Our temptation, when faced with so much of what we have made of the world, is to pull it all down and start again.

Our temptation, when faced with so much of what we have made of the world, is to pull it all down and start again. But that demonstrates our lack of confidence. Most of the visionaries, when they talk about God’s coming, can just begin to imagine how God will be able to transform the world into something recognisably the same and yet astonishingly different…

This is exactly what God does at Christmas. God takes all the materials that are already there and makes something completely new, that we could never have imagined, because we simply do not have God’s creativity. Coming to save the world, God doesn’t look at it with the despair that it would seem to deserve, scrumple it up and decide to start again, making a world peopled with less troublesome creatures this time. Instead God uses the most ordinary thing imaginable, the birth of a baby, to transform everything.

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