Christmas Eve liturgy
If you were to visit the small memorial chapel at King’s College, Cambridge, you would find one hundred ninety-nine names written on a wall. The names belong to students who lost their lives between 1914 and 1919, due to the First World War. Written between the dates, in Latin, reads 2 Corinthians 6:9, “dying, and yet we live on.”
In 1918, Eric Milner-White, the Dean of Cambridge, was tasked to put together a Christmas Eve service following the devastation of the Great War, which had just ended. Plagued by his own experiences as a chaplain during the war, about which he wrote, “Most of life is at night, and the nights are filled with prolonged terror—a horrid, weird, furtive existence. . . . Battle is indescribable, unimaginable. A continuous firework of light balls goes up from the German trenches. But most awesome is the noise. We feel powerless against those splitting cracks and roars, and dream of the metal tearing its way into the bodies of poor men.” He now sat, not knowing which friends or students were alive, trying to figure out how to put together a Christmas Eve liturgy that would speak to those who had no words to describe the past years of war.
Instead of trying to explain away the horrors the world had witnessed, he decided to show the beauty of a service that focused on the warmth, light, and hope of the Christian message. Rather than a sermon, he allowed the theme of the service to proclaim “The development of the loving purposes of God through the windows and the words of the Bible.” He sought to replace the pictures and noise of war with the images and sounds of heaven.
To help orchestrate this task, he looked back to the practice of Truro Cathedral’s “Festal Service for Christmas Eve,” which dated back to Bishop Edward White Benson in 1880, who looked to address the secularization of Christmas. Milner-White adapted these lessons and carols into a service that addressed the emotional and spiritual wounds of the people of England, and included a bidding prayer, creating the service that we have today.
There is a reason why this service, focused on speaking hope in the midst of brokenness, resonates with our souls more than the folly of secular Christmas songs about all you want for Christmas or seeing mommy kissing Santa Claus. It is the beauty of the service that seeks to show the loving purposes of God in the midst of hardship that speaks to us. When we consider the biblical narrative, we behold the tragedy of the Fall, promises and pursuit of God, and the hope of the Incarnation. If we are patient and sit within the pages of Scripture, we will find the hurting soul, the murder of Holy Innocents, the pain of barrenness, the loss of reputation, and we will see the faces of the war-torn and the sojourner. However, if you linger still, you will find lying in a manger, God incarnate: “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” And behold him as he is now: “And our eyes at last shall see him,/ Through his own redeeming love,/ For that child so dear and gentle/ Is our Lord in heaven above,/ And he leads his children on/ To the place where he is gone.”