Jesus, who was born in a cowshed, calls the Church to challenge the structures of society and not to stand apart in some pure, sacred space, says the Archbishop of Wales in his Christmas message.
Dr Barry Morgan warns the initial reaction of St Paul’s Cathedral to the Occupy protesters by closing its doors gave an unfortunate impression that God needed to be shielded from the outside world.
But it changed its policy because that was an idea shattered by Jesus who taught that compassion was more important than holiness and that we should try to overturn the injustice, poverty and oppression we see around us.
Christmas message – the Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan
All of us here know about the protest outside St Paul’s Cathedral and the Occupy protestors in many other parts of Britain, including the one until recently in Cardiff outside the Unite offices. They are protesting, among other things, about economic injustice and the effect it has on the poorest members of our society.
St Paul Cathedral’s initial reaction was to close its doors and threaten legal action. Later the authorities there changed their minds, opened their doors and welcomed the protestors in. However, by initially reacting the way they did, they gave the unfortunate impression that what was happening inside the cathedral had very little to do with what was happening outside it. People could have drawn the conclusion from that, that the worship of God has no connection with the world or its concerns because God is literally and metaphorically above it. So God needs to be protected and guarded so that He is not tarnished by vulgar protests and disruptions because, after all, He is a Holy God.
That’s how the religious leaders of Jesus’ day regarded God. His chief characteristic was His holiness – a God set apart from His world and separate from everything that might be unclean and messy and unworthy.
So the emphasis is on the importance of dignified worship, carried out in church buildings with due reverence, awe and majesty which nothing must interrupt or disturb – the world kept at a respectable distance so that it doesn’t sully what is going on inside the sacred space. The holy must not be contaminated with the unholy, or the spiritual with the material or political.
But it is precisely this view of God’s holiness that Jesus shattered. He spent most of His ministry out of doors, not in synagogues or temples but preaching to ordinary people, attempting to relate ordinary everyday events to God.
In Jewish society, of which He was a part, everything was built around a purity system where everything was classified as being either pure or impure, clean or unclean. The centre of the purity system was the temple and the priests who upheld it.
Jesus however replaced the core value of purity with compassion because He regarded compassion not holiness as God’s dominant quality and so He criticised the system that emphasised purity and neglected justice.
So Jesus touched lepers and haemorrhaging women and mixed with poor people and outcasts. Whereas purity divided and excluded, compassion united and included.
Through Christ, God has broken down the barriers which we humans erect, and has shown us His involvement in every aspect of life. That’s what incarnation means and that’s why Jesus began His ministry at Nazareth and said that He “had been anointed by God to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind and release for the oppressed”. On one level that sounds like a secular agenda but that’s Jesus’s interpretation of His prayer that God’s will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. Nor is it just a matter of changing our own lives to do God’s will – a personal morality. It is more radical than that – it means trying to change the structures of our society and world, overturning poverty, injustice and oppression.
Paradoxically, it is the Occupy Movement which has reminded us that in Jesus, the view of God as a holy set-apart God, has been shattered forever, in the birth in a cowshed and death on a cross.
