Winterfest

It’s the middle of December and Glasgow’s Winterfest is in full flow in George Square. This, now traditional, event seems to get bigger and brighter every year with carnival rides, stalls selling food and gifts, staging for music and other entertainment, and an ice rink. Every night George Square is packed full of people enjoying all that Winterfest has to offer.

As part of the Winterfest event there is a nativity scene set up in a quiet(er) corner. The scene is now behind glass (ever since someone stole baby Jesus a few years ago!).

It seems to me that some Christians respond to Winterfest by disapproving of everything associated with it. The argument is that Christmas has been hijacked by the pagan (or more correctly, secular) Winterfest, the incarnation has been pushed into a corner so there’s more room for the entertainment. But I think this is unfair. Christmas may have been ‘hijacked’ or even replaced by Winterfest, but as a non-Christian friend of mine enjoys reminding me, Christmas hijacked an earlier mid-winter celebration. The nativity is not pushed to one side in George Square but is set up in a quieter place to give people an opportunity to stop and take in the scene.

Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama spends much of his writing exploring the idea of ‘periphery’ and more especially Christ as the one who goes to the periphery:

“But about this centre person we learn of his advent that when the time came for his mother to be delivered she gave birth to her first born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn (Luke 2.6,7). The person ‘through whom all things were made’ was placed in a manger. … This centre person lived on the periphery. No! He established his centrality by going to the periphery.” (Mount Fuji and Mount Sinai, 243)

The power of the incarnation, for Koyama, comes by the god who is the centre of the universe taking on human flesh and living a peripheral life. But peripheral should not be confused with unimportant. It was in living on the periphery Jesus asserts his centrality.

So what does this mean for those of us who follow Christ in 2009? It means that we need to recognise the need to give up our desire to be at the centre and to follow Him to the periphery. To realise that our centrality is established not by clinging on to remnants of a once powerful ecclesiology, but to go with Christ to the periphery and to worship Him.

So, I think, let the people of Glasgow have Winterfest, let there be lights and fun and laughter, but at the same time let us have Christmas, an opportunity to worship the incarnate God whose centrality is established on the periphery, and whose body we are.