheid, saying that because of the Incarnation he felt called to fight any system of segregation and discrimination based on race. Again, the thesis is that Christmas means being subversive of the established order.

Heart-warming, uncontroversial examples. Few would object. However, a tough-minded Christian might argue that there are other ways in which Christianity can be radically critical of a society. What about a culture that condones and promotes abortion, for instance? The killing of the unborn? Or unsavoury practices like usury, adultery, promiscuity, immodesty, pornography, gambling and boozing? The Holy One of Nazareth comes to liberate humanity from those, also. From sin in all its ugly forms. Progressive-minded people who happily cheer when Christians embrace popular causes, would draw back in horror, yell ‘Reactionaries! Obscurantists! Medievalists!’ in response. Yet the Incarnation entails uncompromising, holistic opposition to evil in its entirety, not just to sins disapproved by the likes of Nick Clegg and David Cameron.

What lies behind the current hoo-ha over traditional school nativity plays? Some schools want to ban them outright. Others wish to water them down or rather pervert them by ‘modernising it’. No more Joseph, Mary, the Holy Babe, the crib, angels, shepherds and animals but, I read, ‘aliens, punk fairies, Elvis, footballers, and drunken spacemen’. Verily, a mirror image of the ‘culture’ of abominable trash the degenerate media are obsessively pushing on the long-suffering people of Britain.

Could it be though that the powers that be fear the potential revolutionary message of Christmas? Sounds implausible. Who would feel menaced by a baby in a manger? But Christianity has always excited the hostility, the mad hatred of the wicked, in many forms and ways. How many innocent Christians have been murdered in the Middle East? And it is not just the vociferous ‘new atheists’, chaps like ‘Deluded Dawkins’, who are afraid of the little child of Bethlehem. The not-so-occult forces out to destroy faith, spirituality and goodness are incessantly at work.

Yes, the Incarnation. Christ continues to operate in the world actively through the Church. Because the Church is, as it were, the visible extension of the Logos made flesh. But what when the Church, this sacred society, loses her compass? What when the Church falls prey to the idols of secularism? I fear a church like that has turned apostate from herself. She has become estranged from her very nature and purpose. (A guy on a TV discussion I was on asserted that secularism is genuinely Islamic, that it does not mix religions and politics: not a view most Muslims share.) Today, such is the case, alas, of the Church of England. But don’t despair. God is not mocked. He will repay.

Unless the Christmas proclamation sounds like a gun going off, it is not Christmas at all, wrote G.K. Chesterton. Which conjures up provocative, extremist thoughts. The holy child in the manger…Might he perhaps hold a gun? A Kalashnikov? Ready to shoot at the wicked? Aargh! That’s going too far!

Fantasies about a violent child Jesus – striking down those who have crossed him - appear in apocryphal gospels but they have no place in mainline church teaching. Which poses a problem: how will the Christmas revolution operate? The rich will not forsake their ill-gotten gains and go away willingly. The filthy will not renounce their filth just by being told to do it. Where does violence come in, if at all?

Significantly, the first nativity play was staged by that wonderful figure, St Francis of Assisi – my patron saint! St Francis, also the type of ideal ‘new man’ advocated by Toni Negri’s violent tract, ‘Empire’. Maybe someone should tell Russell Brand. He might turn Franciscan and give away his millions to the poor…

The Franciscan movement under St Francis of course was never violent but after the Saint’s death some offshoots preached a different message. Fra Dolcino, for example. The violent hero of a revolutionary play I wrote in my youth.

Shades of things to come?

Revd Frank Julian Gelli


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