Here’s my longer notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre, Bury service (21st December, 2025).
You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel (just give us time to get the video uploaded).
‘What Child is this, who, laid to rest | On Mary’s lap is sleeping?’
— W. Chatterton Dix[i]
‘That the Ancient of Days should be born,—that he who thunders in the heavens should cry in the cradle,—that he who rules the stars should suck the breast…,—that the branch should bear the vine,—that the mother should be younger than the child she bore, and the child in the womb bigger than the mother… This was not only amazing but miraculous.’
— Thomas Watson[ii]
LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION!
I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen my share of nativity plays — and, like many, had the privilege of starring in a few of them when I was a child.
One year, I reached the dizzy heights of playing Joseph. It was a non-speaking role, though, which meant knocking on invisible doors and standing silently next to the girl who played Mary.
The kid playing the donkey made more noise than I did.
A year or two before that, I was a shepherd. Also, a non-speaking role!
They clearly didn’t trust me with lines. All I had to do was sit there with a tea-towel on my head.
I may look content in the picture above, but my serene face masks heartbreak. The girl playing Mary happened to be my “girlfriend.” It wasn’t a serious relationship — we were only five or six — but she dumped me on the day of the performance and started dating the boy playing Joseph.
If you’d watched our school’s Nativity that year, you’d have seen Joseph gloating at a scowling shepherd… a shepherd who may or may not have aggressively pushed Joseph while paying his respects to the Newborn King.
It wasn’t exactly the most accurate portrayal of the Nativity story; there’s certainly no love triangle in the original events.
But maybe we need that now and then — no, not a love triangle! But a fresh way of hearing the story. We’ve grown so used to the cosy version that we can become complacent and miss the significance of what’s actually unfolding.
So this Christmas, I’m taking a risk and reading the Nativity through a portion of Scripture almost never read at this time of year — though it speaks powerfully about the events we recall at Christmas.
We’re turning to Revelation 12.
ERROR 404!
Before we read it, we need to acknowledge the elephant in the room: Revelation is full of fantastic imagery. Because of that, people, both inside and outside the Church, have come up with fantastical interpretations — treating this book like a heavily-encrypted video transcript of our immediate future, and making use of news headlines and conspiracy theories to decode its symbols.
Revelation can speak to us today, but that’s not how.
The letter itself tells us its purpose: it is, ‘the revelation of Jesus Christ’ (Rev 1:1). Regardless of how we understand this opening verse (as a revelation ‘by’ or ‘about’ Jesus), if reading Revelation pushes our attention toward news cycles and conspiracy theories rather than toward Jesus, and if it moves us toward paranoia more than worshipful adoration, we’re reading it wrong.
Revelation isn’t a code for deciphering modern headlines. It’s a letter written to encourage early Christians struggling under the Roman Empire — not so much persecuted, as tempted. While marginalisation was an ever-present risk for the early church, the greater danger, for the original audience, was being seduced by Rome’s claims and compromising their faith. Amid that seduction, John, the writer of this text, calls believers to remain faithful witnesses who follow the Lamb of God.[iii]
The key to interpreting Revelation’s symbols isn’t newspapers — it’s Scripture and History. Within its 404 verses, the Old Testament is echoed (explicitly and implicitly) over 600 times.[iv] Revelation connects the promises of the Old Testament to what God has done in Jesus and what that now means, through a series of symbolic, poetic dramas—dramas that make use of Old Testament images, and which also critiques, parodies and inverts some of the propaganda imagery of the Roman Empire.
That’s not to say that this is an easy book to read or understand.
(And in a real sense, it’s meant to be heard more than read, dissected and analysed – but that’s another story).
When you do read Revelation, you’ll also notice that it doesn’t progress in a linear way, moving from one thing to the next in a neat chronological fashion. Instead, it spirals; looping back through repeating visions. Just when you think you’re moving forward, a transition comes and the cycle starts again.
Revelation 12 opens with one of those transitions. In the previous chapters, John has seen Exodus-shaped images linked to Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension. And then, like a cinema when the screen goes dark and the sound system rumbles, John’s previous vision ends and then thunder crashes, and the next vision begins to form on the screen.
And this is what John sees:
READ: REVELATION 12:1-12 (NIV)
‘A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born.
She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron sceptre.” And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.
Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.
Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:
“Now have come the salvation and the power
and the kingdom of our God,
and the authority of his Messiah.
For the accuser of our brothers and sisters,
who accuses them before our God day and night,
has been hurled down.
They triumphed over him
by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony;
they did not love their lives so much
as to shrink from death.
Therefore rejoice, you heavens
and you who dwell in them!
But woe to the earth and the sea,
because the devil has gone down to you!
He is filled with fury,
because he knows that his time is short.”
A DRAMATIC RETELLING
Strange as it seems, this is the Nativity story — not the tea-towel-on-your-head version, but the same story, nonetheless.
The clues quickly point us to Jesus.
The Dragon stands ready to devour the child at birth, recalling Matthew’s story of Herod and the mortal danger that surrounded Jesus from his first moments (and throughout his life).
This child, in verse 5, is described as the one, ‘who was to rule the nations with an iron rod/sceptre.’ It’s a direct quote of Psalm 2—a psalm speaking of God’s Messiah; someone who will rule the world like no one has ever ruled the world before. Someone with with real authority.
By speaking of “the Child”, John also intentionally echoes Isaiah 9:
‘For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the greatness of his government and peace
there will be no end.’[v]
This child is not just a king, but the King.
We’re also told that the child is ‘snatched up to God and to his throne’.
This child occupies the throne of God, just as the slain-but-standing Lamb does, which John has already described in Revelation 5, where he glimpses the great heavenly and universal throne room.
Again, echoing the slain Lamb, this child comes to the throne through violence done to him. He is snatched up—a word (ἁρπάζω / harpazō) that often describes a violent, forceful seizure.[vi] In other words, he suffers. But, instead of this suffering being his downfall (as the Dragon intends), it becomes the very means of his exaltation.
Taken together, verse 5 is perhaps the shortest summary of Jesus’ birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension ever written.
But this isn’t for information’s sake. No.
Revelation wants us to see that as a result of this child’s suffering and ascension to the throne of God, a victory is won and the ancient serpent — Satan, the accuser and the deceiver of the world — is hurled down, defeated; his accusations forever silenced, echoing Isaiah 14 and Jesus’ own words: ‘I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven’ (Luke 10:18).
Again, I know this is a strange way to talk about it.
But it’s the Nativity — the story of God’s incarnation: of God’s becoming flesh and the salvation it brings, and the Kingdom and authority that is launched with it.
Speaking honestly, though, I’ve never seen a nativity play that looked like this! I’ve seen donkeys and cows… even pirates, giraffes and aliens in nativity plays. I’ve even seen (up close) a shepherd get aggressive with Joseph.
But I’ve never seen a nativity play that includes a conflict between a Baby and a Dragon. Not even in a ‘Harry Hill’ fashion, with two people in costumes wrestling it out.
School’s just don’t tell this story.
Then again, even the Gospel’s don’t tell us the nativity story in this fashion.
When we read how these events unfolded within history, they don’t look as dramatic as this. They look nothing like this.
Imagine they were movies, playing in the same cinema, and you had to choose between watching a cosmic battle between a child and a dragon or a film about two peasants travelling to a quiet village to have a baby who is visited by shepherds and later some wise men.
Which storyline sounds more dramatic? Which film would you buy a ticket for?
Yet Revelation insists they are the same story.
The the quiet, unimpressive scenes of the Nativity (and up to the Resurrection) are what the cosmic battle of Revelation 12 looked like in history.
John wants us to see Christmas for what it truly is: the invasion of God’s life into a world held in captivity; an invasion that overthrows the tyranny of sin, death, and Satan.
As the carol says, we may “rest merry” because Christ has saved us from Satan’s power.
I like how Eugene Peterson describes it, when he observes:
‘It is St. John’s Spirit-appointed task to keep the nativity from being sentimentalised into coziness… He makes explicit what is implicit in the Gospel stories: that God in Christ invades existence with redeeming life and decisively defeats evil.’[vii]
INSIGNIFICANT SIGNIFICANCE
And yet, if we’re honest, we struggle to see this. It’s not only because we’ve heard it so often—it’s not just because we have sentimentalised Jesus’ birth. But also because this dramatic and decisive defeat of evil through Jesus’ birth, life, and death unfolds in the ordinary-looking rhythms of everyday life.
Yes, the miraculous is present—but even the miraculous comes wrapped in the earthy and unremarkable. Isaiah told us it would be this way: the Saviour would not arrive with obvious beauty or majesty, but in a form easy to miss.[viii]
If you or I had walked through Bethlehem that night and heard a baby crying, we would have kept going. We would have assumed it was just another child.
If you or I had been part of Joseph’s extended family, gathered in the small room watching this birth, we would not have seen anything unusual, like holy lighting or holy sound-effects. Not even a halo around the newborn child. We would have seen a boy born in normal fashion, with all the same sights, sounds and smells, never imagining that something of cosmic significance was taking place; never imagining that this baby could be the one who rules with all power as Mighty God and the Prince of Peace.
As Queen Lucy says, in C. S. Lewis’ The Last Battle, ‘Once in our world, a stable had something in it that was bigger than our whole world.’[ix] But few knew this at the time.
It’s easy to miss the force of Christmas, and we wouldn’t be the first. When John writes the opening to his gospel, he tells us that, ‘The world did not recognise him when he came’ (John 1:10). God became flesh in obscurity. Aside from a few shepherds and some travelling astrologers, the world — preoccupied with its own headlines, absorbed in the usual human power struggles — simply missed it.
And we often miss God for the very same reason: we expect God to grab the headlines, and to act in the big and the loud, even though Scripture shows again and again that God’s ways are small and quiet — as quiet as a seed falling to the ground and germinating in the soil; as subtle as yeast working its way through dough; easily overlooked like a mustard seed.
More often than not, whenever Jesus spoke about God’s mighty reign or described how the Kingdom would be manifest, he leant into pictures of things that appeared insignificant, hidden, almost laughably small — yet it transforms everything.
The Nativity is the same: It reminds us that the entry of God into human history didn’t come with a trumpet blast (though Scripture uses such symbolic imagery), but with the cry of a newborn child—born in a backwater village, far from the platforms of power and prestige.
While our eyes chase the big and dramatic — scanning headlines to decode God’s ways — God comes in the smallest, least expected way. And through such humility, God does the incredible and extraordinary.
A CHILD vs A DRAGON
Think about the contrast in Revelation 12: a vulnerable child set against a massive, many-crowned, multi-headed dragon.
The scale is intentionally absurd; the difference couldn’t be more stark.
This is Revelation’s way of showing us that the child is everything the dragon is not. There is nothing dragon-like in the Child. He is vulnerable, gentle, meek — a ruler, yes, but one who comes to claim his throne in a power-less way with no bravado; one who is willing to suffer violence and not perpetuate it.
This child is on par with John’s favourite image for Jesus in Revelation: the Lamb. The child is lamb-like. And it is this meekness and vulnerability — that we would easily dismiss as weak, foolish, or ineffective against evil — that is in fact stronger than evil.
The dragon, on the other hand, is nothing like the Child. There is nothing Child-like or Lamb-like in the Dragon. He’s enormous, blazing red, multi-headed, covered in horns and crowns.
It’s a symbol, of course — but it works. The dragon is not interested in obscurity or meekness or vulnerability. He wants to be seen. He’s all show, all spectacle, all intimidation; willing to use violence to dominate and coerce.
The dragon captures our attention: He looks powerful; He projects significance. He demands to be noticed. He is the sort of figure who would trend instantly, who would dominate our social-media feeds, and who would make headlines simply by existing.
In other words, the Dragon is the embodiment of everything that we and our world think about when it comes to possessing strength, influence, glory and control.
The Child, on the other hand, is not.
Who would you choose to rule the world, our nations, our economies, our welfare? The small, naked, vulnerable child, who needs to be nursed and fed; too weak to walk, let alone fend for itself or anyone else? Or the domineering and charismatic Dragon, flaunting his titles?
To be fair, our political elections already give an answer: we go for the loudest and most boastful contender each and every time, rarely ever voting for the one who seems more passive.
To make the choice more grounded: At the time of Jesus’ birth, Caesar Augustus ruled as the first emperor of the Roman Empire, which held most of the Mediterranean in its sway. Augustus literally held many crowns, making his will tantamount through a number of vassal kings and dignitaries throughout the known world.
Please understand, I’m not saying Augustus was Satan. He was not. But the power he wielded was certainly of dragon-like scale. He could speak and set the world in motion.
In fact, he did: He called for a census, wanting to figure out how many people he could tax within his world. As a result, a mass migration happened; even causing two relatively unknown people, from the lower echelons of his dominion (Joseph and Mary), to have to make a multi-day journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem.
Augustus collected titles throughout his career: ‘Saviour’, ‘Peace Bringer’… even minting coins reading, ‘Son of God.’ He literally, as far as politics was concerned, had the world’s government resting on his shoulders.
Meanwhile, the real Saviour, Prince of Peace and Son of God was swaddled in bands of clothe and lay in a manger.
Again, who would we regard as king?
One sits on a throne in the known worlds’ capital.
The other lies in an animal’s feeding trough?
Let me put the question differently: Which seat would you rather occupy?
Truthfully, the answer to that question is the answer to the former one.
If we’re honest, many people — even Christians — wish God looked more like the Dragon, and his Kingdom more like the Roman Empire: big, loud, dominant, forceful. The kind of power that fills stadiums, builds empires, crushes opponents, or gets quoted by world leaders. The kind of power that doesn’t wait quietly in a manger but arrives with fireworks and fanfare, military might and magnificence.
Sadly, this desire is sometimes expressed in our prayers.
But the power of God is the opposite. God’s victory comes in the weakness of the Child — the same “weakness” Paul speaks of in 1 Corinthians 1:25: that God’s weakness, seen most clearly in the cross, is stronger than all human strength. What looks fragile is actually undefeatable. What seems insignificant is the very place God is overthrowing the powers of the world.
Again, the dragon represents everything we associate with power – domination, spectacle, intimidation, and control. The child represents none of it. He doesn’t roar – he cries. He doesn’t seize power – he receives care. Yet Revelation insists: the child wins.
This child rules the nations not by force but by a suffering faithfulness. Like the Lamb in Revelation 5, victory comes through self-giving love. Evil expects God to fight like a dragon. Instead, God overcomes evil by absorbing violence rather than reproducing it. This is the scandal of Christmas. God doesn’t defeat evil by becoming more brutal than it, but by being radically different from it.
This challenges how we measure strength in our own lives. We admire loud voices, big platforms, and decisive force. We are tempted to believe that if God were really at work, things would look more impressive. But Christmas tells us otherwise: God’s kingdom often advances through a weakness we would normally dismiss.
God is found in the least, the lowly, the overlooked, the little. The manger, the mustard seed, the yeast in the dough, the Lamb who was slain — all of them whisper the same reality: the Kingdom comes quietly, but its quietness is stronger than every empire’s roar.
It’s outlasted every dragon-like boast to power thus far, and will continue to do so.
THE INVITATION
So don’t ridicule the little things.
Don’t despise the mundane.
We have this strange way of believing that the small things are merely stepping stones to the “real,” “big,” important things God will eventually do. But that’s rubbish. In Scripture, the small things are the big things. The mustard seed is the kingdom. The child is the conqueror. The manger is the throne room.
We forget this because we’ve learned to measure significance the way the dragon does — in size, spectacle, numbers, noise. Even when it comes to church.
We assume that a bigger church means a bigger God-moment, that a larger budget means greater blessing, that a louder platform means deeper impact. And when we look around today and see small gatherings, budgets tightening, ministries feeling fragile, we panic. We assume God must not be working — because surely if God were moving, it would be bigger and more impressive than this.
But the Kingdom has never worked that way. God’s greatest movements often look like mustard seeds — so small you can barely hold them; so ordinary you could easily overlook them: A conversation after church; A prayer whispered for a neighbour; A simple act of generosity; A church community quietly loving one another without the fireworks. These don’t feel like “revival,” but they are the very places the Spirit remakes the world.
God builds the Kingdom not through the impressive, but through the faithful. Not through the grand, but through the good. Not through the strong, but through the weak. Not through the loud, but through the loving. And this means that nothing done in hiddenness, nothing done in weakness, nothing done in “ordinariness” is ever wasted.
Christmas reminds us that, those fragile moments — the ones we’re tempted to dismiss as insignificant — are the moments where God breaks into history and changes it forever.
Don’t despise the childlike places. That’s where the dragon loses.
One last thought…
Prior to the second world war, in a time full of men seeking dragon-like power in dragon-like ways, the famous German Lutheran Pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, once asked, ‘Who among us will celebrate Christmas correctly?’
His answer…
‘Whoever finally lays down all power, all honour, all reputation, all vanity, all arrogance, all individualism beside the manger; whoever remains lowly and lets God alone be high; whoever looks at the child in the manger and sees the glory of God precisely in his lowliness.’
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer[x]
“Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength, and honor and glory and praise!”
— Revelation 5:11b (NIV)
ENDNOTES AND REFERENCES:
[i] William Chatterton Dix (1837 – 1898), from his carol, What Child is This?
[ii] As quoted by Jonathan Gibson, in O Come, O Come, Emmanuel: A Liturgy for Daily Worship from Advent to Epiphany, December 4 (Crossway, Wheaton, Illinois, 2023), p. 97
[iii] There’s plenty of amazing commentaries that handle Revelation sacredly and carefully, without slipping into the extremes of a paranoid expression of the Christian faith. If I can recommend a few, that approach this differently in style but united in heart content, then they would be: Reading Revelation Responsibly: Uncivil Worship and Witness, Following the Lamb into the New Creation by Michael J. Gorman (Cascade, 2011); Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of John & the Praying Imagination, by Eugene H. Peterson (HarperOne, 1991); Revelation: The New Cambridge Bible Commentary by Ben Witherington III (Cambridge, 2003); Introducing Revelation: Content, Interpretation, Reception, by David DeSilva (Wm. B Eerdmans, 2021).
[iv] According to The Novum Testamentum Graece
[v] Isaiah 9:6-7 (NIV)
[vi] For other occurrences of the word, see: Matt. 11:12; Matt 13:19; Jn. 615 and Jn. 10:12
[vii] Eugene Peterson, Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of John & the Praying Imagination (HarperOne, 1991), pp. 121-122.
[viii] Isaiah 53:1-2
[ix] ???? Last Battle Ref
[x] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from his reflections notably found in the collection God Is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas. Preached in London, December 17th, 1933.
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
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