In the season of Advent, the Rev Muriel Pearson reflects on the message of the birth of the Prince of Peace.

‘CHRISTMAS is cancelled in Bethlehem’. The headline from The Herald newspaper in December 2000 awakened my determination that when we celebrated Advent and Christmas in my parish in Scotland it should not be divorced from life in current-day Bethlehem. Writing now, with no way of knowing how this war ends or where it might lead, I wonder what that means?

Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus begins with the political context. Augustus was Caesar and Quirinius was governor of Syria, territory which includes today’s Israel and Palestine. Then as now, ordinary people found their lives disrupted and worse. A heavily pregnant Mary was forced to make the journey with Joseph her husband to Bethlehem, David’s town. We think of images from around the world of weary women and frightened children and sad and humiliated men all on the move because of geo-political forces outwith their control. Into this world Jesus was born.

Bethlehem was overcrowded when Mary and Joseph got there, and unlike our classical manger scenes, I don’t think they would have been alone with the ox and ass. During the current war, strangers (Palestinian and Israeli) have opened their homes to shelter families. In Gaza, 30 or 40 crowded in to one house is not unusual. Mary would have given birth with perhaps a sheet for privacy, but the midwives would have been there for her, as medical personnel in Gaza have given their all with little equipment to give what comfort they can. When her son was born, Mary swaddled him and laid him in the hay. You use what you have in a crisis.

News is at a premium in times of war. Mobile phone charges are nursed, ingenious methods of recharging found. Never before has it been possible to be present with people in their terror as rockets rain down. Luke has the news of a saviour’s birth go to those who would ordinarily have been last to hear news: shepherds out on the hills with their sheep. That hillside is no longer bare and open to the skies. Bethlehem is now encircled by illegal settlements, the west bank countryside scored through by Israeli-only roads, Palestinians trapped in increasingly smaller enclaves. Yet the same stars shine overhead and the angel song, though muted, still comes to those on the edge of things:

‘Don’t be afraid! I am here with good news for you, which will bring great joy to all the people.’ Luke 2:10

The shepherds’ fear was overwhelming, yet they had enough faith that when the angels had left, they went down into Bethlehem and found Mary and Joseph and the baby, just as the angel had said.

In times of polarisation and brutality and ecological and humanitarian disaster, when it seems humanity itself is under threat; superficial, tinsel covered ‘good news’ does not ring true.

Childbirth is hard: painful, sweaty, dangerous without medical resources. Blood, sweat and tears birthed the Prince of Peace. Peace in our time, God’s dream, will be equally painful. It involves justice for all, recognition for all, a place for all. Just as it took imagination to see in the tiny newborn wrapped in cloths and lying in the hay a Saviour, so we need all our imagination to welcome the One named Jesus – Yeshua-Deliverer, Rescuer, in our lives and in our world now.

Come, Prince of Peace God-with-us, Emmanuel Into the mess and misery Into the war and worry Into the fear and forsakenness Come, be born again today.

Amen

The Rev Muriel Pearson, along with her colleague the Rev Dr Stewart Gillan, came back to Scotland from Israel-Palestine a week after October 7 2023. This article was written before the outcomes of the war in Gaza unfolded, and in awareness of the fears on all sides of escalation, and the yearning for an end to Occupation and a hopeful future for all between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea.