It’s that time of year again! Advent – the wait for Christmas. Yet, every year more British people drift away from the most substantial reasons to bother with it. We now call it the ‘holiday season’, forgetting that holiday means Holy Day. So what’s ‘holy’ or ‘dazzlingly different’ about it? What makes December 25^th so special? After all, every two seconds three babies are conceived somewhere in the world but what’s different about Jesus? Jesus really was born, beginning life at conception as all human beings do. He did not suddenly appear as a full-grown male around 30 years of age. Nothing unusual about that then.

But wait. God took only some of the human components and genetic make-up from the ovaries of Mary his mother, a virgin Jewish maiden of royal lineage. From them he then cloned the embryo of Jesus, bypassing the normal intervention of male sperm and its chromosome complement, presumably through a creative miracle which subsidised the lack in Mary’s ovum. Matthew says ‘She was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit’ (1:18), and notes that Joseph’s suspicions were quelled by the explanation, ‘What is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit’ (1:20). Many struggle with the apparent naivety of believing this.

Mary did too. In answer to Mary’s query of the angel as to how she could be pregnant when she was still a virgin and had never ‘played around’, she was told ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God’ (Luke 1:35).  The actual physical processes involved in this are not explained medically, but the activity of the Holy Spirit is clearly credited as the source of the resulting miracle child. The most obvious reason for this is that the child should be holy, and that Adamic sin and corruption should not be inherited by Jesus. Male paternity was bypassed to ensure this.

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Few of us could be ignorant of the widespread fall-out of the ‘nuclear accident’ that occurred in a chain reaction of alien ideas that gained momentum in the 1960s. Man-centred philosophy and rampant secular humanism exploded and the debris and shrapnel of cultural soundbites like ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’, ‘Free love’, ‘The Hippy Trail’, ‘campus riots’, ‘Make love, not war’ and ‘God is Dead!’ shaped that decade. The results included legalized abortion, family breakdown, easy divorce, playground narcotics, paedophile predators, and much more that led most of us to conclude with Dorothy in the film The Wizard of Oz, that ‘We are not in Kansas anymore!’ The whole spiritual landscape has changed.

The results have, for the most part, been devastating. You can’t go anywhere without meeting its tragic victims. London is filled with them. The mugged, sexually abused, depressed and suicidal, trafficked children, street sleepers, junkies, corrupt city traders, bent politicians, ‘wasted’ clubbers, abandoned single mums, fatherless kids and knifed teenagers and so on, are everywhere.

TIME-TESTED REMEDY

The only answer to this is the Gospel. The Gospel radically transforms, reorientates and remakes human lives. It affects a kind of metamorphosis – change from the inside out. No education or social conditioning can do this. Over time, the result is ‘redemptive lift’, recreating individual lives. The suicidal find hope, unshackled addicts go free, the sexually defiled feel clean again, the violent find peace. Whole communities and cultures change for the better. This is what we need so much in Britain, but only Christ’s Gospel can do it.

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