‘What kind of message are you guys trying to send with that brutal Christmas card?’ asked my friend in the bar last night. He’s referring to the above card, an image created by ‘Castro’ for the Christmas special edition of the Spectator (which you can download here) to run alongside Paul Wood’s stunning diary from Lebanon. It is a discomforting image, but the Christmas story is supposed to be discomforting. Over the years, it has been sentimentalised into a story of comfort, joy and Mariah Carey. But the original Bible story is pretty brutal.
The image in our 2014 card (in more detail below) shows Mary, Joseph and the newborn baby. But instead of a stable, they’re in an era of tower blocks destroyed by war. Bleak, perhaps, but to me it sums up the side of the Christmas story that no one talks about nowadays. The story of the Nativity is about light, arriving in darkness – and there was plenty of the latter. The Saviour was born into abject poverty, in a country under occupation. A place where mass murder was used as a tool of keeping order; the Bible tells us that Jesus narrowly avoided an infanticide.
Too many Christmas cards portray the stable of the Nativity as a warm, cosy place with plenty of hay, cute little sheep, etc. But whole point of St Luke’s story is that Jesus was born in a dump. The contrast between His greatness and His wretched circumstances is a constant theme in the Bible: the King of Kings, born to homeless parents. The story of the Nativity about this contrast. And when Mary Wakefield and I saw the Castro illustration for the magazine, we thought it portrayed this contrast beautifully – so we had it made into our Christmas card.
This cute cosy story of the Nativity that we hear tell to children is not quite true story of Christmas. The modern-day equivalent of the stable would be some bombed-out dump with murderous Isis maniacs on the rampage. This is what Castro depicted in his magazine image.
There will be people from Nigeria to Iraq who take their life into their hands by going to midnight mass. And there are others, Christian refugees, who are right now with their families in circumstances every bit as brutal as those portrayed in the card. This Christmas, we should remember them too.
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