A time of Monsters: Midnight Mass

by the Revd Dr Brutus Green

‘Hell is empty. And all the devils are here.’ A line from Shakespeare’s Tempest.  You can hear an echo in the Italian writer Gramsci, who was recently quoted by Rutger Bregman, who memorably called President Trump: the most openly corrupt president in American history, which was then awkwardly edited out by the BBC, who are never completely sure which direction they are facing. Gramsci wrote: ‘The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born, now is the time of monsters.’ But lest we should be too sure of who the monsters are, we should remember Nietzsche’s aphorism: that: ‘He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.’

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

All of which is to say: Transition is difficult. He may not abhor the virgin’s womb, but nature abhors a vacuum, and at times of transition, there’s a strange giddiness, a sense of possibility, of freedom, of danger.

All Saints Day marks the triumph of the Church, of the forces of Good and light. All Saints was known as All Hallows, Not to be confused with JK Rowling’s Deathly Hallows which is just witchity nonsense. All Hallows was preceded by All Hallows Eve, by the carnival, the world turned upside down, where certainties were no longer certain, and monsters came out. The Day of the Dead. Humans, it seems, have always dealt in contrasts of night and day, darkness and light: life and death.

Is it that the darkness craves light, or that the light exposes darkness?

Halloween has been ruined by children and Americans, but you can still find that uncertainty in other liminal times.In the church it’s Easter Eve and Christmas Eve.

Christmas Eve is special because it’s layered with so many memories. The ghosts of Christmas past. Of grandmas and waiting for Santa, of reindeer and port; of drinking 4 pints till closing, then sitting through midnight mass, praying for it to end, of friends come and gone, of Christmas movies and songs – Die Hard and Mariah Carey. The cranky wheel of time is more visible in those memories, of year on year; The thought that life might have gone another way, Could go another way; Like a conversation that has run through the night until the light dawns. You’re not sure how to end the conversation, or even if you want to, despite the ache behind your eyes, but you feel that something has changed, or perhaps you just need sleep.

The Christmas poem I didn’t quite include in the carol service this year was Yeat’s 1919 poem, The Second Coming. It memorably begins:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…

Before ending:

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

A funny sort of festive poem. But monsters and miracles both come alive at Christmas.

This is a time of transition. On the cusp of a day and a year. A time when wars proliferate. Europe is rearming, and we all know from school the likely outcome of a continent in an arms race. The cost of living crisis can no longer be called a crisis as it’s gone on too long. It’s the ‘new normal’, that ghastly phrase that left us all so depressed in 2020. And Tommy Robinson has done what no one else could. He’s united the Church of England. Never before have all sides so vehemently, so quickly, put down the man who would put Christ back into Christmas. Christ the Jew; The refugee, the immigrant off in his small boat to Egypt away from dreadful Herod. Jesus who was never white except in paintings.

Commentators draw parallels with the 1930s; country vicars with the first century. To me this speaks of the prologue of John we heard tonight. There is darkness. And there is light. There is revelation. And there is rejection. There is fear and there is glory. There is God and there is flesh.

Christmas is a time of monsters and miracles. In the beginning, in Genesis, there is a vacuum. A ‘formless void’. And into it God says ‘let there be light… and God separated the darkness from the light.’ The Word that God speaks separates the darkness from the light.

Christmas is a time where the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. When a baby draws his first breath amid the animals and oomska. As we come to look on this crib, to hold a candle, to sing of a mother’s love, of a God’s love, of a new hope – especially if Star Wars lego is on your Christmas list – We are asked whether we are for the light or for the darkness. When the candle in our hand is extinguished and we step into the night, Are we carrying it within us, or falling back into the shadows? His own people did not accept him. But to all who received him… he gave power to become children of God.

If Hell is empty. And all the devils are here, we might be reassured. For centuries humans have worried about evil, about witches, and vampires and zombies, and Elon Musk. My children have their concerns, especially Elspeth, the vicarage ghost who is largely benign. But the devils in the Gospels recognise and respond readily to Jesus. The real devils in the Gospel are those who crowd around the light. They are Herod, whose insecurity drives him to murder children. The pharisees whose religion is skin deep and fraught with hypocrisy. Pilate who is too weak to do the right thing. Executioners just doing their jobs. A close friend whose head is turned by money and jealousy. The rulers who will do anything to maintain their power. Hell is empty and all the devils are here.  

So as the Christmas bells ring at midnight, let it be a ring of change; In us, for where else does change begin? And perhaps in our torpor, our weakness, our passivity we can hear Tennyson’s call to arms against the grief and injustice of his day:

Ring out the old, ring in the new,


Ring, happy bells, across the snow:


The year is going, let him go;


Ring out the false, ring in the true.



Ring out the grief that saps the mind,


For those that here we see no more;


Ring out the feud of rich and poor,


Ring in redress to all mankind.



Ring out a slowly dying cause,


And ancient forms of party strife;


Ring in the nobler modes of life,


With sweeter manners, purer laws.



Ring out the want, the care, the sin,


The faithless coldness of the times;


Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,


But ring the fuller minstrel in.



Ring out false pride in place and blood,


The civic slander and the spite;


Ring in the love of truth and right,


Ring in the common love of good.



Ring out old shapes of foul disease;


Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;


Ring out the thousand wars of old,


Ring in the thousand years of peace.



Ring in the valiant man and free,


The larger heart, the kindlier hand;


Ring out the darkness of the land,


Ring in the Christ that is to be.