Christmas message from Revd Beverley
A Christmas message from Revd Beverley I used to visit a retired midwife, and I loved her stories of delivering babies, sometimes in very interesting or challenging places. What a privilege it must have been for the first century woman, the village equivalent of a midwife, who would have come to help Mary through her labour and so became the first human to touch the Messiah as she delivered the precious child into the world. The child was named Jesus, which means ‘God saves’ and is sometimes translated as ‘the Saviour’ or ‘The Deliverer’. If we call Jesus ‘Deliverer’, we’re using the word in an old fashioned way, not suggesting that he was destined to bring us our parcels (we all know that’s St Nick’s job…). No, Jesus is the deliverer in the sense that we say in the older translations of the Lord’s Prayer ‘deliver us from evil’ – when we pray that if we find ourselves facing evil in any form, Jesus will protect and save us from it. That was the point of his coming – t...
