BISHOP Robert Paterson has released his Christmas message.
How many times have you heard, ‘and there was no room for them in the inn’?
Most of us have a mental picture of seven-year-olds with tea-towels on their heads, one of them shutting a door very firmly on a girl with a pillow under her dressing-gown and a boy whose hand she’s holding sweetly.
Tears are in every eye.
Parents of the innkeeper will know just how relieved they are when the door is shut, just in case their offspring should change the course of history and say, ‘Yes, do come in!’
A good story is worth embellishing, isn’t it?
In fact, the word that most versions of the Bible use for ‘the inn’ is the same word that’s used later in Jesus’s story for the upper room of his last supper.
In other words, by the time Joseph and Mary arrived at Joseph’s relatives in Bethlehem, they found that the spare rooms upstairs in the family home were over-flowing, so they went downstairs and made their bed with the animals on the lower floor
It was a case of ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ or a prequel to ‘Downton Abbey’.
It really is so basic isn’t it?
Such a contrast to everything we’ve become used to that we think it’s normal!
Normal for almost all of us means untold wealth, living ‘upstairs’, but most of the people on our planet live ‘downstairs’.
People ‘downstairs’ need the basics as much as people ‘upstairs’ want the luxuries.
Imagine another nativity play: it’s late on Christmas Eve.
The characters are the same except you’re the innkeeper this time, tea-towel and all. You hear someone knocking, gaze longingly at your glass and the near-empty bowl of peanuts, pause the telly and drag yourself up from the chair. Not more carol singers who can’t sing!
You see a scruffily dressed couple standing in front of you but, as you open the door, you know that there’s more to this pair than meets the eye.
You know, because you know the story, that this is really about you as much as it is about them.
It’s the situation God puts you in when you take Christmas seriously.
Can you bear to welcome the kind of Saviour who doesn’t give a fig for the status symbols and gizmos of life ‘upstairs’, the God who takes us as we are, the same as the poorest person ‘downstairs’, stripped down of all the stuff?
The message of Christmas is so believably simple: that if you can welcome Christ in all the simplicity of his coming among us, you’ll find peace and hope and you’ll begin to change the world.
Peace and joy at Christmas.
