Last year in the build up to Christmas I went to see the film Nativity!

It’s a feel-good British comedy which centres around two rival schools, each trying to outdo the other by putting on the most ‘successful’ nativity play. The private school always stages a highly professional production which, this time around, turns into something wincingly horrific as it focuses on the character of King Herod and his massacre of the children of Bethlehem.

The story of Herod’s act of terror is there in the Bible (in Matthew’s gospel), but I’m willing to bet that you have never seen it featured in a nativity play, for obvious reasons. However, the very inappropriate play in the film reminds us that too often we sanitize the Bible’s account of Christmas, softening the reality of the birth of God’s son into a harsh and dangerous world, preferring to make it all rather twinkly and glittery and safe.

When Jesus was born he came as king to bring in a kingdom which would turn this world upside-down. No surprise, therefore, that rival powers resisted him and his kingdom from the very beginning, as Herod tried to rub him out. What was a complete surprise, however, not least to his followers was the way in which Jesus dealt with those rival powers – taking all that they had to throw at him as he was nailed to a cross, then rising, victorious, in order that the kingdom of death and evil will not have the last word.

So may you remember this Christmas that you celebrate the birth of a king. May you realise that this king invites us to enter his kingdom – one of life and light and peace with God. His invitation has been the same down through the ages: turn away from trusting in our own goodness and our own power to save ourselves; trust instead in the king who lived and died and rose again for us and who promises to be with us, whatever the future holds.