Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
May I wish you a graced Christmas and all good things for 2025.
The Jubilee Year of Hope is coming to an end, and we might wonder what to hope for this coming Christmas – amid its festivities its liturgies, amid its possible disappointments too.
There’s no doubt that our times are troubled, our hearts and minds too. Our God-given capacity to hope is being tested. At Christmas, we all hope, or at least wish: for peace, for a renewal of the bonds of love that bind our families and for a New Year that will somehow be better. We hope for physical and mental health, positive relationships, stable work and much else, some of it very personal and domestic, some of it global and political.
What is it though, above all, that Christmas does actually offer? There is a word that occurs frequently in the readings and prayers of this season. It’s the word “glory”. The prophet Isaiah, who is such a presence here, promises that “the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh [that is, all humanity] will see it together” (Is 40:5). We hear the refrain from the Psalm: “His salvation is near for those who fear him and his glory will dwell in our land” (Ps 85:10). This is the glory that shone around the shepherds on Christmas night (Lk 2:9) and that we sing of as we take up the Glory to God in the highest again at Mass. For the magi this glory was embodied in the star that led them to Bethlehem, and Simeon will sing of the child in his arms as “a light of revelation to the Gentiles and the glory of your people Israel” (Lk 2:32). St John finally sums it all up: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14).
Here surely is what we can hope for from Christmas. Here is what God the Father wants to show us. Here is what is embodied in this unexpected Child, God and man, whom Mary lays in a manger. The great Christmas gift is this: to glimpse the glory of God. St Paul sums up the human “problem” thus: we “have all sinned and lack the glory of God” (Rom 3:23). A light has fallen from us and our world. Only the Father can rekindle it. And in the coming of his Son, he does. God’s glory is his love: the love that underpins and carries everything, that is older and newer and stronger than every evil and sin. Jesus is this glory in person and shares it with us as we accept him. Then something can start to shift in us and we can discover another approach to life. We can drop our compulsion to know and to control, and instead we can see and wonder, glimpse and adore. We can be led in and through life by another light than just our own.
May the glory of God break upon each and all of us this Christmas!
Yours devotedly in Christ,
+Hugh Gilbert OSB
Bishop of Aberdeen
