Media Releases

2011

Tuesday 20 December 11
A Christmas Message from Bishop Bill Wright as he spends his first Christmas in the Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle

"Christmas! The word is loaded with associations: home, family, children, childhood, comfort, giving, plenty, relaxing, holidays, good times. For this very reason, Christmas time affects people in very different ways. In a pleasant home, surrounded by family and enjoying the kids' wonder and excitement, Christmas is a delight. But it is a hard time for those who lack these things, a time that raises acutely the pains of separation, loss, deprivation. In many people's lives, too, Christmas is a mixed experience: we enjoy what we have of it, while saddened by the absence of one child or by an inability to really provide for the celebration as we'd wish. Christmas often brings mixed feelings.

The extraordinary thing, of course, is that the first Christmas was just the same. If we focus on the crib, we see the blessed little family of Jesus in tranquillity and joy, rapt in the beauty of the new child that has been born, and joined by the local shepherds in wonder at this gift of God to the world. Stepping back, though, we see a different story. Here is a family uprooted from home and comfort by the harsh necessity of obedience to the arbitrary authority of a distant emperor, their child being born in squalor, really, because they have had no sympathy from the townspeople, and their future threatened, as they shall soon learn, by the jealous cruelty of their own king. If there is beauty and dignity in that stable, it is that of simple, good people bearing up under great adversity. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.

For the believer, the whole story of Christ is foreshadowed in his birth. In simple summary, the one who is born in a stable because he has found no lodging in the city of David, is the one who will die outside the walls of Jerusalem, having been rejected by his own, and God's, people. The one whose birth reveals God's power to give life and blessing even in the midst of human poverty, perversity and malice, is the one whose rising to new life will also overcome the worst the world can do to him.

The one who shares our weakness and vulnerability as a babe, is the one who will take upon himself all the faults and sufferings of humankind. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Or as the Fathers liked to remark, God became human that we might become divine.

Happy Christmas to you, then.

If your Christmas celebration is full of joy, let it be a celebration of the blessed coming of the Prince of Peace, the Saviour.

If your Christmas is tinged, or more than tinged, by sadness, then let it be an occasion to recall how Christ has dignified such sufferings by sharing them, how he has made our sorrows his own, how he has taught that the struggles of this life are part and parcel of being human but they are not the last word. In good times or in bad, God is with us. Through good times or bad, but in either case right through to the finish, he is with us. Since that first Christmas."


Bishop Bill Wright
Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle
20 December 2011

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