If you look up ‘Christmas’ on the streaming platform Netflix you will see a list of films, including ‘Christmas inheritance’, ‘Meet me next Christmas’, ‘A Christmas Prince’, ‘A Christmas prince: the royal wedding’, ‘A Christmas prince: the royal baby’ (the original ‘Christmas prince’ clearly did well), ‘A castle for Christmas’, ‘Falling for Christmas’, ‘A merry Christmas wish’, ‘The knight before Christmas’ (‘knight’ with a ‘k’), ‘A royal date for Christmas’, ‘’Twas the text before Christmas’ and others along similar lines. I have not made any of these up and I am barely scratching the surface here. By far, the majority of Christmas films on Netflix are romantic films. And this is the case not only on Netflix, not only with films, and not only in the last couple of years. Some of that stuff has been around for a while and may be considered, dare I say, traditional: ‘Love actually’, The holiday’ and of course ‘Bridget Jones’s diary’ are among the films at least the women of my generation certainly would be watching. I am personally guilty of enjoying ‘Bridget Jones’s diary’ around Christmas time. I am even guilty of watching ‘A Christmas prince’ once as background to cooking, and I regret to tell you this film is dire.
All of these films, and their success, revolve around one idea: Christmas is a time for love, unlike any other. But where does this come from? Did we get the meaning of Christmas wrong confusing the journey of turning to Christ with a quest for attracting a partner? Is it simply a commercial exercise; monetising single women’s desire not to be alone, especially at Christmas when it’s considered not good to be alone? Or are we perhaps onto something when we pair up Christmas and love?
All of those romantic Christmas stories conclude with a happy commitment of the two loving partners to each other. A lot of them end in a marriage (other than ‘A Christmas prince’ where the wedding got its own entire film). And how lovely it is that, in addition to me now being an expert in planning weddings, our Old Testament reading today also speaks about marriage! It is quite interesting that marriage between two people does not come up at all in the Biblical texts – we have no idea what an Old Testament wedding would have looked like, other than drinking a lot of wine and serving the best wine first. Instead, marriage appears as a metaphor, a symbol of unity and commitment. Today’s Old Testament text, for example, speaks of restoration of Jerusalem, its rise from destruction and desolation, and just before the portion of text appointed for today, it says, ‘As the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you’. It uses the metaphor of marriage, presenting Jerusalem as the bride and God as the bridegroom. The same passage is interpreted as anticipation of another union: that of Christ and the Church. In other later contexts the Church is often described as the bride and Jesus Christ as her bridegroom. The focus of marriage is not on the sensual or the sexual, it is on unity and longevity.
Marriage in many cultures, including our own until very recently, has been seen more as a contract, an alliance. By contrast with the recently written marriage services we use in the Church today, our own Book of Common Prayer does not say a word about love in the preface that describes the purposes of marriage. In the Old Testament Biblical terms, marriage does not even have to be exclusive, as we understand it today. The Bible is full of extramarital relationships, and it is pretty normal especially for men in power to have a wife and a number of concubines. So, with all this in mind, does it mean that love was invented at some point? And when did it take such a central place in Christian faith? Perhaps at the point when John wrote ‘God is love, and all who live in love live in God’ (1 John 4.16)?
Of course love has always existed, and God, being eternal and unchangeable, did not suddenly become love. He must have always been love and always loved us. The Old Testament does speak of love: the Ten Commandments tell us to love God and our neighbour; God promises that his love will not depart from his people; we read that God abounds in love and his love endures forever. I wonder if our very ability to love is in fact an imprint of God’s image on us.
I think the cultural mistake we have made is attempting to isolate love, placing it within the boundaries marriage, limiting it to a feeling between two people. But love, being God himself, is surely too powerful to be enclosed like this. I think this establishes that we don’t quite get it right if we look for love exclusively in romantic relationships.
But another question still remains: if love has always been there, within marriage or completely independently of it, and if God has always loved us, why do we want to celebrate love at Christmas? Why would Christina Rossetti write that ‘Love came down at Christmas’, to shape generations of people thinking that Christmas equals love?
What changed at Christmas was that the love that was ‘out there’, perhaps abstract and unattainable, really came down to Earth. For the first time, humanity saw what God’s love looks like. I am always struck by that passage in Mark 10, when the rich young man came to Jesus to ask what he had to do to attain eternal life, and Jesus ‘looked at him and loved him’. What is it like when you see God loving you? This love is no longer abstract, no longer ‘out there’. Jesus wept when Lazarus died, because he loved him. Jesus died on the cross because he loved us more than we could ever love him. Humanity had never come into direct contact with love like this until Christ was born, it knew of love but did not know love.
Christianity itself is an invitation to love and it was born when Christ was born, so yes, Christmas is about love. And although Christmas is not about finding someone to fall in love with, it seems that our cultural instinct to look for love is exactly right. I think we simply forget where to look. We get trapped by social pressure and distracted by heavily commercialised romantic ideals. And it is a lot easier to be romantic, to attach all your hopes and dreams to one person you barely know, idealising them in the process, than to look for love in the ordinary, in the familiar, in the difficult, seeking to find love in ourselves for the things and the people we have seen a thousand times and may no longer find exciting. Chasing the imaginary romantic love is much more fun than wresting with reality to find love in it. And yet, love came down at Christmas not to be chained or privatised but to overflow and to be shared.
To quote one of the Christmas romantic classics, ‘Love actually is all around’, but it is because God is all around and within us, sharing his love with us every second, so may we seek to do the same. Merry Christmas! Amen.
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