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There’s a Dragon in My Nativity

At St Nicholas on Sunday morning I’ll be showing another Christmas film that includes a dragon.  It’s called ‘There’s a Dragon in my Nativity.’  If you miss it, you can find it here: It’s a wonderful presentation, beautifully made (so share it on facebook!) and it starts to unpack the reasons Jesus came and why he is called saviour.

For Jesus to come as our saviour implies that we need to be saved from something.  And we do.  Joseph is told that he must call the child Jesus because ‘He will save his people from their sins.’ (Matt 1:21) That means the wages of sin; death and judgment, and the effects of sin; loneliness, pain, suffering, darkness, disease and death. We might add violence, selfishness, environmental disaster, corruption and the like.  The work of the evil one is to undo the glory of God’s creation, to steal and destroy, and we see the dragon’s schemes in the Christmas story, as Herod slaughters the babies in an attempt to kill Jesus before he could take his rightful throne.

And the shadow of the dragon still looms over Christmas.  We see it in family feuds and drunkenness, in ‘shop until you drop’ excesses and the poverty and loneliness that pervades our land.  We see it in the wars that rage across the world, in laws that prohibit gospel outreach, in oppression and fear and injustice.

But Jesus, the mighty Lord of Light, came to defeat the devil and undo his works of darkness.  And praise God, our saviour won!  The lights with which we decorate our houses at Christmas point to his great victory.  On that first Christmas, the true light entered our world, and began to roll back the dragon’s darkness.  What a wonderful reason to celebrate Jesus’ birth!