"Was made very man of the substance of the Virgin Mary his Mother"

I greet you most warmly for the feast of the nativity of the Lord 1999. Christian faith today is not facing new threats, but old threats renewed, and I pray that the in the third millennium Christians will be led to announce the gospel together with a single united voice, so that the world may believe.

It has often been said that there are no new heresies. When people today abandon or misunderstand faith in Jesus Christ as the unique Lord and Saviour of the human race, they tend to do so in terms remarkably similar to those used by opponents of the Gospel in earlier centuries. Of course, they are not always to be blamed for their mistakes; after all, the wonder of Christmas brought the cleverest people of Jesus' own day to their knees.

Early Fathers of the Church loved to point out how the birth of Jesus not only fulfilled all human knowledge, but put it in its place. The wise men from the east laid their treasures before the infant Lord of all wisdom, admitting not only that God was the source of their wisdom, but also that everything they knew was as nothing compared with the fullness of God's truth.

In a way that beggars our understanding, God took a new and historically unprecedented initiative by implanting his eternal Word and Wisdom into the womb of Mary, where he grew, was nurtured and from whom he was born as the one person, unique and irreplaceable, who was and is both God and fully human.

For those who deny the existence of God and for those who deny there is any human nature as such this is bound to be nonsense. But to us who believe, it is the key to our lives. How wonderful that God should not only have created us, looked on us and said "that is good", but that God should also share what is like to be human, so that nothing we enjoy or suffer is "alien" to God! That is the good news of the gospel; that is the good news of Christmas.

I pray that you will have a happy and holy Christmas, and that God will strengthen in all his people the knowledge that "the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us". Happy Christmas!

+John Hind, Bishop in Europe
Christmas 1999