NOLLAIG 2024 : “Follow the star in humility and hope – “Christmas Message 2024 from Archbishop Michael Jackson

This year 2024, we continue to look to Christmas for hope, searching with a mounting sense of fear and dread on behalf of others as of ourselves. Annually, we decry the fact that Christmas, as most people now understand it, begins to impact on us earlier and earlier in the year. In some of our towns and cities, it is not so much that the Christmas lights go up. It is more that they never come down and are switched on as soon after the change in the hour as seems possible. Christian people should embrace this. We are supposed to live Christmas, like Easter, every day of the year.

At home, we are conscious that poverty and homelessness take many forms and that deprivation is a sophisticated chameleon which changes its spots according to anyone’s circumstances. Some people have nowhere to live. Some people are one shopping trip for food or one utility bill for light or heat away from going under not only the radar but also the thin line of survival. Other people find that sitting no longer works for them because they are cold and getting colder by the day – and mobility is not an option for them either.

Abroad, warfare is the new normal. Ukraine and Israel–Palestine fall over the precipice of our consciousness and therefore of our conscience all too readily. Other theatres of war are long gone from our social media ‘likes.’ Not enough of us make the connection between climate change, local warfare, poverty and enforced emigration – and let us never forget domestic violence and religious persecution. What we see is more and more people who do not look like us in our country. And in 2024 we have reacted physically and shamefully. Fearfully we set to one side our obligation to be humans and neighbours. We shrivel out of self–protection.

Christian people have no option but to ask: Was it any different in the days when God was born human, when Jesus whose sending was to set humanity free from our sins was born in what is now a Palestinian village subjected to intense intimidation, social starvation and personal powerlessness? Hope came to earth in the person of a living person. Jesus Christ carried the human imperative to suffering and the divine imperative to healing. It took him a lifetime of crucifixion to bring this to its beginning on The Cross of Calvary.

We, who are followers long before any were called to be leaders, are called today to follow the star in humility and in hope. The Child of joy who is born at Christmas continues to be born in the rubble of privilege and in the rubble of irrelevance. The choice is the choice of all of us. Let us mark and celebrate Christmas 2024 with all those whom we meet.  

+Michael Jackson

Dublin and Glendalough