Peter Jackson is a film director best known for his ground-breaking adaptation of “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, which turned out to be a huge success, saw his popularity soaring and won all eleven Oscar nominations, including the Best Picture and the Best Director. It is a much less known fact that he produced a deeply moving documentary film “They Shall Not Grow Old”, broadcast by the BBC on 11 November 2018, the centenary of the end of the Great War. The production used original footage from the Imperial War Museums’ extensive archive, much of it previously unseen, alongside BBC and IWM interviews with servicemen who fought in the conflict. The original footage was obviously black-and-white and silent, with objects moving in that familiar cartoonish way due to the different speeds of the cameras used at the time. The majority of the footage had been colourised and transformed with modern production techniques to present detail never seen before. He had used lip readers to help dub in what the men were actually saying. The film was deeply moving and brought forward the painful reality of the war by using the original footage. That was one way of telling the story of the Great War. Another one was used in a film released one year later entitled “1917”. Sam Mendes produced it, partially inspired by stories told to Mendes by his paternal grandfather Alfred about his service during World War I. Although mostly fictional, the film also brought forward the painful reality of the war. Different source materials and different ways of telling the same grim story. Is one better than the other?
This Christmas we hear stories about Jesus’ birth. Some of them – like the Christmas Eve gospel reading – seem to provide many details of the circumstances: the political and social context, Mary and Joseph’s challenges and troubles, angels and shepherds… Others, like the one read out at today’s Mass, offer a completely different view: “In the beginning was the Word: and the Word was with God and the Word was God. […] The Word was made flesh, he lived among us, and we saw his glory.” There will be more episodes read at Masses over the next couple of weeks and some of them might sound more or less probable than others. It is easy for our modern mind to dismiss them as fairy tales because of the way the story is told. The language is dated, the form is dated, the references are unclear as we lack a deep knowledge of the Old Testament. The whole story might be heart-warming and sentimental, but it hardly seems to be relevant to our times and the challenges we have to face. Not to mention that having heard it so many times, quite often we don’t even listen to it when we hear it; it’s like white noise while we think about our troubles and what to do about them.
However, the authors of the gospel didn’t tell their version of Jesus’ birth as a story inconsequential to their respective audiences. Each of them had a well-defined purpose for doing so. St Matthew, talking to the Jews, was arguing that Jesus was the continuation and fulfilment of God’s promises made in the past. St Luke stated in the opening of his gospel: “I decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.” (Luke 1:3-4) St John, writing his gospel much later than others, addressed the theological discussions of the early Church who tried to understand the meaning of Jesus’ incarnation. Those who heard those stories first-hand understood them well because they were told in the language and form they recognised. What was a ground-breaking form for them is to us like black-and-white silent footage where objects move in a cartoonishly funny way. Similarly to Peter Jackson and his crew, we must find ways to bring forward the ever-relevant message of the birth of Jesus Christ. The first step is to get what this message is. In order to do so, we have to delve into the meaning of Christmas, to go beyond the superficial.
St Luke’s version, addressed to a non-Jewish audience, mostly unfamiliar with the Old Testament, is a good starting point from our point of view. He described the wider political and social context of the whole affair, as well as the troubles encountered by Mary and Joseph around the time of Jesus’ birth. From the earlier part of his narrative, his audience had known that the child was the Special One, the Son of God. And yet, He was born in circumstances that were far from perfect, far from royal or palatial. The message was clear: our God came to our troubled world sharing the same challenges as everyone else. The same message was echoed a few decades later by St John: “the Word was made flesh, he lived among us.” A different form but the same message. Another aspect of the message conveyed by the evangelists was that our Incarnate Saviour wasn’t a powerful political leader overwhelming His opponents and wiping them out, in the mould of the heroes of the Old Testament or Greek mythological pantheon. Such a mighty figure wouldn’t leave much room for individual, sometimes gradual, time-consuming transformation. The Saviour of the Christian faith, meek and humble, was determined to give everyone a chance to change their hearts, sometimes at their last breath, as we can see in the case of one thug, crucified next to Jesus.
Today we are celebrating the birth of Jesus, the Son of God and our brother, not only as a sentimental, heart-warming event from a very distant past. Today we are reminded that Jesus has come into our lives too, in the political and economic turmoil of our times, as well as into our personal anxieties, troubles and challenges. He’s not going to cut the Gordian Knot of our lives with a swing of his powerful sword. He’s going to accompany, support and aid us in our attempts to untangle it while we journey through life. That’s the meaning of one symbolic name given to Jesus by the prophets and evangelists: Emmanuel – God is with us.
Image by Igor Ovsyannykov from Pixabay
