Did the "Carol Service" Census Really Happen?

If you ask an educated atheist to show that the events described in the New Testament didn't really happen, the number one place they pick is the "carol service" census described in Luke 2.

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to their own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child.
Luke 2:1-5, NIV

Bock identifies five problems people cite when it comes to this passage.

1. There was no known empire-wide census under Augustus
2. No Roman census would have required Joseph to go to Bethlehem to register
3. Israel under Herod wasn't officially part of the Roman Empire until Herod died in 4BC
4. Josephus wrote that the first Roman census was under Quirinius in AD6, and that caused a revolt
5. Quirinius wasn't governor of Syria until 10 years after Herod died. Herod died in 4BC, Quirinius became governor of Syria in AD6.

(It's worth noting in passing that pretty much everyone agrees Jesus was born in 5 or 6 BC - the chap who invented the BC/AD dating system guessed a date for Jesus' birth and got it close, but a few years out).

Some Answers...

Here are some answers to those problems, again adapted from Bock...

1) The Romans liked doing censuses because they liked taxing people. We know there was ongoing census activity across the Roman Empire at the time of Herod.

3) We also know that vassal kings (like Herod) did censuses too when Rome told them to. There's even evidence that Jews under Herod were paying Roman taxes (and hence had been censused).

If there was a census for Roman taxation and at Roman command under Herod, it makes sense that...

2 & 4) If Herod did a census (before 4BC), he might have done it Jewish-style rather than Roman-style. A Jewish-style census could well involve going to ancestral towns, especially if Joseph owned land in Bethlehem as he might well do if descended from David. Jewish land ownership was tied to who your ancestors were. A Jewish-style census wouldn't have caused riots like the Roman-style one in AD6 and so is less likely to be mentioned by Josephus, who is the only non-Biblical historian describing Palestine in that period.

It's also clear that the census Luke is talking about isn't the one in AD6. For example, a census after 4BC wouldn't have required Joseph to go from Nazareth to Bethlehem - after 4BC they were in different provinces. Luke also knows about the AD6 census - he mentions it and the rebellion in Acts 5:37.

So what about Quirinius? Luke 2:2 reads "This was the first census that took place whilea Quirinius was governor of Syria." But the NIV has a footnote saying “Or this census took place before...” The word in question is πρωτος (protos) - dictionaries define it as “first, before, greatest”. So it could be talking about the census BEFORE the one where Quirinius was governor of Syria (the one in AD6 which caused all the trouble). We've got the same issue in English with the word "prototype", which is from πρωτος. Was the prototype of the Jaguar XF the first one, or was it something they made before they made the XF?

Literally, the verse reads “this was the first census of Quirinius, governor of Syria.” Qurinius may well have been asked to administer the census by Herod, even though he wasn't governor of Syria yet. In the same way, we might say "President George W Bush was a notorious drunkard as a young man", even though he wasn't president when he was a young man.

In conclusion, it looks like the difficulties with these verses might well cancel out. There isn't enough historical evidence to say "these verses are definitely right", but there isn't enough evidence to say they're definitely wrong either. That's one of the problems with ancient history - we often don't have enough evidence to check whether written accounts are true or not. On the other hand, we do have that evidence to check lots of other things that Luke wrote, and he gets it right time after time, so chances are he's right this time too.

Incidentally, if this is the best the sceptics can do when it comes to attacking the reliability of the New Testament, what does that say about the rest of their arguments?

Christmas Letter - from church magazine...

How do you feel about Christmas?

Some people love it and have never reallylost the wonderful child-like innocence of it all – they can't wait for the decorations to go up, the music to start playing and the anticipation of the big day itself, spent with loved ones.

For others, it's one of the toughest times of the year. Cold weather, memories of past Christmases where everything went very wrong, broken relationships and loneliness all take their toll. And Christmas is the hardest time to be alone.

And for those of us who go to church, Christmas is often the time when we hear sermon after sermon reminding us not to take Christ out of Christmas, or all we'll be left with is M&S. It's clever, but I don't think it goes far enough.

So amid the abandoned diets, merry-making and sorrow, preparations and presents and pies, let me offer three quick thoughts about Christmas.

1. Let Christmas blow your mind

Of course, Christmas is about Jesus being born in Bethlehem over 2000 years ago. And it's a great story to teach children – there are all kinds of useful lessons about it being important to treat refugees and poor people well. But so often we leave the Christmas story for the children, and we don't stop to realise how earth-shatteringly huge it is. It's like buying a new car, and only ever using it to enjoy the way the windscreen wipers work!

Christmas is when the infinite, eternal God, who made everything that exists became part of his own creation. And not an important part either. He didn't become King of the Universe at Christmas, though even that would have been a big step down. He became an illegitimate baby born to a poor couple from a conquered race, born in a grotty cave-stable in an insignificant backwater of a town in the unfashionable end of the Roman Empire. And that is the same God who spoke and the universe was created. A Christmas carol puts it well:

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain; Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign. In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Or as C.S. Lewis wrote in The Last Battle: “In our world, too, a stable once held something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.” If that doesn't blow your mind, I don't know what will.

2. Let Christmas bring you to your knees

And God did this not just to blow our minds, but to enter into our experience. The God of the Universe became one of us and lived as one of us so that we could know him and be with him. God himself bridged the gap between people and God, and at immense cost to himself.

Do we praise and worship God for Christmas? Do we let the facts of Christmas bring us to our knees? I recommend that you take some time on your own or with another Christian to just think about what God did at Christmas until you are left with no choice but to worship him for it.

3. Let Christmas warm your heart

Christmas is also a time to celebrate what we have in this life. Telling people to put Jesus at the centre of Christmas often doesn't work because they don't see how he will help them enjoy Christmas more. We need to show them that Jesus was right when he said “I have come that they may have life to the full,” and that the best life to live is one with Jesus at the centre.

So I hope and pray you will all enjoy Christmas, that you will enjoy Christmas all the more because Jesus is at the centre of it, and that you will share that enjoyment with others who don't have as much to rejoice about.

God bless, and have a very Happy Christmas!

Christmas, Elephants and Symmetry-Breaking

There's a well known story that seems to have seeped deep into the modern British consciousness, about a group of men trying to understand what an elephant is like by touch alone (they are either blindfolded or blind, depending on the variant of the story). So one man has the trunk, and he declares that the elephant is like a snake. Another has the tail, and he declares the elephant is like a rope. Another has a leg, and he says the elephant is like a tree. Yet another the side, and he says the elephant is like a wall. And so on...

And that is very much like people trying to find out what God is like. We can tell something about him/her through the world she/he has made, but we also observe that other people can come to very different conclusions about God, because they look from different perspectives. But we are also fallible and some of our conclusions are wrong, just we can't tell which ones. In more mathematical language, we see that our position is essentially symmetrical to someone else's, except that we disagree on what God is like, which means that we should not be too certain about what we believe. So we look on people who are certain as being highly suspect.

But Christmas changes all of that, or it should do. Because the message we proclaim at Christmas is that the symmetry is broken. It isn't just different people coming up with different ideas about what God is like because they are coming from different places and looking at different bits of the evidence. It isn't just different groups of people each claiming that God has given them a different book. At Christmas, God himself came into the world in the person of Jesus, and showed us what he was like. So in a world of so much uncertainty, we can really know him. That's something worth getting excited about!

Happy Christmas!

Jesus and Christmas

This isn't a Christmas post - that will come later in the week. This is a quote from Rod Liddle in the Spectator, dated 20/27th December 2008...

In the north of England a boy was not allowed to attend his school's Christmas party because his parents had insisted, ever since he joined the school, that he should not be required to attend lessons in Religious Education. The school presumably thought that they were being scrupulous in abiding by the wishes of the parents - but apparently not. The boy's mum, a Ms Dawn Riddell, was incandescent at the 'cruelty' inflicted upon her poor son. Christmas parties, she said, have got 'absolutely nothing to do with Jesus'. I think that's one of my favourite quotes of this year or any year. And that's where we are now, too.

3 Reasons Christmas is Offensive

He was in the world, and the world was made by him and the world knew him not.
John 1:10, KJV

I think it's interesting and sometimes helpful to push at the inconsistencies in what people believe. A large proportion of people in England today claim to believe the truth of the Christmas story (and what a dangerous word “story” is). But it runs strongly counter to so much of English culture. I'm just going to explore three themes briefly.

God became man

In today's culture, it is offensive to claim that other people are wrong when it comes to things which people have no choice over. So it's wrong to say that one race or sexual orientation or gender is better than another. And the same goes for religion, because most people seem to follow the same religion as their parents. When I was a teacher, pupils were absolutely fine with me saying what I believed. But as soon as I claimed, implicitly or explicitly, that there was something wrong with what they believed, there was opposition.

When it comes down to it, we like the old Indian Parable of the Elephant, where a group of blindfolded men try to describe an elephant by feel. And so the claim at Christmas that the one true God of the whole universe uniquely became a man, and that he did it in Israel in 6BC or thereabouts and not in India or Arabia or Mexico or Britain, should offend us. Because it means that it is possible for some people to have a position where they can know God more clearly than others, because it is possible for us to look at what Jesus said and did and say that God is like X and not like Y.

God became man, and that offends us because it means that we can know God accurately, and therefore we can say that other people are wrong in their knowledge of God.

God became poor

God became man, but God did not become the sort of man whom we might think it worth becoming. He was not born to King Herod or to Caesar Augustus, but to a woman so poor that she could afford nothing more than an animal food-trough to put him in, and that was probably borrowed.

And yes, Jesus became the greatest celebrity the world has ever known – so much a celebrity that 2000 years later, people are still fascinated by his mother's sex life and a book of completely unsubstantiated gossip about him can reach the top of the bestseller charts. But how did he use his celebrity? He did not become rich or powerful as this world defines riches or power. He did not command an army or found a school of philosophy or even get a house. He lived as a homeless teacher, and his celebrity led to crowds baying for his execution, which was what he had planned all along.

And that offends us because we value the rich or the powerful or the famous, and we want to be like them. We do not value the person who chooses to stay in poverty, give up all their power and die the death of a criminal.

God did it for us

We (stereotypical men at least) love to think that we are self-sufficient – that we can cope with life and that we don't need anyone's assistance. And when we do get help, we prefer to be able to reciprocate. People are more likely to buy something than they are to accept it for free. And yet Christmas tells us that we most definitely do need help, and we need it from a God whom we could never even hope to repay.

Why?

And you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.
Matthew 1:21, NIV

Christmas shows not only that we are inadequate and need help, but that we are morally inadequate and need rescuing from the bad things that we do, not just from circumstances outside ourselves.

That is why Christmas is offensive. Happy Christmas.

C.S. Lewis on Christmas

Three things go by the name of Christmas. One is a religious festival. This is important and obligatory for Christians; but as it can be of no interest to anyone else, I shall naturally say no more about it here. The second (it has complex historical connections with the first, but we needn't go into them) is a popular holiday, an occasion for merry-making and hospitality. If it were my business to have a 'view' on this, I should say that I much approve of merry-making. But what I approve of much more is everybody minding his own business. I see no reason why I should volunteer views as to how other people should spend their own money in their own leisure among their own friends. It is highly probable that they want my advice on such matters as little as I want theirs. But the third thing called Christmas is unfortunately everyone's business.

I mean of course the commercial racket. The interchange of presents was a very small ingredient in the older English festivity. Mr. Pickwick took a cod with him to Dingley Dell; the reformed Scrooge ordered a turkey for his clerk; lovers sent love gifts; toys and fruit were given to children. But the idea that not only all friends but even all acquaintances should give one another presents, or at least send one another cards, is quite modern and has been forced upon us by the shopkeepers. Neither of these circumstances is in itself a reason for condemning it. I condemn it on the following grounds.

1. It gives on the whole much more pain than pleasure. You have only to stay over Christmas with a family who seriously try to 'keep' it (in its third, or commercial, aspect) in order to see that the thing is a nightmare. Long before December 25th everyone is worn out -- physically worn out by weeks of daily struggle in overcrowded shops, mentally worn out by the effort to remember all the right recipients and to think out suitable gifts for them. They are in no trim for merry-making; much less (if they should want to) to take part in a religious act. They look far more as if there had been a long illness in the house.

2. Most of it is involuntary. The modern rule is that anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own. It is almost a blackmail. Who has not heard the wail of despair, and indeed of resentment, when, at the last moment, just as everyone hoped that the nuisance was over for one more year, the unwanted gift from Mrs. Busy (whom we hardly remember) flops unwelcomed through the letter-box, and back to the dreadful shops one of us has to go?

3. Things are given as presents which no mortal every bought for himself -- gaudy and useless gadgets, 'novelties' because no one was ever fool enough to make their like before. Have we really no better use for materials and for human skill and time than to spend them on all this rubbish?

4. The nuisance. For after all, during the racket we still have all our ordinary and necessary shopping to do, and the racket trebles the labour of it.

We are told that the whole dreary business must go on because it is good for trade. It is in fact merely one annual symptom of that lunatic condition of our country, and indeed of the world, in which everyone lives by persuading everyone else to buy things. I don't know the way out. But can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter just to help the shopkeepers? If the worst comes to the worst I'd sooner give them money for nothing and write if off as a charity. For nothing? Why, better for nothing than for a nuisance.

Hat tip to Ben Witherington III.

Mary and Princesses

It's Advent...

One of the things that has quite surprised me in getting to know people is the number of women with huge princess fascination complex things. I'd quite like to try to figure out why it happens - I think it's a wanting to feel valued and beautiful thing, but there's got to be more to it in some of the extreme cases I know.

One of my best friends here at college has a young daughter who is fascinated with princesses too (so it's not just 20 somethings). And he wisely tells her that she is a princess only because she is a daughter of God, the King of the Universe.

And this kind of strikes a resonance with the build-up to Christmas. In a lot of the art representing Mary, she's depicted as wearing blue. Originally, this was because that shade of blue could only be made from the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli, so it showed she was really important. In some, probably the majority in this selection, she is depicted as well-off, which she'd have to be to own blue clothes. In the picture above (the Annunciation by Conrad von Soest, 1403), she looks like a noblewoman, and that's quite common in the art of the period.

But that seems to me to be almost completely missing the point.

In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin's name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, "Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you."

Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end."

Luke 1:26-33, NIV

All the evidence we've got points to Mary being a peasant girl. She's from Nazareth, which was a small village in a provincial backwater. But she's clearly a peasant girl who is really devoted to God, as seen from her response "May it be to me as you have said". She is a peasant girl, yet she is to become the mother of the King of Kings because she has found favour with God.

Mary is not a princess. She doesn't even come close. Except that she's a daughter of the Most High God. If you have to compare this to a fairy story, it's much more like Cinderella (with the very major difference that it's true) - God comes and takes a peasant girl and makes her the mother of his King.

It's scandalous really. And it's meant to be. And it shows that God gives hope and brings light not to the princesses of this world, but to the poor who seek him. As Mary's response shows, that's what God's always done.

O Holy Night

It's starting to be the Oxbridge Christmas season, due to stupidly early holidays and so on. But hey, it's nearly Advent in the real world. I've got some interesting stuff to write on Paul's understanding of law, but at the moment I've got too much work to write something sensible.

So here is a rendition of "O Holy Night"; one of the things that is pretty much guaranteed to get me laughing.

Good News

Some good news for everyone this Christmas...

Except for the waistline that is, and for those struggling with food addictions. I honestly don't understand why we as a society treat food addictions any differently from alcohol or drug addictions, and yet we do. Or why gluttony is such an easily overlooked sin. Or, for that matter, why so much of the church seems to hold a neo-Platonist view of food that says that if it tastes nice it must be evil.

They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth. For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.
1 Timothy 4:3-5, NIV

So enjoy chocolate, but enjoy it responsibly!

Christmas Carols

On my dashing round the country tour, last night I was at a carol service where "O Holy Night" was sung as a solo.

That song always (however well it is sung) reminds me of this rendition, which is hilarious.

NB - since I don't currently have access to my ftp server (being on tour and all), I "borrowed" the link from this page. And yes, I did check that their audio host gives unmeterd bandwidth... I don't seen any reason for them to complain, but if they do, I'll happily remove that link.

Sermon on the Magnificat

This is lightly adapted from a sermon I wrote last week for preaching class. The passage is Luke 1:46-55.

Suppose you had to pick a woman to change the world. Who would you choose? Someone famous - a pop star, an actress, a celebrity, a TV presenter? Someone influential - A politician, a top lawyer, maybe a teacher or a doctor or an academic? Or maybe you'd go for someone spectacularly bad who could be turned around – a prostitute maybe or a criminal?

Chances are you wouldn't do what God did in v27 of Luke 1. God is going to change the world, and he starts with Nazareth - a town so obscure that no-one had ever written about it - in Galilee - a provincial backwater that most people ignored, and he starts with Mary, probably a teenage girl who's never even had sex and is engaged to be married to a guy whose only claim to fame is that 1000 years before, he'd had a famous ancestor. Lets face it, she's not the obvious choice for the job. At least get someone with maybe some influence, or useful life experience or at least from somewhere people have heard of! But that's not the way God does things. God chooses Mary.

Reading from verse 28...

The angel went to her and said, "Greetings, you who are highly favoured! The Lord is with you."

Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favour with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end."

“How will this be," Mary asked the angel, "since I am a virgin?"

The angel answered, "The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. For no word from God will ever fail."

"I am the Lord's servant," Mary answered. "May it be to me according to your word." Then the angel left her.

At that time Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judea, where she entered Zechariah's home and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. In a loud voice she exclaimed: "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear! But why am I so favoured, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfil his promises to her!"

Mary has had an angel appear to her and tell her that she's “found favour with God”, and that she's going to be the mother of the Son of God. Even her respectable relative, Elizabeth, is acting like she's amazing. She's probably realised that she might well become the most famous woman of all time.

How does she respond?

She takes everything people have said and points it back to God. It's not about her at all really. Listen again to what she says:

My soul glorifies the LORD – literally that's closer to “my soul bigs God up” - and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant – that would be better as the “humiliation of his servant”. From now on all generations will call me blessed for the Mighty One has done great things for me – holy is his name.

She's praising God because God has noticed her, even though she's nothing.

Actually, it's not just Mary. She doesn't even mention herself again in the song, but she notices that actually when God chose her, he did what he's always been doing.

His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation. He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers (powerful ones) from their thrones but has lifted up the humble (or the humiliated ones – the low ones). He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel, remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his descendants forever, just as he promised his ancestors.

God has been doing what God has always done. Mary has been looking at the Old Testament, and realising that's always the way that God acts, and that's the way God promised to act. You know, they say that 60% of this song is lifted directly from lots of different bits of the Old Testament, and the other 40% is heavily influenced by it. How many teenage girls could do that. Come to think of it, how many adults who are regular church attenders could do that?

Mary's been studying her Bible, she knows what God is like. She knows that God always looks out for and helps the humiliated, the low, the hungry ones who fear him, who respect him, who honour him. He doesn't go for the proud, the powerful, the rich – if anything, God brings them down because they are too cocky, they don't respect God properly. So God chose Abraham. He was a nobody too – he was a nomadic Chaldean sheep herder. He was so unimportant, archaeologists reckon they'll probably never have any archaeological evidence that he even existed. But God met him and told him that he would become a mighty nation. Why? Not because Abraham was great, but because God loved him.

Here's Moses speaking to the people as they are about to enter the promised land. It's Deuteronomy 7

The LORD did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. But it was because the LORD loved you and kept the oath he swore to your ancestors that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt.

God didn't choose his people because they were great. He chose them because he is a loving God. He loved them because he loved them, he made promises to them because he wanted to. God doesn't choose the best people, he chooses whoever he wants.

God chose Mary.

And when he did that, he did exactly what he always does, and what he's promised he'll keep on doing. He chose the foolish things, the weak things, the despised things, so that no-one can boast.

We need to hear this today.

Maybe you're feeling weak. Maybe you're feeling foolish. Maybe you're feeling despised. Maybe you're feeling like you're a nobody. Well if so, Mary would say that's great, because God chooses people like you. If you respect God for who he is, if you fear him, then God will show mercy on you. God will lift you up, God will fill you with good things. That's what Mary's son Jesus came to do – to show mercy to people like you so that you can know the incredible joy of knowing God for yourself, and praise him as Mary does here.

If you to find out more about how you can come to know God, e-mail me, or talk to a Christian you know.

Or maybe you don't feel like that. Maybe you're proud, maybe you're powerful, maybe you're rich. For you then, this isn't such good news, because God scatters those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He brings down the powerful, he sends the rich away empty.

To you, what this passage is saying is “Change”. Come before God, recognise that he is the amazing God who created the universe with a word - the God who keeps everything in the entire universe running, the God who is so big and so powerful that we can't even begin to get our heads around it, the God who is so pure that if anything or anyone is less than perfect in his presence they just get burnt up. Come before that God, and realise that you are nothing. Realise that however rich you think you are, you are bankrupt in God's sight – that however clever you think you are, you are a complete fool – that however powerful you are, that you can do nothing. Recognise that, then maybe when you see that you are poor, that you are humiliated and worth nothing, when you are hungry for God, then he will have mercy on you. Or maybe, like me, you're a bit of both. Maybe you need to hear that where you are weak God is longing to bless you and to build you up, but where you feel strong and rich, he will tear down your pride so that you come to trust in him alone.

Because that's what he's doing by choosing a nobody like Mary. That's what he's always done. And that's what he's promised to do.

Lets pray.

Father God, where we are proud, break us. Make us into people who recognise our poverty, our humiliation, who hunger and thirst for you, and then who know what it is to be filled and lifted up by you, and to rejoice in God our Saviour.

Father Christmas

A random not-especially-seasonal post today. I was in a coversation a few days ago where the topic came up and I realised I should write some more on it.

I was quite traumatised as a child over the whole Santa Claus thing. Here's how it happened.

My parents, in a well-meaning but ultimately misguided way, had told me that Father Christmas existed. They told me that he came down the chimney and put presents in my stocking. My stocking certainly went from being empty to being full of presents overnight, and many of the presents claimed to be from Father Christmas.

Having a fairly scientific mindset, I wanted to know how this worked. Specifically, I was bothered about the fact the chimney was bricked up and wasn't sure about the level of communication that seemed to take place between Father Christmas and my parents. So I stayed awake one year - I guess I was about 6 - and waited to see what would happen. As my parents were going to bed, I heard my mother come into the room, so I said hello. She seemed surprised, mumbled something about checking if I was asleep so Father Christmas could come, and went out. I figured I'd better pretend to be asleep the next time, and true to form, my mum filled my stocking with presents.

The next morning, I mentioned this to my parents, and they still tried to maintain that Santa existed, but came up with some much less plausible story, which I didn't believe. I know now that they meant well, but I also know that I lost a lot of respect for my parents that Christmas. I stopped regarding what they said as true just because they said it - I stopped trusting them. It felt as if they were lying to me, and thinking I was stupid to believe the lies.

Why do I say this? Because lies, however well-intentioned, damage relationships.

I think there are some situations where lying is ok - for example if I was hiding a load of Jews in Nazi Germany and the SS came looking. One thing that Daniel Hill has been pushing me on a fair bit lately in when I think it is ok to lie and when I think it isn't. I guess the key issues there are an understanding of the big picture, a knowledge of how others would respond to your statement, and issues of informed and humble consciences. If my parents had understood how lying about Santa would affect me, they wouldn't have done it.

Corban?

I came across an interesting situation the other day. A young married couple, living in an expensive area of the country, were quite strapped for cash. One of them had parents who were quite openly very well off.

The young couple usually found Christmas very helpful, as the rich parents usually gave them some money. Imagine their reaction then when they found that the parents had bought them some of Oxfam's latest range. Basically, they gave the money to Oxfam to get something for people in poor countries. They then gave the young couple a card, saying that they'd done this and what they'd bought.

Now, to my mind, this doesn't seem very good. If you want to give money to Oxfam, that's fine (though I'd think Tear Fund would be better). But why should that detract from gifts to others, especially when they were relying on those gifts, and especially especially when you hadn't asked the couple first?

This got my sympathy, of course. But it also started ringing bells in my head.

Then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, "Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat." He answered them, "And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God commanded, 'Honor your father and your mother,' and, 'Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.' But you say, 'If anyone tells his father or his mother, What you would have gained from me is given to God, he need not honor his father.' So for the sake of your tradition you have made void the word of God.
Matthew 15:1-6, ESV

Seems like there's nothing new under the sun...

To avoid hypocrisy though, it is worth thinking about how I sometimes think of pious excuses for not supporting my family and friends.