Someone said to me recently, 'I am glad the Millennium is over at last'. The fact is the Millennium has only just begun and the Year 2000 is the Millennium Year, a Year of Jubilee.
On the 25th December this year, we shall be celebrating the 2000th birthday of our Lord Jesus Christ! Our Millennium candle, lit at the Midnight Mass last year, will continue to burn throughout this Jubilee Year until Epiphany 2001.
The Millennium of Jesus Christ's birth is not on New Year's Day 2000, but 25th December 2000. What a special day that must be for all Christians. I do hope we shall have another spectacular display of fireworks in Waterlooville on Christmas Eve this year, as we had on New Year's Day, although I very much doubt it. Perhaps we can start our Midnight Mass at St George's with some? What an introduction to the 'Gloria in excelsis Deo' that would be!
Even in February, we are still in the Epiphany season, as the old Prayer Book states: the 'Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles'. Christmas does not really end until the feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple or Candlemass on 2nd February. It is so easy for these two important events in the early life of our Lord to be forgotten in the celebration of Christ's birth, but both are an important part of it, as so little is known of his early years.
The incarnation and resurrection of our Lord are the two great events in his life and central to Christian teaching. At his birth, God became man and at his resurrection God in Christ won a great victory over death for ever. A recent survey of some clergy said that many priests are unable to accept these teachings as historical fact, but if they cannot accept God became a man at Bethlehem or that God in Christ won a victory on Calvary, what is left? If he was only a good and holy man, small wonder so many have left the church and no longer practise the Faith.
C.S.Lewis wrote: "A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said wouldn't be a great moral teacher, he'd either be a lunatic - on a level with a man who says he's a poached egg - or else he'd be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse... But don't let us come up with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He hasn't left that open to us. He didn't intend to... I have to accept the view that he was and is God. God has landed on this enemy occupied world in human form".
With my prayers and blessing for the rest of the Great Jubilee.
Your friend and priest.
Fr Malcolm Ferrier
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