The news looks bleak in 2026. That’s why Christians must witness to the light

There’s something about being a retired parish priest that lends a certain objectivity to our Church lectionary, like standing back from a painting you’ve been working on to get the whole picture and some perspective.

It happened to me this Christmastide. I’ve been helping out a bit at a neighbouring parish in Sussex. It’s a bit like being a retired pilot, I imagine, keeping one’s flying hours up to retain a licence.

What struck me was how quickly the Christmas story – the joy of the angels, the wonder of the shepherds – is plunged into the very real horror of worldly tyranny and terrorism with Herod’s order of the massacre of all male babies under the age of two in Bethlehem.

At our most despondent, we may assume that prayer doesn’t cut it, which is an attitude that can be defined as the end of hope

This grotesque crime against humanity was less of a genocide than a deicide, for it was an attempt to kill God incarnate, whom Herod had been told about by the Magi from the East. These Magi drop into the Christmas story slightly out of chronological order, as if the Massacre of the Holy Innocents is the more immediately significant event after the Nativity.

The etymology is fascinating. Take the word ‘holy’ in the title of that massacre. It shares its ancient root with the word ‘wholly’. For to be holy and to be whole share the same sense of completeness. There’s the same etymological root in the word ‘heal’ too, for reasons of being made whole again.

So, Herod’s infant victims, the holy innocents, are something of a liturgical pun, in that they are also the wholly innocents, as was the newborn Jesus, spirited away across the border into Egypt for safety from the pogrom.

Under the same sun

God knows, that’s not an atrocity with which we’re unfamiliar. The darkest of stains in the Christmas narrative has been repeated in the carnages and cruelties of oppressions and persecutions down the ages since.

And today, the wholly innocents, children, are still suffering and dying in conflicts around the world. In Gaza, where wholly innocent families are wiped out in a conflict arising from the wholly innocent who were murdered two years ago by Hamas terrorists at a music festival in Israel. 

In Ukraine, the wholly innocent suffer and die at the hands of a rapacious Russia. In Sudan, wholly innocent children suffer and die in famine and civil war.

As it says in Ecclesiastes 1:9, there really is “nothing new under the sun”. As we step back this New Year and look at the whole picture, it’s (literally) bloody depressing.

The new Church year began at the beginning of Advent, a month or so ago. The new calendar year started last week. It’s a time of resolution, but also a time in which we can feel burdened by the terrible knowledge that nothing ever seems to get better in this regard. At our most despondent, we may assume that prayer doesn’t cut it, which is an attitude that can be defined as the end of hope.

Light and dark

But part of the answer must be defiance. What we celebrated at Christmas is defiant. John the Evangelist starts his story in prose poetry with the affirmation that, while darkness doesn’t recognise the light, it “has not overcome it” (John 1:5). Light is not just the opposite of dark, it defeats it.

It’s a matter of conscience to declare, in defiance of the darkness that threatens our world, that these actors aren’t good enough. We can’t and won’t tolerate them, and their acts are not in our name. If we’re witnesses to the light, we can do no other.

To be holy and to be whole share the same sense of completeness

We and our elected leaders need to find and speak that voice – against war-makers in the darkness; against antisemitic terrorists everywhere; against economies that allow such horrors as Sudan to prevail; against those in power who would allow Ukrainians to suffer and to die in their own defence.

And against those who peddle hate and bile in the public arena and social media.

The road to authoritarianism and tyranny is taken in baby steps, incrementally so we may not notice it happening. Defiance needs to stand up to an America that we can no longer consider, nor even recognises itself, as a champion of the free world.

Pray in defiance for the West to find its voice again. On Sunday, we celebrated the wise Magi from the East. Now we need to find them in the West, to speak through earthquake, wind and fire; to speak truth to power.

We can’t see that leadership yet. But for Christ’s sake we’d better start looking.