Chester Diocese
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‘The birth of God counts for everything,’ writes the Bishop of Chester for Christmas
CENTURIES ago, legal documents were sometimes given a date ‘counting from the birth of God’. We do indeed still reckon our years from the awesome and mysterious events in Bethlehem and Judea, in Galilee and Jerusalem. The Apostles’ Creed refers to the crucifixion as having happened ‘under Pontius Pilate’ in order to date the event to a precise time, and place. The birth of God happened when Caesar Augustus ordered a census, and everyone had to return to their home town or village, so that records could be as accurate as possible. Quirinius was governor of Syria, St Luke tells us. It was there and then, that it came to pass: See, therein a manger lies He who built the starry skies. To the educated people of the day, this was all a bit too much. Real Gods don’t need to have their nappies changed. Real Gods certainly don’t get nailed to a cross. Real Gods – if they exist at all – must be above all this sort of thing. To the intelligentsia, the chattering classes, it seemed as if the early Christians wanted to put the clock back five hundred years or more, to the Greek and Roman myths of Gods being married to each other, and behaving in all-to-human ways. Christians were first called Christians as a term of abuse, much as we might refer to someone as a ‘Moonie’, i.e. the follower of some obscure and self-appointed prophet figure. One can understand why, given the extraordinary claim that God had been born among us, in the person of the unique and eternal Son of God, in what was then a mere backwater of the Roman Empire. Yet as Christians this must always be both our starting point, and our destination, our faith and our hope; that Immanuel, ‘God is with us’ is as much a truth of history as any other truth of history, and as much a contemporary reality as the truth that we are alive today. The birth of God counts for everything, and we count everything from the birth of God. That God chose to be born as a child also means that we count, as children of God, adopted into the original Royal Family. The Rt Revd Dr Peter Forster, Bishop of Chester
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Bishop Peter: ‘As children of God, we count’
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