Celebrating the good news of Christmas-tide.

For many years the prologue of John’s Gospel (John 1:1-18) has been a favourite passage of Scripture for me. As a student I could recite from memory the whole prologue in Greek, although today I can hardly get beyond the second verse. But I have grown to understand its message much more. “The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.”

This is the central message of the Gospel and it expresses the tragedy of our human nature. God has sent his truth like the sun penetrating the darkness of the night: but it has not been understood by human beings, whom God created in his own image for intimate fellowship with him.

Through the Prophets of Israel, over a period of many centuries, God progressively revealed his nature and purposes to humanity. This prepared the way for the coming of Messiah, Jesus, who added to that revelation an understanding of God as our Father who loves us with an unconditional and un-ending love. That love was so great that it even took Jesus to the Cross in order to provide for our salvation.

The Incarnation: Blessing and Tragedy

The tragedy of the incarnation is emphasised in verse 10 which states “He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognise him.” Traditionally, theologians have understood the enlightenment brought by Jesus as the illumination of reason and conscience, thus bringing the Gospel into line with Stoic ideas about the logos as something that dwells in every human being, a seed within each one of us that enables us to develop full understanding of truth.

But the coming of the light actually brings judgment, because it reveals the fact that human beings love darkness rather than light; although it is not God’s purpose to bring judgment but to create faith leading to salvation. The amazing truth of the incarnation is that “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us,” so that we can actually see the light shining in the darkness of the world around us.

Of course, human beings prefer the darkness because they cannot understand the light, which actually requires a change of mindset. Indeed, it requires accepting that we need the light in order to be able to understand anything at all in the created order of the universe. Only the true light of the world can give us real, genuine understanding. It changes everything, giving us a different position from which to perceive reality.

In order to accept the light, we have to be prepared to forsake the pursuit of our own self-interest. But in the process, we actually become children of God instead of being creatures of the world, which is an entirely new status. As Paul said, “Anyone who is in Christ is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come” (2 Cor 5:17).

Opportunity to Respond

Of course all human beings, whether they believe or not, are surrounded by the light of Jesus, because he has made his dwelling among us. This was part of God’s intention from the time he created the universe and made human beings capable of being in relationship with himself, the Creator. He chose the people of Israel to be the means through whom he would bring light to the world and fulfil his purpose of enabling everyone to become children of God – part of the community of believers.

This was revealed to the Prophet Zechariah 500 years before the coming of Jesus. He shouted for joy when he received this revelation: “Shout and be glad, O Daughter of Zion. For I am coming, and I will live among you, declares the Lord. Many nations will be joined with the Lord in that day and will become my people. I will live among you and you will know that the Lord Almighty has sent me to you” (Zec 2:10).

The prologue of John speaks about the true light of the world – the person and power and wisdom of God, who created the universe – coming to take a permanent place among human beings, so that they could perceive truth in a way that had been hidden from previous generations.

In order to accept the light, we have to be prepared to forsake the pursuit of our own self-interest; but in the process, we become children of God.

The nativity that we celebrate at Christmas has very flimsy historical links with the date of Jesus’ birth and even less to do with the tinsel and wrappings and commercial Christmas of today. But the fact that lights are switched on in our towns and villages and decorate our homes is an acknowledgement of the central truth of the incarnation – that the true Light has come into the world of humanity.

As we are each a creation of God, there is built into each one of us the ability to respond to (or the freedom to reject) the true light. For those who do respond, there is the wonderful experience of becoming a child of God which changes our perception of everything: in the same way as the light of a new day dispels the darkness of night and enables us to see things that were only dimly perceived in the darkness.

Witnessing to the Light

The Fourth Gospel prologue tells us that John the Baptist was sent ahead of Jesus to prepare the way and to be a witness to the light. He was not the true light – he was a reflection of the light, but when Jesus came, the true light which was there in the beginning, and through whom the universe was made, was now available to human beings in a new way.

God actually humbled himself and took human form as his final great act of salvation, to enable sinful men and women to see the truth and to give them the power to overcome the forces of darkness that drive us all towards self-destruction. This is the good news of Christmas-tide - the coming of truth and light into our world of sin and darkness.

Surely there has never been a greater need for such a message than there is today! As children of the light we need to take a break from all the works of darkness around us (including our Parliamentary Pantomime) and take every opportunity of sharing the good news with others during this Christmas season. Let’s make it truly a season of light and truth!

The Lord be with you and bless you as you bless others.

An extraordinary testimony of God’s kindness.

We live in a strange and worrying era, when the value of life is in deep recession.

On the one hand there is the so-called morning-after pill, an insurance against unwanted conception, and - worse - the escalating use of abortion to destroy unwanted, unborn children. On the other hand, at the other extreme we hear of new scientific ‘advances’ in the way eggs can be cultivated outside the womb for women who find difficulty in conception.

Add to this ever-increasing rates of family breakdown, the general acceptance that one’s gender (even that of a child) can be manipulated and re-configured, and the mounting pressure to legalise assisted suicide, and we begin to realise how far our society’s value of life is being eroded.

Sometimes I have wondered how the wastage of life might be made clearer to those blind to what they are doing. Perhaps someone could write a story that imagined the potential of lives lost in the womb, following the imagined life story of those who might have been born, grown up and contributed to our society, but who never made it past the start-line.

Could one illustrate this in a powerful enough way to touch a generation like, say, Uncle Tom’s Cabin challenged a whole nation to reconsider slavery and eventually reverse that tide of evil?

I don’t have the skill to write such a book, but recently I discovered something in the testimony of my own life that, at least for me, illustrated these things in a deep way.

A Blessed Childhood

My life has been wonderfully blessed. I grew up in the era immediately following the Second World War, conceived in 1945 and born in 1946. My earliest memories are of the hard winter of 1947, with its deep snow up to my waist, at a time when we had been temporarily housed with other families in a village in South Wales.

Sometimes I have wondered how the wastage of life might be made clearer to those blind to what they are doing.

My father returned from Belgium in 1946, was demobbed and resumed work as a plumber, enjoying plenty to do in those days of rebuilding a nation and building houses. My mother kept house and was always the anchor of our security as children (my older sister and I).

What followed was a blessed and stable childhood through the 1950s - the era of rationing and austerity but hope, strong families and supportive community, when Sundays were kept special, when there were few phones and few cars. That era lives with me to this day.

A Fruitful Life

I did well at school and was optimistic about my future career. When my father asked me if I would join him in his plumbing business, that he might write SF Denton and Son on the van, I rather bluntly turned him down, having plans to join the RAF.

I did indeed become an RAF pilot, followed by studying for a maths degree at Kings College Cambridge, followed by teaching Maths and Computer Science at Banbury School, and then Educational Research at the University of Oxford where I also picked up my DPhil in the study of the educational of able children. Since the mid-1980s I left all that to go into full-time Christian work, which has, since then, taken me all over the world. It has been a wonderful and fruitful life.

One thing that typified my life from as early as I can recall, was my commitment to serve God, which I brought to prayer every single night in my years of growing up. Much later, I recall a day when the Lord spoke to me on my way back home from a ministry meeting. I was recalling how blessed and encouraged my early life had been, when the question came into my mind: ‘You thought that was your parents encouraging you, didn’t you?’ “Yes,” said I. ‘Well, that was Me’, said God.

It was like a Bar Mitzvah experience at a time when perhaps the Lord wanted me to turn more fully to him as Father and recognise the quiet but significant role he had played in my life all through those blessed years of growing up. Amazing.

Searching for My True Father

Yet the story has become even more amazing recently, ever since a friend put together a genealogical tree for both sides of my family. I was quite pleased to discover a fairly normal set of ancestors from the working class – labourers, agricultural workers, domestic servants and so on - going back through the 19^th Century.

I recall a day when the Lord spoke to me, urging me to recognise the quiet but significant role he had played in my life through those blessed years of growing up.

At this time a thought came back to my mind that had, despite having wonderful loving parents, often posed a question during my early years: was my father really my father? It is remarkable what a DNA test can show, so I took up the offer of one towards the end of last year. The results confirmed my hunches and so began an incredible period of investigation to see if I could find my true father.

Amazingly, my DNA results strongly linked me paternally not to the Midlands where my supposed father came from, but to the USA.

Piecing together clues I picked up from other known relatives, I went looking on US genealogy trees for the person most likely to be my real father. I was looking for someone who would have been serving in the US forces, stationed in the UK near where my mother lived in 1945 with my baby sister, at a time when my presumed father was away serving in the RAF.

Surely that should have been like a needle in a haystack to find; but miraculously, with the help of an historical society, I was able to locate a man who ticked all those boxes. More than that - I have obtained a photograph of him and have discovered that he is still alive in the USA - a frail 96-year-old, but alive. I may yet have personal contact with him, though he will probably be quite surprised at my existence!

What Really Happened

The true story is that I descend from a Native American tribe in Mexico (perhaps the Pima tribe). In the days of immigration and of pioneering (including the California Gold Rush no doubt), beginning around 1800, an Italian went to Mexico and married a young Indian squaw (I imagine her living in a tepee) - and so the line from which my true father came was launched.

In 1942, when America entered the war, a young Italian with Native American roots enlisted and became one of those GIs who came to the UK with bars of chocolate for the children and nylons for the women. Amazingly, it was on the exact day that my deceased mother would have been 100 years old that I discovered this man’s name.

Despite finding him after all these years, I find myself not so much drawn to know my real father as being drawn closer to my heavenly Father.

History of the closing days of the war describe the way GIs linked up with local young women. During those uncertain days, my mother formed a temporary relationship and I was the unplanned result. Soon the GIs went home and eventually my (adopted) father came back from Belgium. It was all covered up and we got on with that life that turned out to be blessed.

I think about this, having complete forgiveness for my mother, and being aware that but for the events which took place, neither I, nor my own children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, nor the consequences of my life (good or bad), would have happened.

In fact, despite finding him after all these years, I find myself not so much drawn to know my real father as being drawn closer to my heavenly Father.

A Father to the Fatherless

The point of describing all this is that, in raw terms, my origins were from the unwanted of the developing USA, descending from a ‘half-breed’ (as they would be called in the cowboy films), a nobody, then later born in sin, the unplanned and unwanted result of a temporary fling. An accident with a questionable background.

Yet, God did not leave me in my vulnerability. He put his mark on me even as I was a young child. As Psalm 68 says, he is a father to the fatherless and puts the isolated in families.

If I had been conceived today, I would very likely have been eradicated by the morning-after pill or through abortion.

I only boast about this to highlight what God has done with my life, for there has been some fruit, for example in the education of gifted children, the establishing of Bible colleges, participating in the eradication of polio from Morocco, to name a few highlights. For his glory it is important to see the potential in my life that God planned to use, and which he is still bringing to fulfilment.

My origins, in raw terms, are an accident with a questionable background. Yet, God did not leave me in my vulnerability.

God Values Life

This is a story with two-fold application. One is to highlight the utter waste of potential in our generation, when life is allocated such little value as to wipe it out before birth. My life is unique and colourful in its origins, but there are many such from our generation. There are many lives from the current generation who never had the chance to find God’s love or to fulfil their potential. They simply weren’t born.

The other is the way Almighty God cares for us when we ask him to help us. In an unseen, sometimes hardly perceptible way, God has been alongside me wonderfully all these years. He will do and is doing the same for others who reach out to him in hope and in growing faith.

God values life so much that he gave his life so that we might live and, as he said, that we might have life in all its fullness. How many of those children destroyed before birth might have grown to have their own testimony, we can only imagine. But here is one who could have been at the bottom of the pile, who might have been lost, but was spared for this life, shared in the work of God, and saved for eternal life.

That is my testimony – still developing and hopefully worth sharing. How about yours? It is the sum of our personal testimonies about what God has made of our lives that could be that ‘book’ I was imagining.

Clifford Denton discusses the probable date of Jesus' birth, how we got to 25 December and what that means for us today.

There is no known record from early Christian writers concerning the celebration of Christmas. For example, neither of the prominent writers Tertullian (c. AD 155-220) or Irenaeus (late 3^rd Century AD) included Christmas in their lists of Christian feasts. It is therefore generally considered that the Christian festival of Christmas began being celebrated officially sometime after AD 300. In terms of the date we use now, 25 December, the first recorded celebration was in Rome in AD 336.¹

The Pagan Roots of Christmas

Many Christians are now re-thinking the practices of the faith, being concerned to return faithfully to its Hebraic roots. They are concerned that what may have begun as a genuine remembrance of the birth of Jesus (possibly in the 1^st Century AD, incorporated into the biblical Feasts of the Lord) was moved to 25 December in an attempt to Christianise the pagan Roman festival of the sun god Sol Invictus, celebrating the 'birthday of the sun'. In the English language this allows an interesting play on words, but other than that it is not difficult to see that the marrying of the two celebrations is rather fragile.

However, there can be no doubt that God has brought much blessing to families and communities, and immense opportunities to proclaim the Gospel, during the Christmas season. The birth of Jesus is recorded in Scripture and it is something to celebrate every day. Indeed, if we were able to establish the correct date for his birth then Christian ethics of love and sharing and many of the wonderful carols we sing at Christmas could transfer seamlessly to that date or season.

So let us not be too harsh in our judgment as we celebrate this Advent season once more - but let us get our focus clear. Once more we will surely know the blessing of God; yet we might also consider whether he is gradually seeking to re-focus us - and why.

Christians desiring to recover the Hebraic roots of the faith often become concerned that the remembrance of the birth of Jesus was moved to 25 December.

When Was Jesus Really Born?

When, then, was Jesus actually born? We have no clear conclusion from Scripture, but it does give us clues to develop a compelling argument that it was during the Feast of Tabernacles.

Let us begin in Luke 1:5, where we discover that Zacharias was a priest from the division of Abijah. The divisions of the priests were established by King David (1 Chron 24) who appointed 24 Levitical families in a certain order for ministering in the Temple. We discover (verse 10) that Abijah was the seventh division, which would place his priestly responsibility in the first half of the fourth month. If the counting of the Jewish year began at Passover (the beginning of the biblical year – Exodus 12:2), the fourth month after Passover would be Tammuz (around June/July).² We can then estimate when John the Baptist was conceived, i.e. after Zacharias returned home in the middle of the fourth month (Luke 1:23-24).

We know, by reading on in Luke 1, that it was after six more months that Jesus was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit. All this has some approximation, but in putting the clues together there is a strong suggestion that John the Baptist would be born nine months on from the second half of Tammuz: in the middle of the first month (Nissan) of the following year. Jesus would be born six months later, in the middle of the seventh month (Tishrei, around September/October).

Bearing in mind that the Feast of Tabernacles begins on the 14^th day of the seventh month (Lev 23:34), the calculation may be exact to that date. If not exact, the strong implication is that Jesus was born (i.e. came to earth to dwell/tabernacle amongst us) during the season of the latter feasts, which includes both the Day of Atonement and the Feast of Tabernacles, a feast announced with the blowing of Trumpets.

All this makes much more sense than 25 December, especially when it also brings to mind his Second Coming, which will also be announced by the blowing of a trumpet (1 Thess 4:16)!

So What?

So, what does this mean for us who are already well into another traditional Advent season? I have, for many years, been among those who have desired and encouraged a return to the biblical roots of our faith. Yet, I have also known the blessings of a traditional Western Christian Christmas, especially as a child in the 1940s and 1950s in post-World War II Britain, when family bonds were strong and when community Christmases centred on remembering the birth of Jesus.

I know that some of those who strongly promote the Jewish roots of Christianity would be quick to argue against any Christmas emphasis, but personally I am uneasy about over-reacting in this. Is our Father in Heaven, whilst increasingly warning us of the pagan roots of the celebrations around 25 December, nevertheless encouraging us to get our priorities straight rather than acting in haste? The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath!

The implication of Scripture is that Jesus was born on the Feast of Tabernacles - or at least during the season of the latter feasts.

Priorities in Our Remembering

Jesus told us to remember his death until he comes (cf. his birth), through the sharing of the bread and wine of Passover. Yet, in balance, we must also remember his birth as the Son of Man.

It could well be that he was born on the Feast of Tabernacles. Those shepherds in the fields near Bethlehem were most likely those who cared for the flocks of lambs prepared for slaughter at the Feasts. How appropriate that they were among the first to see the Lamb of God, who had come to take away the sins of the world. And if it was the time of this Feast, then it is little wonder that the inn in Bethlehem was so full of pilgrims. How differently we understand the Christmas story when taken in context.

As to the exact date, even though it is not known for sure, we are surely to understand that the Feast of Tabernacles will be fulfilled through the Second Coming of Jesus. If we divert our attentions away from this truth, we will end up unprepared for his arrival. Conversely, recalling his First Coming at the Feast of Tabernacles will help us to prepare for his Second Coming, through concentrating on the priorities of that Feast. If Passover helps us look back and remember his death, then Tabernacles helps us recall his birth and, more importantly in the context of our age, look forward to his return.

Look Up!

As we celebrate this year, let us do so whole-heartedly, as our Thought for the Week this week encourages us to do. Surely, God will still bless us as we sing carols, witness in the world and share love together in community and family. But let us not be foolish with the worldly trappings that divert us from the prime focus of the season. And let us not look down overmuch at the troubles of this world, nor concentrate our attention too exclusively on a now-empty manger.

In the coming days it is my hope that we will gradually adjust our perspective on what we call Christmas, to re-home it among the biblical Feasts of the Lord (especially in relation to Tabernacles). Perhaps our attraction to the tinsel of Christmas will fade away! But whatever happens, let us look up, for he will come back when the world least expects him. Indeed, is it now time to concentrate more on his Second Coming than on his First? Are you ready for Christmas?

Is it time to focus more on Jesus's Second Coming than on his First?

Notes

1 See Wikipedia's page on the origins of Christmas.

2 Ezra, after the Babylonian captivity, led Judah back to the biblical pattern of worship. It is a reasonable assumption that the order of the priesthood would be according to the pre-captivity order, but it is an assumption.