At Christmas more sensitive to the nuances of life – Neumarkt

23.12.2020

Photo: Christian Amthor
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Perhaps Bach wanted to suggest that suffering begins with the Incarnation, and that the cross is already remembered at the crib, as Hans Georg Anniès put into the picture in the woodcut “Two prayers”. Or maybe it was just the usual melody in the Leipzig and Dresden hymn books as interpreted by more recent Bach research.

Whatever Bach’s drive to use this melody in the Christmas Oratorio, some listeners of the Christmas Oratorio may find it pensive to hear a melody in this joyful work that he or she knows from funerals.

Maybe this year at Christmas we are more sensitive to the ambivalent nuances of life that we have not noticed in the usual happiness of Christmas. “He, the Word, became a man, a real man of flesh and blood. He lived among us, and we saw his power and majesty.” This is how the Gospel of John sums up what the other Gospels tell in their colorful Christmas stories. God becomes a person like you and me when he enters the child in the manger and exposes himself to what it means to be human.

These are not just the cornerstones of how to be born or how to die. There are the many nuances in between, including the struggle for insight, the search for the right and the good, fluctuating between more or less good arguments on the way to contestable decisions.

In view of this Christmas Eve, many people will probably have wrestled in a way that they have never been before about whether or not to go to a service. There are good reasons why many will not come to the services this year and will hopefully experience a blessed Christmas in their own way.

Much less than usual will probably come, again this year, with good reasons, in services that will be different than usual, in not even half-full churches, with masks. And when you get up at the end and look with shining eyes at the glowing Christmas tree, this year you will have to stand in silence and listen to the organ playing “O you happy” or “Silent Night”.

The gleam in the eyes this year are perhaps less tears of emotion than tears of the knowledge that human life, which comes close to God in the child in the manger, can also be the way we have to endure it together these days. “How should I receive you – who became human in flesh and blood?”