Tents may not seem to feature strongly in the Christmas story…
…We hear of shepherds carefully guarding their sheep on the hillsides of Bethlehem wide awake for predators whether they be wolves or humans.
In our day we do not expect security guards to be asleep so it is a question we never think of asking about the Christmas shepherds. They probably however worked in shifts and co–operatives and had tents I suggest.
Tents have featured strongly and visibly in the cities of the world over the last months.
Financial centres and cathedral churches have found themselves sprouting tents as people make sustained protest about the relationship between finance and justice.
New and urgent questions are being asked about the economic model of society.
Questions are also emerging about the underlying assumptions of capitalism in a world where inequality and injustice combine to offer us what is no more than a macabre caricature of globalism.
Tents in the ancient world were places of meeting – take for example Abraham entertaining angels unawares and offering them hospitality in his tent at the Oaks of Mamre.
Tents speak to us of holidays and of vacations where we live simpler lives, where we enjoy aspects of life which are less consumerised and more relaxed – even if often more uncomfortable!
Those of us who celebrate Christmas within the Christian tradition associate the opening words of St John’s Gospel. Not only does that opening chapter tie together creation with the birth of Jesus Christ.
It also speaks with direct simplicity of the same Jesus pitching his tent in this world and among people like you and me.
Impermanence and improvisation were features of the birth in Bethlehem, in a stable or, less romantically said, a shed.
Mary and Joseph had to make do with shelter when security was not on offer. Hasty improvisation had to suffice. But the baby Jesus was born in the squalor of injustice and imperialism. The circumstances of his birth reflected this and in this reflection we see new light and new life.
The pitching of the tent of God in everyday humanity is the first step of the child of Bethlehem in living a life of justice and compassion, a relatively short life which encouraged others to pitch their tents in places of need and rejection, alienation and exploitation.
St John tells us that the pitching of the tent is essential to the disclosure of the glory of God.
As many of us struggle to make this Christmas happy for others – our children, our older people and our homeless people – let us remember the tent pegs of witness which are embedded at the heart of contemporary culture.
Let us never forget that according to St John the first thing Jesus Christ did was to pitch a tent among us.
Michael Jackson, Archbishop of Dublin