大象传媒

A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Bishop David Walker

Good Morning.

I chuckled at the magazine cartoon. It featured two men pushing supermarket trolleys, both piled high with beer, wine and spirits. The caption was one saying to the other, 鈥淲e wouldn鈥檛 bother with Christmas if it wasn鈥檛 for the kids鈥�. Today, children feature in the Christmas story for a very different reason. It鈥檚 the day on which churches remember the mass murder of all boys in Bethlehem below the age of two. A massacre ordered by King Herod, in his effort to eliminate Jesus before he could grow up to be a threat.

The suffering of children caught up in the concerns of adults is not simply a matter of history. We see it today, in the stick like limbs and distended stomachs of those starving because conflict bars their access to food. We see it in the small bodies washed ashore when an inflatable boat, on an unofficial migration route, capsizes in the middle of a dangerous sea. We see it in the mind-numbing stories of child abuse and neglect, inflicted in our own towns and communities. We see it in the adolescent girl sold into slavery and trafficked for prostitution.

The temptation at Christmas is that we romanticise childhood, with visions of happy families gathered around a bauble bedecked tree. But the story of Herod and the boys of Bethlehem paints a very different picture. And so I pray:

God, you are father all. Be today, a protecting father to the vulnerable, a loving father to the unloved, a rescuing father to the trapped, a healing father to the hurt. And may each of us learn to honour and respect children, for the sake of Jesus, who lived the life of a child among us.

Amen.