Whether you celebrate it religiously or socially, it’s hard to be distant from loved ones at Christmas. Emotional reunions at airports as people return home with the lifting of travel restrictions have been some of the most beautiful images of this year. Distance may be practical – caused by quarantine, closed borders, finances, work or inability to travel.
But there’s another form of distance that many experience at these times of cultural importance. The kind of distance you can feel when sitting around the dinner table with your family or the painful chasm of being not invited at all. It’s the distance of judgment, shame and rejection based on religious, cultural or social norms that one has not conformed to.
A particular message is conveyed in every scriptural story of Jesus as he grows up and then completes his ministry. He becomes a refugee. Touches the “unclean” despite the religious law demanding otherwise; the five-times divorced foreign woman he meets at the well becomes a revered figure of Christian faith and a hated heretic Samaritan is the central heroic figure in the parable Jesus tells to explain what it really means to “love your neighbour as yourself”.
The heretic is the hero. The unclean are equals. The divorced, the refugee, foreigner and the migrant, the despised, the rejected, the “sinners”, the culturally and the religiously unacceptable are all invited into his story and to eat at his table.
This is the essence of the Christmas narrative, the “good news” that the angels sang about to the working class shepherds on the hill – everyone you thought was excluded is embraced. Everyone you thought was distant is brought near. Everyone you hoped would be uninvited is welcome. All of those your religious upbringing, cultural prejudice or social expectations make you feel uncomfortable about should be welcome at your table. Figuratively in society, and physically in your lives and communities.
The substance of the Christmas narrative could have and should have set a value system for western societies based on Christian tradition. Instead, Jesus’s radical example became fresh dogma for exclusion, control and shame. His message as recorded in Christian scripture targeted two groups – the religious people and their leaders who were doing the excluding and the people who were being excluded. His message was clear to the religious: “You are wrong. They’re all in, all welcome”; to the rejected: “You don’t need to feel the shame they’re subjecting you to.”
Everyone you thought was excluded is embraced.
And not embraced as lesser people who should show gratitude that the faithful, obedient or pure should deign to show them entrance and worth – but equal, elevated and venerated. All people, all welcome, with all shame and prejudice dissipated and irrelevant.
When we turn a value system into rigid religious or cultural dogma it becomes hard to translate it into practice in modern society. That’s why we see church leaders preaching about the good news of Christmas at the same time as demanding a Religious Discrimination Act that explicitly allows them to exclude those in our society they believe should not be embraced, or why we see Christians talking about radical selfless love also believing that their way of life is threatened by Muslim immigration, or opposing the Black Lives Matter campaign.
The narrative of Jesus’s birth paints a picture of an alternative future where no one need be uninvited to Christmas lunch or feel distant although they eat the same meal.
All the excluded are embraced. Every person equal and welcomed into all of society.
At a time when it was a public disgrace, the mother of God was an unwed pregnant woman. May your Christmas table, your New Years’ resolutions and our society regardless of culture or religion reflect this good news that angels sang about. As Mare of Easttown’s Deacon Mark said, “It is not our job to decide who is deserving, our job is only to love.”
• Brad Chilcott is founder of Welcoming Australia
