THE BIGGER STORY

One of my daughter's friends works for a supermarket as a cookery consultant and spends her summer writing and testing recipes for the next Christmas, so that the ingredients will be ready for wheeling out in December. The toy manufacturers are even further ahead, and we all know that you can buy Christmas cards in August. Christmas was long ago seen as an ideal opportunity for making money, and the temptation is to moan about the commercialisation of it all. You even hear people saying ‘I'll be glad when it's all over!’ I say, Oh stop moaning! Show me a religious festival anywhere in the world which isn't used as a chance to make money, and why not, as long as we don't lose the heart of it?

And the heart is...? The heart of Christmas is the true story of an ordinary couple without any money or important family behind them. It's a story about a birth in difficult circumstances giving them a precious but very at-risk new baby. They get plunged into a dangerous crisis, the child's life is threatened and they become refugees in another country. But they survive through all the problems and this very special child grows and matures to become a man who inspires billions of people. It's an ancient story and a very modern story at the same time. But you may have noticed that in the Christmas cards and the celebrations there is lots about the baby in the manger, and the Wise Men who brought gifts, and hardly anything about the danger surrounding that child from the outset. Not the danger of insanitary conditions for a birth and the lack of proper medical care, but the determination of a government to eliminate all opposition, all possible seeds of dissent. That's very ancient and very modern too. Think Burma, China and elsewhere.

‘Christmas is for the children’, people say. So it is, for children of all ages, and especially for the vulnerable, those who are threatened by poverty or persecution, the at-risk child asylum-seekers and those exploited by people-traffickers. Why them? Because the bigger story behind the Christmas story is of a God who cares for everyone, not just for the comfortable and well-off people that we would all like to be. He cared enough to risk coming to us in the human life of Jesus. That's the real story.

Christopher Lamb