Revd Dr Colin Heber-Percy on how Christmas shows us that ‘the most powerful person in the world’ is not an emperor, or a high priest or the CEO of a tech company, but a helpless baby in the arms of a loving mother.
When I was a child, behind the doors of my Advent calendar, I used to find illustrations of the Nativity story: shepherds, angels, a star. These days, we’re more likely to come across ‘taster’ packets of artisanal cheeses or little glass bottles of expensive scent. Or chocolates.
Last month, I bought my daughter Aggie an Advent calendar, as I always do. She insists, as she always does, on a calendar with goodies behind the cardboard flaps. On the days when she’s not here, I open the door and eat the chocolate. It’s a Father Christmas calendar and the images behind each of the doors are calculatedly unconnected with the story of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem. There’s a snowman, a plum pudding with icing on top and a sprig of holly, a candy cane. It’s easy to dismiss the calendar as meretricious nonsense, as a catch-penny. Yet, after a few of the doors have been opened, I find I rather like the way the symbols seem to combine to tell a story of sorts. It’s not a story with a plot or a moral, but it’s a story inasmuch as it relies on certain familiar tropes and images that combine to create a world. There’s something reassuring and uncanny at the same time about the way the gingerbread man and the red-nosed reindeer seem to belong together in a shared pattern of associations.
In an influential essay of 1919, Sigmund Freud analysed our sense of the uncanny in literature and in our everyday lives. He points out that the English word ‘uncanny’ doesn’t quite capture the meaning of the German word it normally translates. That German word is unheimlich, which literally means ‘unhomely’. What interests Freud is the way the unfamiliar emerges from and wraps around the familiar. He suggests, therefore, that ‘the uncanny is in some way a species of the familiar’. Like charity, uncanniness begins at home.
Advent and Christmas are homely seasons. At this time of year, many of us travel home to be with our families and loved ones. We sit around tables in our homes, enjoy home cooking. We sing familiar carols and hear a familiar story about shepherds, angels, wise men from the East and so on.
We’re also in panto season. You can go out to see Babes in the Wood, Aladdin, Cinderella. Take your pick. Yet it doesn’t really matter which you choose. You know the stories. You know the characters. You know when to call out ‘He’s behind you!’. And so on.
‘Do our secularised calendars offer us a truer trajectory than we might suppose?’
What’s unheimlich about any of this? Behind the first door of my childhood Advent calendar was a mystery, a man: hairy, half-naked hermit striding out of the desert towards us. Only years later did I realise it was John the Baptist. John emerges from the desert to alert us to the uncanny lurking behind the tinsel and the baubles. Jesus questions the crowds about John. ‘What did you go out into the wilderness to look at?’ he asks. ‘A reed shaken by the wind? What then did you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who wear soft robes are in royal palaces. What then did you go out to see? A prophet?’ (Matthew 11:7-9).
Jesus’s repeated questions suggest the people didn’t know quite what they’d find when they went out to investigate who this John might be. Yet they sensed something momentous was out there, waiting. They had expectations. However, as the unfamiliar emerges from the familiar, so the unexpected waits behind the expected or half-expected.
As do all prophets, John compels us to see the homely as our own scripted construction. He’s not the celebrity with top billing in a pantomime we know by heart, he’s the unnamed stagehand taking down the scenery at the end of the production, revealing the reality behind, sweeping up all the glitter and extinguishing the limelights.
John’s presence reminds us to see Advent not as a countdown through cosmetics or confectionery, but towards a coming kingdom. It’s not a kingdom with thrones and borders and royal palaces; it’s not even ‘from this world’ (John 18.36). Yet it is near. It takes the uncanny, the half-familiar, the prophet to make us see what has been waiting for us all along: a radical truth we’ve somehow managed to obscure behind our stage sets of the status quo, which we’ve chosen to overlook in favour of our own devices and desires.
Revd Dr Colin Heber-Percy.
Luke’s introduction to John’s prophetic ministry is a masterstroke of unheimlich: ‘In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness’ (Luke 3.1-2).
First, Luke offers us a series of verifiable facts. We’re on safe ground here, surely? We’re told — as you’d expect in an orderly, historical account — who the emperor was at the time, who the governor was, who was ruling in Galilee and in other regions, who the high priests were. We’re told the name of John’s father. Yet then… ‘He’s behind you!’ The order and conventions are interrupted: the word of God came to John. And it comes, not despite, but somehow through the everyday, lending meaning and significance to all those names which otherwise we’d have long forgotten. After all, why would we remember Caiaphas? Why would we remember an apparatchik like Pilate, or a grubby puppet like Herod, if it weren’t for their encounters with the Truth, this uncanny carpenter’s son from Galilee?
Could it be the case that all the candy canes and snowmen and Father Christmases in our saccharine and secularised calendars might be offering us, albeit inadvertently, a truer trajectory into the Christmas season than we (or their designers) might have supposed? Collectively, they are the homely, the everyday, the forgettable and the banal behind which the unheimlich waits.
In 1994, Steve Jobs gave an interview in which he claimed the storyteller is ‘the most powerful person in the world’. He went on: ‘The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation.’ However, whatever he thinks, Jobs isn’t talking about the story here; he’s talking about propaganda, about pantomime. He’s talking about the ‘story’ told to us on the tongues of Tiberius, Pilate, Herod and Caiaphas. Certainly, these ‘plotted’ and familiar stories set an agenda: theirs. Yet the real story does the opposite; it resets every agenda. No story is more unsettling than the Nativity story. Are you sitting comfortably? You certainly shouldn’t be.
At some point this Christmas, as we make our way home and settle back into the familiar, I pray we can, each of us, encounter the unheimlich, too: ‘no room at the inn’, a filthy stable. The radical, shattering truth: that ‘the most powerful person in the world’ is not an emperor, or a high priest or the CEO of a tech company, but a helpless baby in the arms of a loving mother.
The Revd Dr Colin Heber-Percy is vicar of the Savernake Forest parishes in Wiltshire and the author of ‘Tales of a Country Parish’ (Short Books). His latest book ‘Lost in the Forest: Notes on not belonging from the English countryside’ will be published on February 27, 2025 (Gaia, £18.99), and is available for pre-order now
