Witnesses

One of the curious things about the days which follow Christmas Day is that we commemorate a series of martyrs: St Stephen is the first martyr, a deacon whose task was to serve the needs of the poor. Then there is St John the Evangelist, who although he is not a martyr in the traditional sense, writes in his Gospel and Letters about the importance of bearing witness, of faithful testimony. The Greek word μαρτυρ literally means ‘witness’: at the end of the Fourth Gospel, we read: ‘this is the disciple who is bearing witness to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true’. The next day we remember the Holy Innocents, the children slaughtered by King Herod in the story recorded by Matthew. The next day, Thomas Becket, put to death by another murderous king, who despatched his henchman to Canterbury to do his dirty-work for him.

Of course, such a curious display of martyrs whose violent deaths bear witness to the miracle of the incarnation confronts us with a choice. We can either take refuge in a rather sentimental view of Christmas - and simply sing a brief rendition of Good King Wenceslas who ‘last looked out on the Feast of Stephen’, shivering at the prospect of all that snow, as page and monarch trudge ‘through the rude wind’s wild lament and the bitter weather’. Alternatively, we may reflect for a moment on the character of this birth which we have just celebrated.

Christmas celebrates the coming of a child who will, as the Magnificat, the Song of Mary, proclaims: ‘cast down the mighty from their throne and lift up the lowly’.  He will fill the hungry with good things and the rich he will send empty away. It is no accident that the principal focus of Stephen’s vocation is to care for the poor. And it comes as something of a shock to discover that the Christian gospel does not offer us the prospect of ‘levelling up’. The social inclusion envisaged is much more demanding. The world is turned upside down.

This morning, we have heard the news of the death another martyr. Desmond Tutu, who eventually became the Archbishop of Cape Town, was an ardent supporter of human rights, who became a powerful voice against apartheid in South Africa. At a time when people were often critical of clergy who commented on political issues, Tutu left his listeners in no doubt that his opposition to apartheid was shaped and formed not just by his own experience of discrimination, but by the theological insight that is given to us in the incarnation: in the words of St Athanasius, ‘What Christ assumed, he redeemed’. In other words, in the incarnation, the Word made flesh, God becomes human and so the incarnation affirms the dignity of begin human. It is not the colour of our skin, or our gender, or sexuality, which is important, but our humanity – and Tutu bore witness to the beauty and dignity and indeed, the joy, of being human.

But more than that…. When like Stephen, we gaze into heaven and we learn what God is like, we discover that this gospel is demanding. This gospel requires us to reimagine the way we relate to one another, to throw under the spotlight the radical inequalities which exist in our society, and to challenge us to reflect on the ways in which we too readily collude with the rich and the powerful and then influential.

In the incarnation, we behold the beauty of the Lord. We see the face of God, and yet if we are to bear witness to what we have seen and heard, the martyrs teach us that it will demand of us… everything.