I wonder how we greet each other over the Christmas season – and I don’t mean with “How are you doing? Terrible weather, isn’t it”! I guess we use phrases such as “Merry” or “Happy Christmas!”; our cards might say “Season’s Greetings” or – at a pinch – “Glad tidings” or even “Yuletide cheer”; if we were American we might well say, “Happy holidays” (ugh). But perhaps the most appropriate greeting for us to use this year should be “Fear not!” That might seem surprising, but it has strong Biblical backing as it’s the greeting which the angels used all those years ago. So let’s have a think about the different occasions on which they said it.

We can think of Mary, terrified when she was confronted by the angel Gabriel. Now we don’t know what she actually saw: was it an ordinary-looking man claiming to be a messenger from God or a radiant, shining celestial being with wings? That doesn’t matter; the point is that she knew in the very deepest part of her being that she was speaking to someone who’d come from another realm; that the message she was hearing would overturn every expectation that she had in life, that she was being manipulated by a mysterious power far greater than herself. No wonder the angel had to say, “Fear not”. For Mary wasn’t just “troubled”, as the old King James Bible puts it; she was (excuse the language!) shit-scared terrified. After all, she was only a village girl.

Then we can think of those shepherds: weather-beaten men, used to a harsh life out on the hills, ready to cope with emergencies such as sheep rustlers or a prowling wolf. They never expected to have their quiet evening disturbed by first one angel and then a whole choir ripping apart the night sky. Again the old Bible dulls our minds by quaintly saying, “They were sore afraid”. That again is surely an understatement for they were experiencing something totally unexpected, frighteningly incomprehensible and entirely outside their experience; in fact they probably thought that God was about to strike them dead (and what would happen to the sheep then, eh?). Just as he’d done for Mary, the angel had to calm and reassure them: what they were hearing wasn’t a message of judgement and damnation but “good tidings for all people”. They should put their fear aside and relish their privilege in having been chosen to hear this amazing news before anyone else.

Those weren’t the only people in the Christmas story to be told, “Fear not”. Joseph heard the words when he was informed of Mary’s pregnancy; also, a bit more obscurely, was Zechariah when he discovered that he would be the father of John the Baptist. Terror and joy can clearly come together when God speaks. Perhaps that’s still true.

What general fears might have been running through peoples’ minds at that time? The native Jewish population might well have been frightened of what the occupying Roman army would do to them if they didn’t obey the Emperor’s edict to go to their home-towns and get registered for tax. (Of course the Roman authorities constantly feared an uncontrollable Jewish uprising or rebellion which is why they kept such a tight lid on things). Then we have Herod on his throne, so gripped by the paranoiac fear that others were out to usurp him that he had his wife, her mother-in-law and several of his sons executed – among many others. And fear continued: Matthew’s Gospel tells us that Joseph, on his family’s return from Egypt after the evil king’s death, was so frightened of his son Archelaus that he didn’t want to live in Judaea and instead took Mary and Jesus north, to Nazareth in Galilee. The rest, as they say, is history.

So there was a lot of fear in the air at the time of Jesus’ birth. But that was a long time ago; we are living in the here and now. And of course the biggest fear around at the moment is the Omicron variant of Covid, partly because we still know too little about it. Will we have, as Nicola Sturgeon warned the Scots last week, “a tsunami of infections”? Or was she being too pessimistic? We don’t know; but what we do know is that we’re all living with the fear of a family member ringing up and saying, “I’ve tested positive” – for not only do those dreaded words bring worries about our loved one’s health, they also mean that our well-laid Christmas plans lie in tatters even before we’ve unwrapped our presents.

And Covid isn’t the only fear around. We heard this week how inflation – driven by the cost of fuel and energy – has shot up; people who cannot tighten their belts any more are desperately worried about keeping themselves fed, clothed and warm. Climate change hasn’t gone away: after last week’s deadly tornadoes many Americans must be nervously scanning the skies and wondering, “Will we be next?”, even as drought-stricken herdsmen in East Africa long for rain. The fear of volcanic eruption must still be great in both Indonesia and the Canary Islands, and then there is the fear brought by Russian troops massing at the border with Ukraine.

So we are fearful people – as were many people two thousand years ago, when Jesus was born. And the Christmas story does not say that we are whisked out of this world into a fairy-tale land of blissful happiness and sparkling snow; what it does do, however, is give us hope when events seem to be out of control and threatening to overwhelm us. For the message which the angels brought is one which said: “We have great news! Despite everything (and I’m sure there have been Christmasses worse than this one), God is still almighty and he is still loving. He has sent his Son into this world, to bring fresh hope and to take away fear”.

One carol says that Jesus, the “sacred infant”, came “from highest bliss down to such a world as this” – a world full of people just like us with uncertainties and doubts, questions and concerns, worries and fears. So, yes, we may greet our friends and family in many different ways over Christmas. But “Fear not!” is possibly the most original and authentic greeting we could say: one which brings positivity and hope in anxious times. So let’s make sure we use it: who knows, we might start a trend!