Christianity pivots around two stories, Christmas and Easter: the birth of Jesus and his murder and resurrection. Each year, the church prepares for, and then celebrates, each.
In church terms, then, the new year has already started. Church calendars began on 2 December, Advent Sunday, the start of the four weeks of penitence and fasting in preparation for the coming of Christ on Christmas Day.
Yes, well, it seemed a good idea at the time. Maybe the answer is to change tack. Instead of grumbling about Christmas filling the shops too early, perhaps we should try to get all the presents bought and wrapped before December, so that the days immediately before Christmas can be spent contemplating what a world-changing event it was.
Standing here at the start of the new year, it might seem a lost cause to try and turn the clock back, literally, to 2 December. ‘Come on guys, there are all sorts of proof that the earth is flat. . .’ But we can at least hold the church calendar in our minds at the same time, living two different rhythms, in the way that, say, businesses and government observe the tax year as well as the ordinary one.
The church calendar plots the seasons — Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost (Whitsun), Trinity and the weeks after Trinity (also known as ‘ordinary time’, just to confuse things) — and suggests daily and Sunday Bible readings accordingly. In there, too, are the saints days, the biblical ones — Matthew, Paul, and such like; the traditional ones — St Francis, St Teresa, and so on; and, in the Anglican calendar, key figures from the Church’s history — John Donne, Thomas Becket, Mary Slessor (some of these might need a bit of Wikipedia work).
Some clergy choose to ignore much of this, preferring to plan their 13-part sermon series on 1 Corinthians, or picking some topic out of the weekly news, or something that happened to them on the way to church. But the calendar constantly reminds us of things we’d prefer to forget.
Not least is the chequered and often violent history of the Church. The day after the joyful birth of Christ, we are instructed to mark St Stephen’s Day, best remembered as the feast when King Wenceslas looked out on the poor man in the snow.
In the minds of the calendar makers, Stephen, the first Christian martyr (read Acts 6 and 7), deserved the honour of having his feast day next to Jesus’s. In the midst of the Christmas celebrations, then, we have our first taste of Easter — the way Stephen forgives his killers just as Jesus did as they nailed him to the cross. This was witnessed by Saul, a young pharisee from Tarsus, who, as St Paul, the apostle to non-Jews, masterminded the huge expansion of Christianity into the Roman empire.
In Christianity, everything connects — birth, death, resurrection, and it helps if we see time as malleable. After all, who knows when an individual is going to encounter these in his or her life? People die at Christmas, babies are born on Good Friday. And resolutions are made every day. The message of Jesus, and the traditions of the Church, can fit any eventuality.
Bradley Hill, TS, 2013
Feature Image: 1600px-The_Scottish_Art_Review,1-_Good_King_Wenceslas, Wikicommons, PD