Bishop of Carlisle's Christmas 2007 letter

We Need Light and not Darkness

An acquaintance was telling me recently about her search for presents for her six year old son. He wanted one of the best-selling presents, a mask, linked to the current Dr.Who adventures. But for a peace-loving child, who did not like conflict or war, his mother looked for a mask of one of the good characters. To her despair, the only masks available in the shops were for the bad characters. Look elsewhere and it is the same story. In a toyshop recently I looked at the row of new Lego sets; they were all of the machinery of conflict and war.

My friend and I concluded that we live in quite a sick society where what is bad is given prominence and what is good is overlooked. We are seeing a creeping increase in fascination with the dark side of our world. It is there in the popularity of the well-known Philip Pullman ‘Dark Materials Trilogy’, of which the first volume has already been made into a film. This attention to mysterious evil is far more sinister than the pirates of Peter Pan or playing with toy soldiers. Of course, the battle between good and evil has always been an underlying theme in current myths and stories. But whereas in Lord of the Rings, for example, the story follows Frodo Baggins, and his many helpers, and the focus of their journey is to defeat evil, what we are seeing now is more of a fascination with darkness itself. Increasing fascination with the dark will only give evil a greater foothold. It is time to work hard to reverse this direction and to celebrate the good.

The creeping focus on darkness, to which I have referred, is filling a void that has been created by the loss of confidence in the true Light of the World, Jesus the Christ. This is the heart of our problem: the loss of clear Christian confidence. We have an urgent need to remind ourselves of our Christian heritage.

The times into which Jesus was born were turbulent times, not unlike ours, full of pessimism about evil. The Roman Empire brought burdensome taxation and oppression of the poor. Armies fought and emperors were overthrown. At one point Rome had three emperors in a year.

Coming into this world Jesus Christ made an enormous impact. Yet he was born in an obscure small town in Israel, never left his country and was put to death at around the age of thirty three. Yet for almost two thousand years, Jesus has been by far the most famous person the world has ever known. It is an astonishing story.

So why such an impact? First, Jesus declared God’s love for everyone in the whole world. This was new. The gods of the Greeks and the Romans were fickle characters: you never quite knew whether they were on your side or not. The God of the Old Testament loved Israel; but other nations could come in only clinging to Israel’s coat tails. But with Jesus the message was clear: God is for everyone; he loves us all. He came as one of us, born needing Mary’s love. There could hardly be a clearer statement that the relationship God seeks with us is one of love. The world’s turbulence makes many people long to escape. God did the opposite: he came into a violent and oppressive world; his light and love completely turned it round. Indeed, the values that we so treasure today have come to Britain through around seventeen centuries of faith in the Light of the World.

Jesus identified with us not only in his birth but also in his death, crucified as one of the very worst, outside the city gate where society spat out those it did not want. The only adequate explanation is that he suffered on our behalf. No amount of human politics prevents human beings tearing each other apart. By contrast, the way that Jesus offers is the way of God’s forgiveness and forgiving each other.

As Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, puts it,

“ ‘God forgives.’ I sometimes think that if I didn’t believe, I would be drawn to faith by the power of those two words alone. The mere fact that we can apologise and be forgiven is one of the most blessed gifts of humanity, and it isn’t simple at all. It is underwritten by a certain view of the universe, the belief that God forgives.”

The light Jesus brought most powerfully shows us how to be human. His life expressed his message: to be human is to love. Not only was his life filled with compassion, healing and forgiveness; he showed us that to be human is to pray - to pray constantly to God as ‘Our Father’. It is following this light that, throughout the centuries has changed people’s lives and our society.

This is the light we need if we are to overcome the growing attraction of darkness. And overcome it we must! With the light he brought, Jesus is forming a society with caring love at its heart, with forgiveness, with prayer, peace and hope. For nearly two thousand years the world, and our own society, has been nurtured by this light. At all costs we must not throw it away.

+Graham Dow, Bishop of Carlisle