Scottish Catholic Observer

WAS Santa good to you? Through some administrative oversight, I must have ended up on the ‘Nice’ list this year and was thoroughly spoiled. Thoughtful gifts abounded, along with the odd ‘let’s kill him with kindness’ present, such as the bag containing every conceivable Maltesers product on the market. I am known to have a weakness for these chocolate and honeycomb delights, so this gift manages to be both wonderful and a very bad idea at the same time. I received the exact same gift last year and the first couple of months of 2016 faded into a calorific fog, with February being especially hazy.

I think many people would have been happy to miss out on 2016 entirely: it wasn’t exactly a vintage year for many people. Apart from some turbulent political events, there seemed to be a constant stream of celebrity departures from this vale of tears. I heard a statistical expert on the radio explain that this was to be expected: we are sufficiently far from the beginning of a celebrity culture, especially with the spread of television adding to the ranks of sports stars and movie idols, that these big names are all coming to the end of their normal lifespans.

I’m not entirely convinced by this explanation. I think what has been so unusual about 2016 has been the proportion of famous people who have died before what most people would reckon to be ‘their time.’ Of course, we could argue that there is no such thing as ‘their time’: when your time’s up your time’s up. Still, there is something sobering (even with a Malteser hangover) about witnessing the deaths of the people who wrote the soundtrack of your youth, portrayed the heroes and heroines you aspired to become or, in my case with Victoria Wood, wrote most of the lines you passed off as your own throughout your 20s.

I think it may have something to do with an attitude which was very common in Our Lord’s day, namely that success and prosperity were regarded as signs of God’s favour. So, we are bit shaken when these secular ‘saints’ are shown to be mortal like the rest of us and can even feel slightly cheated that they won’t be producing more of what we loved them for. Natural enough on one level, but still misguided none the less.

The Christmas season which we are still celebrating is a reminder that life is precarious. The world into which the Word is born is often in shadow. Dotted throughout the Octave of Christmas are ‘red feasts,’ memorials of martyrdom and triumph over suffering. If we are paying attention, then we would see things in a more Christian perspective: that life is not ours. We don’t ‘own’ it but receive it. The time and manner of its return to God is a mystery almost entirely opaque to us.

Another lovely gift I received at Christmas was a small Roman coin. I have a small but interesting collection of such coins, the fruit of my passion for Roman history. I love the idea of being physically connected with an artefact which is perhaps more than 2,000 years old, imagining all the hands it has passed through from the moment it was struck to the moment I picked it up.

This particular coin is a denarius from 66AD (the equivalent of about £3 in today’s money). The bruiser on the front looks as though he has been through quite a few Maltesers himself: this is the emperor Nero who, while not exactly fiddling while Rome burned, did unleash a savage persecution against the Christians after the great fire destroyed three quarters of the city in 64 AD.

Nero is something of a hate figure for the early Church: he certainly seems to fit the job description for the Antichrist. We can, of course, look back with a certain degree of satisfaction in thinking that, while Nero Caesar is no more than a historical curiosity to most, the Church in Rome is alive and well.

There’s a line in Fr (now Bishop) Robert Barron’s series Catholicism where he makes just this point. In a scene filmed at the end of an Audience in St Peter’s Square, as bishops (eagle-eyed viewers with a good pause button can spot the then Bishop Philip Tartaglia of Paisley among them) file up to greet Pope Benedict, Fr Barron observes that, while few remember the successors of Caesar, each year millions of people flock to see the successor of Peter. So take that, Nero!

It’s a nice point—but not entirely accurate. Often on coins issued by emperors, these heirs of Caesar, are the letters ‘PM’ which stand for pontifex maximus, the senior priest of the Roman state religion. Julius Caesar was chief pontiff and so was his adopted heir, his great-nephew the first emperor Augustus.

The title remained in the imperial portfolio until about 376 when Gratian, a Christian emperor, formally renounced it. Shortly thereafter it was picked up by the Pope and it has been used ever since. Indeed, inscribed in huge letters on the façade of St Peter’s Basilica is the abbreviation ‘PONT MAX.’ The point I’m making, with props to Fr Barron, is that the successors of Peter are also the heirs of Caesar—at least as far as this title is concerned. It is what makes the office of pontifex maximus the oldest continuously occupied office in history, dating (perhaps) from the seventh century BC.

Of course, the most important title of the Pope is that which describes him as ‘servus servorum Dei,’ the servant (literally ‘slave’) of the servants of God. As a title it is something of a place holder for the Pope: not as the highest or the greatest, but as ‘the least of all and servant of all’ (Mark 9:35).

This too is part of the message of this season. This weekend we celebrate Epiphany, when the visitors from afar—whether they are simply wise men or kings doesn’t really matter—bow down before a child. In this mystery, the conventional order is turned on its head.

It won’t be long before the crib in St Joseph’s gets packed away for another year. In truth, the three wise men, who have been slowly traversing the sanctuary since the crib was set up, will scarcely have had time to unwrap their treasures before they themselves get wrapped up. But they are with us just long enough to remind us that wisdom and authority are, like life itself, gifts not possessions.

The first week of 2017 is ‘bookended’ by Feasts which celebrate a culture of justice and peace. We, too, build up that culture in our own communities when we grasp the truth that the star of peace leads not to palaces but to the manger of Bethlehem and the greatest gift of all.