He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.

Birth is a messy, noisy and often painful business. In the ancient world, as in many parts of the world today, it was also a dangerous time, both for mother and child. Jesus very strikingly reminds his disciples of this in St. John's Gospel: When a woman is about to give birth, she is sad because her hour of suffering has come.

In his poem Advent Calendar, the last stanza of which is quoted above, Rowan Williams conveys a sense of the intensely physical and risky nature of birth as he describes the mystery of the Incarnation. The noise, the mess and the danger ('crying', 'blood' and 'breaking') are evoked, as is the pain ('writhes') until, at last, the child is born. The serenity of this final line corresponds with Jesus' follow-up to his words in St. John's Gospel about the suffering of childbirth: but when the baby is born, (the woman) forgets her suffering, because she is happy that a baby has been born into the world. We, too, rejoice as we celebrate at Christmas the coming of God among us and as one of us.

Yet the child whom we greet with joy at Christmas will die on the Cross on Good Friday; the pain and the mess of birth will come full circle in the crucifixion. Only by holding together the birth and the death of Jesus, the joy of Bethlehem and the pain of Calvary, can we glimpse the truth of the Incarnation: that God became like us so that we might become like him.