I’ve often thought that we get the Christmas story’s timeline hopelessly muddled! For instance:

– We tell the story of the angel telling Mary about her forthcoming birth just a few weeks before Christmas, although there’s no reason to think that her pregnancy didn’t last the usual nine months (the Catholic Church gets this right with the feast of the Annunciation in March).

– We give the impression (yes, Nativity plays, I’m looking at you!) of Mary and Joseph rushing frantically from door to door in Bethlehem looking for a place to stay, mere hours before she gave birth. The Bible doesn’t say that: they could have arrived in the town days or even weeks before.

– Even if we realise that the Wise Men didn’t push past the shepherds leaving to get into the stable to see Jesus, we still celebrate them at Epiphany, a few days into in January. In fact Jesus might have been a toddler by the time of their amazing visit!

– Early in February some churches mark Jesus’ parents bringing him into the Jerusalem Temple to be dedicated. But that happened when he was just eight days old!

– And we remember King Herod’s appalling massacre of the small children just after Boxing Day – yet that took place after the Wise Men had departed and the Holy Family had fled to Egypt.

So – and I don’t know why – the so-called “Church calendar” has managed to confuse and garble the timescale of two fairly straight-forward Bible stories! And we’re adding to that confusion tonight: for here we are on Christmas Eve, looking forward to Jesus’ birth in just a few hours time – yet celebrating Holy Communion, a ritual which commemorates Jesus’ death over thirty years later! So why are we mixing Christmas with Easter, birth with death, a tiny baby with a fully-grown adult, a manger in Bethlehem with a cross outside Jerusalem? Couldn’t we have just celebrated Christmas now and left Easter for its proper time? Wouldn’t that have been cosier and more comforting?

Well yes, it would. But, quite apart from the fact that “Midnight Mass” is a long-standing tradition in the churches (not that we hold ours at midnight, nor call it “Mass”!), there is a real value in celebrating Communion at this time. For if we think of Jesus just as a baby – yes, even as God being born among us – we’re really not “getting” what Christmas is all about. It would be like knowing the Introduction to the story and then slamming the book shut without even reading Chapter 1, let alone its conclusion.

For the story is about God coming to earth; then experiencing its joy and pain, the whole gamut of human life, at first hand. And of course it leads up to those climactic events of Easter when Jesus was arrested, tried falsely and condemned to a painful death: not because God lost control but because it was all part of his plan for our salvation. Jesus in the manger without Jesus on the Cross is meaningless, just another birth (and a pretty nondescript one, at that).

So, in a sense, I’ve said that Jesus was “born to die”. But I certainly don’t want you to leave thinking that nothing of importance happened between his birth and his death, that his ministry and teaching were no more than an interesting interlude filling up some of the years before those two defining events! That would be ridiculous: for Christians hang onto every word of Jesus’ teaching, Christians see his claim to be God’s Son proved by the miracles he performed, Christians can observe the true meaning of care and compassion and learn from his example, Christians can understand what a holy life really looks like – not one lived in comfort or seclusion but in the hurly-burly of the real world.

If the Bible stories of Jesus had jumped directly from his birth to his death our lives – indeed, the history of the whole world! – would clearly have been immeasurably poorer. More to the point, we’d be left asking ourselves, “Why should we believe in this man? Who exactly is he, was he even real? We just don’t know enough about him”. But, in fact, as St John says in his Gospel, the stories we have about Jesus give us more than enough information for us to believe that he “is the Messiah, the Son of God” and that through faith in him we may have spiritual life.

Nevertheless it is the story of Christ’s Passion – that nervous meal with the disciples, those agonised prayers in the Garden, that night-time arrest, the questioning, the mocking. the torturing, the shameful parade through the crowded streets, the pain of the nails being driven home, the humiliation of the crown of thorns – it’s that which makes sense of the Nativity and pulls the whole tale together. For without Christ’s death – and, even more, his glorious resurrection – Jesus would be no more than a remarkable, perhaps divinely-inspired, miracle-worker with great wisdom and a gift of communication. The dozing infant king is destined for the cross, the nails, the piercing and the grave, right from the start.

I’ve often said that, at Communion, we look backward, at the present, and into the future: back to Jesus’ Last Supper and Crucifixion, around at the Church he has brought into being, and ahead towards our hope of glory. Tonight we look back just a tiny bit further (for thirty or so years are nothing within the history of the universe or in God’s eternity} – we look to the manger as the necessary precursor to both the Cross and the empty tomb; to put it in simple terms, Jesus could never have died if he hadn’t first been born. And, as we do that looking back, something amazing happens: we suddenly get a fleeting glimpse of future glory, as those Christmas angels break into our space and time with their message of good news and coming salvation – an intervention which, you’ll remember, some onlookers hoped in vain to see at Calvary.

Yes, we may have got the timeline of Christmas muddled. But we can rest assured that God wasn’t – and isn’t – muddled! In fact St Paul tells us that Jesus was born “just at the right time”, the perfect moment in all of human history. Tonight, let us look backwards by all means: to the manger, to Jesus’ life, to the Last Supper, to the Crucifixion, and (of course) to the amazing events of Easter morning. But let us look upwards and ahead too: for the more time that goes by, the closer we are to God’s ultimate salvation and glory.