Midnight Mass 2025
Isaiah 52 and John 1.
This year I have been playing Whamageddon.
Perhaps you have been too, but if not and this is a new one to you the rules are simple. Find a group of friends, relatives, colleagues, whatever. As many as you like. Your aim is to avoid hearing Wham’s 1984 hit, Last Christmas for the duration of Advent, this year from the 31st of November to the 24th of December. You create a prize pot, and the last one standing wins. And then you bind yourselves to a sacred covenant that you will be honest, and that when you hear those familiar words you’re out no cheating. To lean on a cricketing analogy if you nick it, you walk, even if you are Alex Carey.
I was playing with a group of vicars that I trained with years ago. The prize; a bottle of Bombay Sapphire. One by one the others fell- a school chaplain out when Last Christmas formed part of the end of term show. A vicar in London got blasted in the Westfield shopping centre. You can imagine the tension when it was just me one other, a vicar up in the fens near Cambridge, left. But two days ago I got in the car, and found Emily my wife had left on Smooth Radio. This is a rookie error, I tried to change to a podcast immediately, but it was too late. Once bitten, twice shy… Oh well, there’s always next year.
Why has Last Christmas become such an enormous hit that it is all but unavoidable for the month of December? Well it must be something to do with the lyrics, which describe the universal experience of offering something precious, vulnerable, fragile to someone else only for it to be rejected, or thrown back in our faces.
It’s that old story of unrequited love that makes great plays, films and novels; the tale of a yearning heart seeking a home. Even the most jaded and cynical of us might be able to think back and remember a time when this story was our own.
Tonight we have heard one of the greatest openings to a book that has ever been written. And it is a story of a vulnerable love that is woven into the foundation not just of our hearts but of creation itself. Two thousand years ago, when St John took up his quill and scratched the opening of his Gospel, that was the story he told.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came into being through him. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.
Here is Jesus, says St John, at the dawn of all things, the Word of God, the one through whom everything exists. In all the cacophony of cosmic creation there is one Word that was in the beginning, and that is Jesus. That’s St John’s first point. Jesus is Emmanuel, which means, God with us. Not just a little slither of God, or an intimation, or a reflection, but God, the Word, the one who was in the beginning. That’s Jesus. That’s St John’s first point.
And the second point is the one that Wham and everyone else doing the unrequited love thing wrote about.
He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.
Last Christmas, I gave you my heart, but the very next day, you gave it away. That’s St John’s second point. Jesus comes, and we turn away. God offers us his son, the fullness of who God is, everything he has. And we go, meh. But if we do that’s not the end of the story.
This year, to save me from tears, I’ll give it to someone special. This one’s the line that God doesn’t say. For God, we don’t stop being someone special. We, in all our silliness, pettiness, selfishness, can dare to call ourselves children of God because he will not, cannot give up on what he loves, which is you and me.
That’s the Good News of Christmas you see, Jesus the Word comes to us again, the angels sing, and we see his strange glory, a glory that looks like a sleeping infant on cold night. In him is the invitation to life and light, to become children born, as St John says, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man but of God.
That is why we are here. Thank God for the gift of Jesus Christ, the child in the manger, the man on the cross, our hope and our salvation in this world and the next.
Last Christmas God gave us his heart, from the heavens he came to a manger of hay.
Happy Christmas to you all.
Illustration: Adoration of the Magi, Sandro Botticelli, 1482. Tempera on panel. Uffizi, Florence, Italy.