Christmas Day
Isaiah 9:2, 4, 6-7; Luke 2:1-14
Auditoire de Calvin, December 25 2025
The inspiration for this Christmas Day sermon was the quote from Charles Péguy with which it begins. Having written the sermon, I then wrote an all-age talk about my own childhood. This is where we start.
Love came down at Christmas
When I was a little child, we sometimes spent Christmas at my grandparents’ house. Their house was in the small town of Wexford, on the southeast coast of Ireland. It always seemed to me very large. When I visited it again, about 10 years ago, I was amazed to discover how much it had shrunk.
On Christmas Eve, we little ones were sent to bed early. Much later, we were woken up to go to midnight Mass in one of the tall-spired churches in the town and then tumble back into our cosy bed. When we woke up in the morning, underneath the bedclothes we always found one of Grandad’s big, thick, woollen stockings and inside the stocking we found an apple, an orange, and a small toy.
It was a magical introduction to a magical day. There was turkey, of course, and plum pudding and Christmas cake, and after dinner, the ceremonial unwrapping and opening of the presents.
But we never forgot that the most important gift of all was the one that came down from heaven. God came to us in the form of a little child. Love came down at Christmas.
Sermon: Justice or mercy?
Let me start with a poem.
It’s a short extract from a very long poem, The Mystery of the Holy Innocents, by the French writer Charles Péguy, who was born in Orléans in 1873 and died 41 years later, in the early months of the first world war – shot in the forehead on the day before the beginning of the Battle of the Marne.
It goes like this:
Nothing so beautiful as a child who falls asleep
while saying his prayers, says God.
I have seen the dark, deep sea, and the dark, deep forest,
and the dark, deep human heart.
Yet, I tell you, says God, I know nothing so beautiful in all the world
As a little child who falls asleep while saying his prayers
And who laughs to the angels as he goes to sleep.
And who is already confusing everything and
understanding nothing more
And who stuffs the words of the Our Father all awry,
pell-mell into the words of the Hail Mary
while a veil is already dropping on his eyelids,
the veil of night on his face and his voice.
I have never seen anything so funny, and consequently,
I know nothing so beautiful in the world.
Nothing is so beautiful, and it’s even a point
On which the Blessed Virgin agrees with me.
And I can truly say that this is the only point on which we agree.
For generally, we disagree.
Because she is for mercy.
And I must be for justice.
*
Péguy was a highly individual thinker. He never ran with the crowd but always went his own way. He was something of a socialist but also something of a French nationalist. He was a convert to Catholicism who never in his life received communion, because he had made the mistake of marrying a woman who was not Catholic before he converted. When Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was falsely accused of spying for Germany, wrongly convicted, and condemned to Devil’s Island, Péguy was one of those who championed his cause, eventually with success.
*
I like this extract by Péguy because it reminds me of my childhood, of which I spoke earlier.
But I quote it for a different reason. I quote it because of how it ends.
Mary, says Péguy, is for compassion, for mercy. God, says Péguy, is for justice. So almost always they disagree.
But why should we have to contrast the two? Why should we think that one can be for mercy or for justice – but not for both at once?
In one of the most famous verses from the Old Testament, the Book of Micah says that God has told us what is good,
… and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8)
We make this contrast between justice and mercy because a long but distorted Christian tradition says that God is for justice, and shows God’s commitment to justice, by punishing us.
For all his individuality, Péguy at the end of this extract is heir to this utterly perverse tradition.
Christmas Day, when God descends to earth in the form of a little child, is a good day for calling out this tradition as the nonsense it is and always was.
*
These days, it’s perhaps easier to do that. Nowadays, it is fashionable to advocate for restorative justice and for transformative justice.[1]
In the context of criminal actions, restorative justice seeks to repair harm after crime or violence rather than chucking the criminal behind bars. Offenders are encouraged to take responsibility for what they have done and to understand the harm they have caused. Restorative justice gives them a chance to redeem themselves and discourages them from causing further harm.
Transformative justice is a larger, social framework that focuses on the root causes of harm and injustice within communities. It aims to create social change rather than relying on punishment and prison. It emphasizes accountability, community healing, and the dismantling of systemic oppression.
Sound familiar? Ring a faint Christian bell?
*
Love came down at Christmas not to punish but to restore. Christ was born on Christmas Day not to condemn but to transform.
“We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” say his disconsolate disciples on the road to Emmaus. And so he was – just not quite in the way they had imagined.
The God we see in the birth of Jesus, in the life that Jesus lived, in the death that Jesus died, and in his being raised again to new life, is a God who aims to restore God’s chosen people and all the peoples of the earth, who aims to restore the earth itself, and to restore all of us who are in need of healing and wholeness.
The God we see in Jesus aims to transform our world and to transform each and everyone of us within it.
The God we see in Jesus is not in the punishing business and never was.
“As I live,” says the Lord God in the Book of Ezekiel, “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked but that the wicked turn from their ways and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel?” (Ezek 33:11)
So we don’t need Mary to tug at God’s sleeve to beg for mercy. And we don’t need Jesus to die on a cross to plead for mercy from a God determined to withhold it.
The compassion of Mary in centuries of Christian folklore and tradition, the compassion of Jesus that shines forth from each of the four Gospels, these show us the face of God. They show us the compassion of a God who is nearer to us than we are to ourselves and who cares for us more than we care for ourselves.
*
Those who rule and misrule us – from Trump and Netanyahu to Starmer and Von der Leyen – would like to keep us separate, fragmented and divided. That makes us easier to control.
But God comes to us in Jesus of Nazareth to break down our divisions, to make us one people in one world.
How does this work? The devil is certainly in the details, but the mechanism is essentially simple.
God come to us in Jesus of Nazareth, and we respond by becoming different people. God shows God’s love for us in Jesus of Nazareth, and we respond by how we treat one another.
What else are we to do?
We may be grateful to God for this unexpected Christmas gift. We may want to say thank you to God – saying thank you is not a bad description of Christian worship. We may even claim to love God.
But there is nothing practical we can do for God. We can’t take God to a movie – or even to the Grand Théatre – or give God flowers or a pretty hat.
Nothing we do makes any difference to God. The God we worship is, in the words of the familiar hymn, “unresting, unhasting, and silent as light; nor wanting, nor wasting, but ruling in might”.
Nothing we do changes God. Everything we do in response to God changes us.
The good news of Christmas is that God loves us. Our response to that love, quite simply, is to love one another as we love ourselves. Our response to that love is to dedicate ourselves to showing that another world is possible.
If this is how we respond, then that other world is indeed possible.
[1] A good place to start is the two Wikipedia entries on these topics.