The darker side of Christmas carols

I've been singing a lot of carols lately. A favourite one among my friends is the Coventry carol, about Herod's slaughter of the children of Bethlehem. It's a reminder that carols don't just talk about the joys of Christmas, but also hint at the darker side. Christmas isn't all mistletoe and wine and small children singing "Away in a manger." Numerous carols about the magi (or wise men, or kings if you really must) mention the symbolism of their gifts: gold for a king, incense for a priest, myrrh to show that he would suffer and die.

Another favourite carol among my friends (well, given that the tune is by Sullivan it's not exactly surprising) is "It came upon the midnight clear." The message of the carol shows how the angels' message "Peace on the earth, goodwill to men" has been ignored by a world too busy with its' own selfishness to think about God or others:

"Yet with the woes of sin and strife the world has suffered long,
Beneath the angel strain have rolled two thousand years of wrong.
And man at war with man, hears not the love-song which they bring,
O hush the noise, ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing."

And it's true that the world is in a mess, and ignores the message of Christmas. So much of the time we're too busy giving and receiving Christmas cards and presents (or, this year, worrying about whether we can afford them) to pay much attention to the baby in the manger, or if we do we stop there and forget what that baby went on to do.

If you believed everything that you see on TV over Christmas, you might take issue with my saying that "the world's in a mess." We're bombarded with feelgood, happily-ever-after films and shows. But behind the glitz and the tinsel we all know that things don't always end happily. Many people will find Christmas hard this year after the loss of a family member, others will be lonely, or ill, or homeless. And further from home people are dying of cholera in Zimbabwe, dying of starvation or AIDS in Africa, in fear of war in Afghanistan- the list goes on.

It's hardly surprising that so many people say "If there's a God- a good, loving God, like you say- why does he let all this happen?" And it's not an easy question to answer. I'm not going to try in any depth here, partly because I don't know. I may write about it more later. I think, mostly, it has to do with humankind's free will to choose not to do what God wants, and to mess up our lives and other people's. Without free will there would be no love- love that is compelled, without the option of not loving, isn't really love. If you're interested in the suffering question, read The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis for some interesting ideas. Or ask me for my thoughts. But I don't pretend to have all the answers.

Whatever you think about suffering dilemma, the one thing you can't deny is that if the Christmas message is true, God himself lived and died and shared in our human sufferings.

"He came down to earth from heaven, who is God and Lord of all
And his shelter was a stable, and his cradle was a stall,
With the poor and mean and lowly lived on earth our Saviour holy."

And later in the same carol:

"He was little, weak and helpless, tears and smiles like us he knew.
And he feeleth in our sadness, and he shareth in our gladness."

More than one carol dwells on this wonderful miracle- God, the creator and ruler of all things, becomes a man- more than that, a child, submitting himself to parental authority, going through all the traumas of growing up, of not being understood by his family and friends, the grief of losing loved ones, of living in a country subject to a hated foreign power, hunger and thirst and temptation, and ultimately betrayal by his friend, abandonment and pain and a truly horrific death.

"Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying,
Sealed in a stone cold tomb."*

And I think that's why I'm prepared to accept that I don't, and never will (in this life) fully understand why there's suffering. He went through what we go through. But he did that so that we could have a way out from this messed-up world- a chance to make a new start. So that we could be set free from our own selfishness, free to live our lives to fulfilment. Christmas changed the world. Carols look back to that. But they also look forward. In the run up to Christmas, Christians look forward to Jesus' return when justice will be done and suffering will end;

"When the new heaven and earth shall own the Prince of Peace their king,
And all the world give back the sound which now the angels sing!"

Happy Christmas!


*Strangely enough, that verse from We Three Kings is also a favourite among my friends. Do I sense a theme of them preferring the sadder, depressing bits?!