Like a shoddy police procedural with an easily-recognizable bad guy—the unshaven one with the heavy accent—the Christmas story has one villain in particular. Not Joseph, who didn’t believe Mary’s tale until an angel came to him in a dream. Not the innkeeper who said there was “no room” for Joseph and Mary. (That’s probably a […]
The Christmas Story Has Always Been About Power
How the Christmas Stories Call the Church to a Different Vision
Two weeks ago I visited our old family church, in the far north of England. I was placing flowers by my parents’ gravestone, in front of memorials to my grandparents, great-grandparents and sundry uncles and aunts. But my eye was drawn, as it has often been, to the Jesse Window in the east end of […]
What Is This Word?
John 1.1–14 Sermon at the Eucharist on Christmas Morning 2005 in the Cathedral Church of Christ, Blessed Mary the Virgin, and St Cuthbert of Durham the Bishop of Durham, Dr N. T. Wright One of the greatest journalists of the last generation, the late Bernard Levin, described how, when he was a small boy, a […]