Christmas Poem 2022

Generally, I love Christmas carols and am prepared to park my reservations about the frankly dubious theology in many of them, and sing along with more enthusiasm than talents which is, I understand, exactly how they are meant to be sung.

That doesn’t mean I am averse to picking apart the dodgy theology in between times though!

I have long taken issue with Away in a Manger: a carol doubtless loved and loathed in roughly equal measure depending on whether your general experience of children’s nativity plays gives you a warm fuzzy feeling or makes you cringe.

My own particular issue with it relates specifically to verse two, line two: “but little Lord Jesus no crying he makes”

I witnessed two babies being born this year; one cried at birth, the other didn’t. In the early days, that second baby's survival hung in the balance and he spent a number of weeks in neonatal intensive care. Thankfully he is now a healthy, happy baby … and he cries. While I am prepared to acknowledge the possibility, given the difficult circumstances of his birth, that Jesus was indeed a very poorly baby, I somehow don’t think that’s the point the carol writer was trying to make.

Aside from the very unhelpful implication that babies crying is somehow bad or sinful as opposed to just normal, healthy behaviour; my major issue with this line is it seems to want to mark Jesus out as different from expected human behaviour. Even here, in the season where we celebrate the incarnation, the docetic heresy, the one which denies the humanity of Jesus, rears its head.

I think, though it would of course be explicitly denied, in many subtle ways this ‘heresy’ is still very much present in much of our Christian thinking. While it is the idea that Jesus is “fully God” that perhaps most challenges the rational thinking parts of our brain, I wonder whether in many ways it is the idea that Jesus is “fully human” that we actually find more inherently challenging: if we mark Jesus out from babyhood as different and special, it gives us the excuse we need to shy away from his instruction to “go and do likewise”.

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Small children played a significant part in my Christmas celebrations this year: and it was wonderful! There was lots of noise and mess and laughter. Perhaps inevitably, there was a little bit of crying at times too. It was all part of being fully human in the world.

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All of which is a somewhat probably unnecessarily lengthy introduction to this year’s just-in-time Christmas poem:

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The child cries

Because the child is human

And the child is hungry and wants to be fed

He cries to be nourished for the journey ahead

For the wine, and the fish and the broken bread

And the stars still look down

The child cries

Because the child is human

And the world is a confusing and scary place

He cries to seek the safety of a familiar face

From the depths of darkness, for the promise of grace

And the stars still look down

The child cries

Because the child is human

And the child wants to be noticed, and wants to be known

He cries to belong, to be wanted, to not be alone

For welcome to be offered, for love to be shown

And the stars still look down

And the child cries

Because the child is human

And the child is God.

Merry Christmas!