Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 2020
Austwick, Eldroth, Keasden and online
Of all the things we’ve had to adjust to this year, for many the one which is still the most troubling is the facemask. It’s the practicalities of putting it on, especially when you’re wearing glasses and a hearing aid and a hat as well; it’s forgetting it and having to go back for it or forking out for a replacement one; it’s the blooming nuisance of your glasses steaming up all the time. And there’s the effect it has on the way we see each other.
This is where we realise that I’m talking in an English country parish, for there are many other parts of our diocese where the wearing of masks or veils is a commonplace. But for us it’s new and unsettling. For we’re having to unlearn the idea that people who hide their faces are in some ways sinister, people we project our fears onto. We’re now learning how to read people’s body language in different ways. That veiled woman hobbling towards you on the high street - she's no terrorist in disguise, that’s granny going down to collect her prescription. That hooded man, he’s no hooligan, it’s Bert from two doors down armed with his Craven Herald and pack of Werthers. Now ourselves masked men and veiled women, we’re learning like our Asian and Middle-Eastern neighbours how to use our eyes to express ourselves, how to read people by the movements of their head, neck and hands.
In her book called ‘Veil’, which explores the meanings of that item of facial covering, Rafia Zakaria describes how as a Muslim woman, she “stands in relation to a particular physical object”. [1] Well, now, we all stand in relation to our facemasks. Are we still ‘us’ when we’re wearing them? This is a big question, for in our particular culture - up until Covid-19 struck - we thought that people who wore masks were hiding something; that we couldn’t fully tell who they were with their faces concealed. Their face coverings formed a barrier of communication and understanding between us. They only became fully present and knowable to us when unmasked.
Today I want to suggest to you that the story of Christmas, the way the gospels tell it, is the story of God unmasked. The birth of Jesus was an act of revelation by a God whose face, until that point, had been hidden - in a burning bush, in a cloud of fire, behind a curtain at the heart of the Temple. This is the God who had once told Moses on the mountaintop, ‘I will not let you see my face; for no one shall see my face and live.’ [2] Clothed in mystery beforehand, suddenly through the screams of his mother birthing him, here was God in Jesus absolutely naked before humankind.
When God is masked to us, when we think he’s hiding his face, we project our fears onto him. He is a sinister judge who we fear in anticipation of his violent acts of retribution. And - worst of all, perhaps - if we think God is masked, then he is distant from us. Unknowable. Unloving and unloveable.
But that night in Bethlehem God became unmasked. Naked and immediate. Knowable and loveable. Just as every baby is. And the world began to learn to not think of God as one who hides his face from us, but as one with whom we can commune just as we commune with each other. Fully divine still, yes, but fully human too. Exercising his lungs and rolling his eyes just as every newborn does.
Because Jesus has been born into the world there is no longer any reason for anyone to think of God as a violent ogre, a sinister and brutal judge. For now we can plainly see what God is like by watching Jesus as he grows into a young man devoted to the scriptures, a teacher of reanimating truths which break through like Christmas lights into the world’s weary darkness, a Wonderful Counsellor, a Prince of Peace.
After the year we’ve had we might justifiably say that it feels like God has been hiding his face from us again. Failing to engage the cries of our hearts for healing and wholeness and an end to suffering and isolation. But the unmasking of God in Jesus invites us to see it this way: that God isn’t hiding, but is here alongside us sharing our humanness, as vulnerable as any baby.
Our masked God - the one we create in our fearful imaginings - is a God we expect to take the world by force and rule the world in power. But that’s our projection onto him, who we expect to be like every other human ruler. Instead, our God unmasked in Jesus is here alongside us in our suffering and isolation. Born of displaced parents in transit in a restless political world, his very existence threatened from birth by malignant forces (the Herods of the earth, I mean).
His instinct is to transform our world in love. His kingdom comes gently, through small acts of kindness, through the fellowship of friends, through the unveiling of those we mistakenly thought were enemies to be feared but who can instead become our partners in shaping a new and better world. He is not any distance away at all, but alongside us and always available in any prayerful moment.
So take comfort, next time you find yourself mumbling into a piece of cloth you’d rather you were not wearing. There is light and joy in this good news: that Christmas is God unmasked.
Notes
[1] Rafia Zakaria, Veil (Bloomsbury Academic: Object Lessons), p.5.
[2] Exodus 33.20
Comments