Bishop's Christmas message 2000

Christmas this year is being celebrated as the 2000th anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ, and the whole world enters a new millennium! How amazing that one particular birth should be taken as the pivotal point of history. The reasons why the rest of the world has largely adopted "the year of the Lord" as the beginning of its calendar are complicated, and, we must admit, probably owe more historically to politics and economics that they do to the heart of the Gospel.

Christians, however, will expect to see the traces of the Creator's purpose in the most unlikely places ("likely" or "unlikely", it's all the same to God!). We are therefore not surprised at the world's adoption of our calendar; it is to us the most natural thing in the world that the birth of Jesus should mark the beginning of a new calculation of time. Of course, what matters here is not just that Jesus was such an exemplary human life that everything is different A.D. than it was B.C., but that Jesus Christ was the eternal and creative Word of God made flesh. His birth in time helps us trust in his Lordship over time and to acknowledge his eternal reign.

This is why we have no grounds for triumphalism about the universal practice of dating years from the birth of Jesus. It is not the "Christian" calendar, but Christ's calendar which determines the course of the world. Christians no less than anyone else are judged by the appearance of Jesus Christ. Let Christmas 2000 mark for all of us a new beginning of Christ's reign in our lives.

+John Hind