Worship - 28 December 2025

Summary of this week's theme

For several years now I have enjoyed the dioramas – the Belens or Pessebres – created in Mahón to depict the anticipation of the birth of Jesus and his early life. Photographs and videos help, but to appreciate them properly you have to be there, in front of the intricate craftsmanship. Sometimes, being present really matters.

Presence, however, is increasingly undervalued. We live in a world designed to minimise direct contact: messages instead of conversations, voice notes instead of voices. We want people to answer when we call, but not to interrupt us when they call back. Even forty years ago, while running focus groups on telecommunications, I remember someone writing, “I want to cause pain to the voicemail lady!” Presence, even at the end of a phone call, matters.

Which brings us to the incarnation: God choosing presence. Not a message, not an image, not a transmission, but a child. The dioramas remind us of this by grounding the Christmas story in real places. Each year they are set in Menorca, locating Christ firmly in the earthy reality of human life. Christ comes to us where we are. In person.

This year most of the scenes are set in La Mola, the fortress marking its 150th anniversary. A costly monument to fear and control, it was never used for its intended military purpose, though it later became a place of imprisonment and death under Franco. It is, sadly, a fitting backdrop for a story that unfolds under Roman occupation.

Except that one diorama is different. The nativity itself is set not in La Mola, but in the ruins of Gaza. The holy family is not immediately visible; the baby appears only reflected in a mirror. The effect is devastating. The gift of Christmas is obscured by rubble, violence, and death. The Christ child, and his countless siblings, are buried beneath destruction.

The gospel today recalls the slaughter of the innocents: children murdered because of a tyrant’s paranoia. Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children, was right to say that all wars are waged against the child. This remains painfully true. Children are still being dehumanised, still being sacrificed, still paying the price of adult cruelty.

Yet hope remains. Like the final thing left in Pandora’s box, it flickers in that reflected cradle. God is still present. Divine tears are shed alongside human ones. Christmas insists that every child is sacred, and that whenever we diminish another’s humanity, we diminish our own.

The nativity placed in Gaza’s rubble reminds us that God enters our broken world as it is. So we are called to be present too: to speak out, to protest, to refuse silence, and to remember that every child is precious to God. Even – and especially – in the midst of humanity’s worst moments.