Christmas Every Week: If Jesus Had Never Been Born
...Then let us keep Christmas, the birth of the Boy
Who floodlights our darkness with infinite joy...
Arnold Kellett suggests that if Jesus had not been born we still would have brightened the dark season by feasting. But Christmas is about so very much more than turkey, puddings and pies.
If Jesus had never been born,
There'd still be a Christmas by some other name:
We'd brighten mid-winter, and feast, just the same,
With corpulent turkey, and puddings and pies
And all the brave glitter that art can devise;
With satisfied stomach and contented mind
We'd purr with the pleasures of pagan mankind;
With greetings and gifts round the evergreen tree,
Like the jolly old Romans did, ages BC.
But we'd have no bright carols, no pealing of bells,
No tidings that Christ now in Bethlehem dwells,
No babe in the manger, no ox in the stall,
No angels, no shepherds, no good will to all;
No Mary, no Joseph, no Wise Men who came
To worship a King of unparalleled fame;
No Gospel to cheer us, no news to refresh,
No glad proclamation of God become flesh.
Then let us keep Christmas, the birth of the Boy
Who floodlights our darkness with infinite joy,
For God is now with us, to seek and to save,
To die for our sins and to rise from the grave,
To help us, to heal us, to bring us to bliss...
Yet, poorer than pagans, if, blind to all this,
We grope through our winter, depressed and forlorn ..
Just as if Jesus had never been born.
