Category: Exodus

A journey justified

As the Omicron virus variant begins to bite, again the question lurks in our minds in this merry month of December: ‘Will journeys be curtailed to keep Christmas alive?’ As travel cancellations escalate and holidays are again delayed, there’s a growing fear that visiting relations and friends may be reduced to avoid the ‘Déjà voodoo’ of a hapless lockdown.

Journeys, however, feature strongly in that first Christmas story, and risks were taken – well beyond the realm of the sensible, sanitised, modern mind-set of the West. Firstly, through the demands of a Roman census, a heavily pregnant mother was forced to travel seventy miles by donkey through the dangerous Samarian countryside which would have taken four days at its smoothest – not quite the 1 hour 50 minutes that it takes today by car from Nazareth to Bethlehem. Joseph, who would naturally have wanted to protect his wife, might therefore have opted for a safer route, but this could have extended the journey to a week, despite knowing that she was ‘great with child.’

Then there was the epic journey of the Parthian magi from the borders of Afghanistan and Syria guided not by sat-nav but by the stars, or rather, one in particular. It had been their conviction after much soul and sky searching that a regal birth had been ushered in, and a sense of mystery and divine curiosity goaded them on to cover the 500 miles, taking them eighteen months or more.

For the shepherds out on the Judean hills, the journey was not nearly so long – but they were ‘under the influence’ of angels and bright lights, and this caused them irrationally to abandon their flocks, potentially to the ravages of wild animals.

For all the central figures that first Christmas journey was fraught with risk and danger, but they were put aside for greater purposes: the celebration of a new-born king who would ‘reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and for ever,’ as the prophet, Isaiah puts it.

It is a similar sense of daring and abandonment that the Christian message calls us all to make: to go with haste and inquire into what this story could mean for us in our hearts. Of course, it might mean disposing some of the excess baggage that we’re so tempted to carry at this festive time – an over-emphasis on self-indulgence, a preoccupation with consumerism and ‘stuff,’ and a scant regard for how the poor and marginalised might be coping as they languish in Yuletide shadows. Our travelling to meet the Saviour face to face, like the crib figures, is down to will power and a heart-felt conviction. Do we want to make that journey? For those who are making it now and have done for centuries it needs no justification. As Ralph Washington Sockman once said: ‘The hinge of history is on the door of a Bethlehem stable.’ History was changed by that journey, and ‘his-story’ for each one of us can begin there too… and transform us.

May each of us consider making that personal journey this year and keep Christmas alive– a very happy and joy-filled season to you all!

(With thanks to Revd Alex Aldous, chaplain of Prestfelde Prep School, Shrewsbury)

Check-Mate?

Last week we had Budget Day – the day when we trust that the Chancellor of the Exchequer will lay out plans for us as individuals and as a nation to emerge from this pandemic with a hope and a future amidst the debt and the devastation wrought upon us by COVID-19. For the world, for us all, this past year has been a tribulation: a time when we have felt in exile from our normal state of being and how we relate one with the other.

The prefix ‘ex’ can often imply ‘deliverance’ or ‘fleeing from’ – coming out of where we have been. The Exodus in the Old Testament was a positive freedom from slavery in Egypt and a moving towards a Land of Promise in Canaan. The Exile, however, many generations later spelt a time for the Israelites of being banished from one’s own land, resulting from their repeated transgression against the plans and laws of God, given as a manual for successful living as Kingdom people.

We might wonder whether there are ‘tax exiles’ or promises of ‘getting out of a fix’ when we reflect upon the etymology for ‘Exchequer.’ But not so: the word comes from the Old French ‘eschequier’ meaning a ‘chessboard’ or ‘chequered board,’ and woven into this is also writ the meaning of ‘reckoning.’ We can in our own mind’s eye envisage the board that we have inherited this year where there are fewer players, many others having fallen by the wayside and others embattled and reckoning with ‘check mate’ mentally, emotionally, economically and physically.

It was whilst the Jews were in exile that the prophet Jeremiah proclaimed God’s words: ‘that when the seventy years are completed in Babylon, I will come to you and fulfil my gracious promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans that I have for you: plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’

After such a year, we might well be feeling that our own chessboard has been decimated, and there is nothing that any Chancellor can produce out of a hat to right the wrongs, heal the hurts and mend the chequered past that we may have endured. Yet the real hope for those of faith is that as we travel through the desert of Lent and towards the cross of Easter, that God always has the last word – that nothing is too great for him to overcome and redeem. But he first gently whispers the additional words after the above promise: ‘call upon me, pray…seek me and find me when you seek with all your heart.’

We do not know the move of our Great High Chancellor of the Exchequer Above – His moves, like some players on the chessboard, may not be predictable by us mortals – they may move sideways and backwards before moving forward, but our faith assures us that He is the one who holds the plans and it is we who are challenged to trust that He knows our futures – ‘plans for good and not for evil’: those plans, we can be assured, will be for us ‘ex-ce-Lent’ as we call, pray and seek Him.

(With thanks to Revd Alex Aldous, Chaplain at Prestfelde Prep School)