I was fortunate to celebrate Christmas of 1999 in the Holy Land. I was one of the journalists who accompanied the late President Guido de Marco on his visit to that country at the invitation of President Arafat.

I fondly remember the visit on Christmas Eve to the grotto where Christ was born. It was an intense, prayerful occasion. At noon there was a jubilant manifestation welcoming the Patriarch of Jerusalem who came to Bethlehem to be the main celebrant of the Midnight Mass. But most of all I treasure my memories of the Midnight Mass in the Church of the Nativity, which is built over the grotto. It was a celebration that really tasted of heaven.

But outside the church, grace mingled with sin, the good with the bad, and the beautiful with the ugly. It was, and still is, obvious that swords have not yet been turned into ploughshares, neither were spears ex­changed for pruning hooks; nations still raise worse than swords against each other. Isaiah must be disappointed!

Shepherds and angels were nowhere to be seen on that cold night of December 1999 but soldiers were there aplenty. The tension between the Israelis and the Palestinians was palpable. Whenever the presidential party wanted to leave Bethlehem for Israel, which was under Palestinian jurisdiction, we had to change cars on the ‘frontier’.

The Christmas celebration of 1999 – as those in subsequent years – was held in a politically charged atmosphere.

Perhaps this should not surprise us at all. The first Christmas also happened in a politically charged atmosphere. The birth of Jesus was a politically revolutionary event in more senses than one. The story of Mary and Joseph is wrapped up in the politics of a Palestine that had fairly recently been occupied by Rome. They went to Bethlehem because of a census aimed to regularise taxation records. Mary and Joseph soon became asylum seekers in Egypt, escaping from the dominant political power, King Herod.

Everyone believed that the Roman Empire was the source of power and glory. But the Christmas message – as sung by the angels and affirmed in the book of the Apocalypse – holds the new born Babe as he who holds the real power and the everlasting glory. The angels sang a political paradigm shift. Peace was the inheritance God promised to men of goodwill, a pro­mise in stark contrast to the political belief that the Pax Romana was the solution to the troubles of humanity.

When I write that we should do politics in Christmas quite naturally I do not refer to partisan petty talk or to prattle artificially appealing for national unity and solidarity

Can one preach a more radical political message, a message of how to exercise power and envisage human society, that the one preached in the Nativity stories?

If we want our Christmas celebrations to be in line with what happened in the first Christmas we have to realise that this is not the time for less political discourse but for more. The popes are staunchly of a similar opinion. I picked totally at random two Angelus’ addresses given by the popes on Christmas Day. The political thread is the distinct characteristic of their weave.

In his address of 2012, Benedict XVI appealed for a political solution to the conflict in Syria and augured that Israelis and Palestinians embark resolutely on the path of negotiation. He also addressed the poli­tical situation in Egypt, Mali, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Kenya. A few days before, in his Christmas message to the heads of the Vatican minis­tries, he strongly denounced the gender ideology and gay marriage which, at the time, was at the centre of great political controversy in France.

Last year, Pope Francis addressed the political situation between the Israelis and the Palestinians as well as the situations in Syria, Libya, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, South Sudan, the Ukraine and Colombia.

Stephen Holmes, in his booklet on The Politics of Christmas (2011), rightly writes that the Nativity story is also a “powerful human drama of how the lives of ordinary people can be disturbed and destroyed by political systems and decisions, and how God cares and intervened in these affairs”.

When I write that we should do politics in Christmas quite naturally I do not refer to partisan petty talk or to prattle artificially appealing for national unity and solidarity, which is such common fare during these times of year. Such talk by those who in actual fact foment injustice and are mired in corruption is the epitome of hypocrisy.

I refer to radical political reflection and action fomenting justice more than charity, privileging the vulnerable instead of the powerful and siding with the poor, not with the millionaires. Christmas is the reveille for the politics of service and screed against the politics of gula. Bethlehem is the antithesis of the Gula Archipelago.

Christmas screams for our active involvement in the way politics are managed. It is the unreserved denunciation of those who prefer to sit on the proverbial fence while egoistically trying to sublimate their sheer irresponsibility by saying that they do not want to dirty their hands. There is no place in the Nativity crib for these children of Cain who live as if they do not know who or where their brother is.

Christmas is not the time to foment an inane feel-good factor through which we escape from everyday concrete reality. It shows us that God did not choose to help humanity from the outside but got deeply involved in humanity by becoming part of humanity. Christmas is the time challenging us to adopt a political stance similar to that taken by our God who is active and present; a time when we are asked to consider how God intervenes in the business of politics.

This is why Kris Kringle, the Father Christmas of Miracle of 34th Street (1947), quite rightly says that “Christmas isn’t just a day, it’s a frame of mind.” More than that, it is a life programme.

joseph.borg@um.edu.mt

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