Notes on courage…with Rev Katherine Chow

Christmas is a somewhat nostalgic season; the sights, sounds and scents can provide comfort through our collective customs. The lights, bells and smells evoke a sense of warmth and wonder. It may just be me but this year feels a bit more complicated and the collective mood seems sombre. Perhaps it’s disjointed to disregard all that is happening in our world right now and simply get on with some festive cheer. This year we have witnessed ongoing war and conflict, political division, social polarisation, famine and humanitarian crisis, global economic uncertainty, natural disasters and unpredictable weather. It’s hard to read the news headlines and watch the sobering levels of human suffering and simply sit back and enjoy a Pret Christmas lunch sandwich and a pumpkin spice latte while remaining disinterested and unaffected. 

As we remember what Christmas is really about and prepare to reorient our lives around the birth of Jesus, what can we draw on to find hope in unsettling times? I’m comforted by the fact that the birth of Jesus occurred during a turbulent period of human history full of political turmoil and religious unrest; Jesus arrived amid a backdrop of terror, violence and massacre. Jesus entered into the world as a newborn baby, in simplicity, humility and vulnerability, to be God with us amid it all. It was not comfortable, convenient or clinical. I imagine times must have felt pretty dark back then too, and so we come and adore a God who is not only unafraid to enter into humanity’s broken reality but who understands intimately the full range of our human experience and human suffering and refuses to turn his face away. 

Christmas offers us an invitation to remember that God isn’t distant and disinterested but close and near, including when life feels messy, chaotic and unpredictable. The Christian faith is first and foremost about relationship not rules; it is about a person and not merely a philosophy. Has it ever felt easy to say yes to God? When we think of how low God descended to bring us back home into relationship with him, it should be straightforward to say yes in faith. But if we really understand what saying yes to God means and the life choices and consequences that come with following Jesus faithfully, we realise that the Christian life is far from straightforward and hardly ever easy. 

Mary: a model for us 

Let’s look at Mary, who was the first Christian, the first hearer of the good news and the first person who said yes to Jesus. What did it mean to her, and what can we learn from her response?  

“In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendent of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said: ‘Greetings, you who are highly favoured! The Lord is with you…Do not be afraid, Mary…You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants for ever; his kingdom will never end’” (Luke 1:26-28, 30-33). 

In order for Mary to say yes to God, she weighed things up and decided to give up on the idea of a comfortable life. She agreed to walk down an inconvenient path and surrendered control of her life, putting her trust in God regardless of the outcome. She knew that saying yes to God would mean laying down her reputation, enduring disgrace and shame because of the rumours that would spread of her having a child outside of marriage. It would mean stepping out of what little security she already had, jeopardising her relationship with Joseph, to walk with God into uncertainty and the unknown. Saying yes to God was going to be deeply costly for Mary; her soul would be pierced as she watched Jesus grow up, become a man and then suffer the most brutal miscarriage of justice in human history, dying on the cross right in front of her very eyes.  

This courageous, unwed teenager is a model of faith for us today. Courage is the ability to control your fear in difficult situations. It is not about the absence of fear, but about the ability to act even in the midst of it. It is about choosing to do what is right, even when it’s hard, and accepting the risk and adversity that inevitably lie ahead. With the rise of cultural Christianity and the co-opting of the Christian faith for political agendas, we may need to be willing to do what is uncomfortable, inconvenient and costly in order to follow Jesus faithfully. To risk our reputation, to overcome fear, to put our head above the parapet in order to say yes to God. In a far from straightforward situation, I love Mary’s pretty straightforward response: “I am the Lord’s servant” (v38). What does courageously saying yes to God look like for you this Christmas?