Bishop Richard Clark – Irish Christians need to examine national sovereignty issues from Christmas perspective.
Writing as Chair of the Irish Council of Churches, Bishop Clarke comments, “A word difficult to avoid within political or economic discourse at present is that strange term, sovereignty. Can a country be regarded as sovereign, if it is economically in hock to other countries? Is a country sovereign if, at the behest of those beyond its borders, it must make budget cuts that will inevitably lead to severe financial deprivation among its own citizens? Sovereignty is a word with perhaps greater resonance in the Republic of Ireland at the present time, but a moment’s thought will easily relate fundamental ideas about sovereignty to Northern Ireland, where difficult and perilous decisions must shortly be made with regard to financial savings within its public sector, as recession affects the economy of the entire United Kingdom.
“For believing Christians – at Christmas as at all other times – the basis for the faith we share is also a sovereignty, the sovereignty of God. But we find here a very different concept of sovereignty. The sovereignty of God upturns human values. God’s sovereignty, God’s Kingdom, is not a matter of aggrandisement, domination or control. The sovereignty of God is represented in the stable of Bethlehem – as indeed also on the hill of Calvary – as ultimate humiliation and as painful service of others. As here in Ireland we struggle, apparently helplessly, in the grip of manipulation, duplicity, greed and futility, Christians must again point themselves and the world to that other sovereignty, the sovereignty of God, revealed to us in humble and self-effacing service.
“There is no doubt that the Christian Church in many of its traditions has displayed much of the corruption that it so readily rebukes in the world around it, including a self-obsessed and self-satisfied perversion of those values exemplified in the earthly life of Jesus Christ. Indeed we should admit that we as the Church have most certainly corrupted the world as much as we have been corrupted by the world.
“But behind the failures of the institutional Church and its incessant hunger for control over others (whether as individuals or as a society) stands the God brought to each one of us in Christ. And, as Saint John tells us in the great prologue to his Gospel (the so-called “Christmas Gospel”), Christ is in the world whether we always recognise Him here or not. He is in places where the Church neither recognises Him nor wishes to recognise Him, even less to serve Him.
“We as Christians do not bring Christ into the world. Christ is already in the world but on His terms, not on ours and not on the Church’s. It is for us, as Christians together, to find Him in very dark and dangerous places, well beyond the walls of our church buildings or the barriers of our institutionalised structures. Then, when we do find Him – in the poor, the unloved, the frightened, the desperate and in those who have long since understandably given up on us – we are to love Him and to serve Him, as He loves and serves us. This is the sovereignty of God in Christ that we are called to glorify, this and at every Christmas.”