The most commonplace symbol of Christmas in homes and gardens, Christmas trees, and city buildings, is light. The symbol is in fact so commonplace that its real significance may escape us. “What has come into being in him was life,” St John writes in the first chapter of his gospel, “life that was the light of men; and light shines in darkness…” (1: 4-5).

Light always shines in darkness, but not always to illuminate. Two headlights on high beam rushing at you on a narrow road, for instance, can be frightening. A single bulb alight in a room of torture is no witness to life. The light of Christmas, on the other hand, shines hospitably. It says here is life lit with divine radiance; here darkness is truly dispelled.

“Dispelled”, of course, does not mean banished.  “Darkness could not overpower [the light],” St John continued. The light, in other words, is light overcoming in darkness.

The lights of every Christmas are always surrounded by different kinds of darkness, old and new, personal and global -- loves betrayed, resentments resisting forgiveness, innocence abused, and today a world haunted by threats of terror. Christmas lights may seem at times just a flickering distraction from what is more enduring and permanent, that life is darkness, wherever you look.

It’s not a thought to be fled from. Daniel, we should recall, was victorious in the lions’ den; and “light shines in darkness.”

The light of Bethlehem is the source from which Christian life catches flame, and saints and mystics continue to be transformed by its radiance. But from the light raging fires have also erupted. Religious passion has never been a neutral flame. Its heat has destroyed and killed as much as it has transformed.

We witness again today the ruthlessness that passion can generate. It’s something the Pope has drawn the world’s attention to. Christianity, of course, has no clean hands in the matter, but all religions must condemn violence in the name of God as contrary to the nature of God.

The light of Bethlehem is a light of understanding. What is offered (Marx notwithstanding) is both a fulcrum to change the world, and a place from which to understand it.  The event itself is that place – its form, its details, and its implications.

First of all, the form of God displayed at Bethlehem is defencelessness. Whenever a child is born, friends and family gather round and marvel at it, at how perfectly formed fingers and toes are, how powerful and healthy the lungs sound, and so on. No one focusses as much on defencelessness, because the child is surrounded by love.
But the status of every infant is defencelessness and vulnerability. It can do nothing for itself; it is at the mercy of all those people smiling down and saying, what a child this is.

The coming of the Lord in this form remains a challenge to all understandings of God – of religion – in terms of power. Jesus had reason on more than one occasion to remind his apostles and followers of this. “You see,” he once said of the powers of his day, “how they lord it over others and make their authority felt. It is not to be so among you.”

But, of course, it has been so. There’s no need to detail some of the excesses of the Renaissance Popes. In Latin America, bishops were driven around with outriders. They, too, like presidents and prime ministers, were men of power. And the parish priest - or lay leader - who says, unreasonably, “Is so because I say so,” is relatively in the same boat. The defencelessness of the Christ-child hides the magnitude of his challenge.

The form of God’s coming sheds light on many things of pressing importance today, for example, people’s hunger for spirituality. Everyone has commented or has heard comments on this at some time or other: there’s a hunger today for the spiritual in the “darkness” of modern life. 

But spirituality does not mean the same thing to everyone. Indeed, the term functions today more like a receptacle for the variety of understandings, not to say, ideologies people put into it.

Is there a spirituality disclosed at Bethlehem? There is, and its basic affirmation is that the ordinary is sacred, that the passion of God is clothed in the prosaic. This is why the realities of the story include straw, a feeding trough, domestic animals, and shepherds.

However one reads this, one can’t read into it the spiritual as the special or the refined, or as bypassing the life in which we all put on our underclothes one leg at a time.

It seems an obvious lesson, but it’s one that’s quite difficult to learn. Artists from Dostoyevski to Naipaul have told us that human beings prefer excitement. They prefer miracle. This is why the Lord more often than not remains unrecognised. We come to life with the out-of-the-ordinary. The ordinary leaves us flat.

Another symbol of light in Bethlehem is, of course, the star. There’s hardly a night where all that one sees is one star.  But such was the case that night. Bethlehem is really a blend of the prosaic and the poetic. The star is a guiding light. 

Kings are led by it to the Christ-child; but the star is also everyone’s guide for life. It accompanies us whither we have to go. It does not tell us the future, what challenges we will face, joys or sorrows we will experience, or hazards we should avoid.

What it tells us is that we never journey alone, that Emmanuel is not only God-with-us, but God-with-each-of-us, in all the twists and turns of our lives.

Both Christmas and Easter begin in darkness and end with proclamations of light.

The services on Christmas Eve and Holy Saturday celebrate Jesus, King and Risen Lord, light in our darkness, and light of the world. The darkness of the Lent climaxes in rivers of light. Advent too is one long yearning in the darkness (of the winter solstice) for the coming of the light.

Christmas does not banish darkness, as I said earlier. It assures us that the light can never be overpowered. It invites us to move forward in hope in every season into a future we can neither predict nor control, but one where the God who has entered our history and shared our condition, walks with us still.