Christmas offers light relief (Image: Getty)
This was the year of elections. More than 100 countries, including many of the world’s most populous – Brazil, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, , Mexico – all held national polls in this past year.
Around half of the world’s population voted for new governments during the past 12 months. Yet what difference did it make?
In almost all of these elections, the incumbent parties faced setbacks. Eighty per cent of democratic parties who held power at the start of the year lost ground to their opponents, or lost power altogether.
Some of the shifts were unprecedented.
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Five African nations changed their governments, more than in any previous year.
In Botswana, the reigning party lost an election for the first time in 60 years.
In the UK, we turned to the Left with Sir , while the United States shifted to the Right with .
Emmanuel Macron’s government in France lost out to both Left and Right. Meanwhile, populist parties gained ground, in Germany, Austria, France, Argentina and Romania.
The trend continued in the UK, with Reform doing well back in July. Populist parties made hay in difficult political weather – they are not going away soon.
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If there was a common theme, it was dissatisfaction. We were not happy with the ways things were, and so we voted in the opposition.
Economics was perhaps the major global factor – a survey conducted in May in 64 countries suggested two thirds of people thought their national economy was in bad shape.
Many commentators believe the main reason Mr Trump won was quite simple – with rising prices making life more difficult, more Americans backed him to fix the economy than .
Other nations changed their leadership in more dramatic ways, such as the recent upheavals in Syria and South Korea.
In other parts of the world, cities, societies, families, lives were devastated as war continued to cause untold grief and destruction in Gaza, , Sudan and many more places around the world.
The world is not exactly a happy place right now.
In all of this change, Christmas can seem a brief lull, a moment of relief, a short season of extravagance in the dark days of winter, before the gloom of the short January days begin again.
Yet that was the idea of the pagan feast of Yuletide – not the Christian season of Christmas.
For Christians, Christmas celebrates something deeper than politics, something that places everything else into perspective.
As has been read in every carol service across the country in these weeks, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
The Word – in other words, the love that brought the world into being, the eternal source of wisdom that runs throughout history, the deep moral structure of the world, once took on human flesh and lived an ordinary, yet extraordinary human life.
It happened in a backwater of the Roman empire in a backwater of time, in the person of Jesus Christ, whose birth we celebrate at this time of year.
His words opened people’s eyes to a new way of seeing the world, his hands brought remarkable hea-ling for the broken, his life was one of sacrifice, costly love, even for his enemies, and, most remarkable of all, it did not end with his death.
Politics and politicians come and go. We live, we grow, we raise families, we vote, we celebrate, we mourn, and we die after our short lives are over. In the brief time we have here, we need a touch of eternity to give our lives meaning.
We need to be connected to God, the one who made us and who gives us the possibility of imitating Jesus’ life of wisdom, sacrifice and love.
Christmas celebrates the offer of that connection, the time when eternity touched earth, came within our reach. It invites us again, as it does every year, whatever our politics, to ground our lives on something – someone – eternal and unchanging.
● Bishop Graham Tomlin is President of St Mellitus College and Director of The Centre for Cultural Witness.