Midnight Mass – Christmas Eve
24th December 2025
Cathedral Church of St George the Martyr
The Most Revd Dr Thabo Makgoba
Archbishop of Cape Town
Isaiah 62: 6-12; Psalm 97; Titus 3:4-7; Luke 2: 8-20
May I speak in the name of God who is Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer. Amen.
What a joy it is to be with you once again on this, my 18th Christmas as your Bishop and Archbishop, for the beautiful act of worship which you invite Cape Town to join year after year. On this most holy of nights, welcome to you all, whether you are here in the Cathedral or worshipping with us online. I wish each and every one of you a blessed, safe and happy Christmas!
Thank you Moruti Terry, here for the first time in your new capacity as Dean, and to our new Sub-Dean, Chesnay, and all those, staff and members of the congregation, who have worked so hard to prepare your programme for Christmas, from the Verger to the Organist and Director of Music, to the Lay Ministers, the choir, the Church Wardens, Council members and sides-persons. On this holy night, on behalf of the Cathedral, the Diocese and the Province, I wish you a blessed and peaceful Christmas.
In that masterful opening line of the Christmas story, Luke manages in a few words to capture the heart, the very mystery of God coming among us. “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that a census should be taken of the Roman world…. And Quirinius was Governor of Syria.” From the outset, Luke affirms that the first Christmas was an event rooted in history, his account naming the governors, the processes of government and the political strategy at work: the operation of a census, the journeys it involved, and how it incorporated the whole Roman world; details that underline the essential truth represented by the Incarnation – that God came not to avoid history but to enter into it. Even more importantly, God enters the world as it is, and not as we would like it to be. As the South African theologian John de Gruchy reminds those of us who aspire to live a life shaped by Jesus, the “Christian faith is always lived within history and never above it.”
The Christmas story places God amongst human systems, entering a world and a context of empire, of taxation, of poverty, of displacement and of uncertainty. The message is clear: in the Incarnation, God made God’s dwelling amongst the ordinary people of that time and place, people whose lives were controlled and dictated by secular, worldly systems and forces. The powerful cry of “Emmanuel”, “God with us”, signalling that God has come to share our humanity, echoes across all humankind. The Incarnation is thus not an escape from reality but God’s decisive intervention in it.
In Jesus Christ, God came not only to be with the privileged, the influential or the rich. No, Jesus was born among those made vulnerable by forces beyond their control. God came to be with the marginalised and the displaced, with those millions of refugees, migrants and asylum-seekers who flee poverty and war, with the victims of gender-based violence, with those whose lives are disrupted by changing climate systems, with those for whom our economic systems make it impossible to move out of poverty.
For us in South Africa, who have suffered a long colonial history, apartheid, forced removals and enforced poverty, the implications of this Christmas message resonate deeply. Our 350-year history continues to cast a long shadow over us, meaning that despite our best efforts over the past 30 years, we continue to live with its legacy. And the nepotism, the self-dealing, the corruption and the theft from the poor which has now replaced apartheid in too many areas of governance, have extended the suffering of the past into the present.
Not only has it extended our suffering; it is threatening our democracy. Surveys by the leading African pollster, Afrobarometer, over many years show that Africans across the continent favour democracy above any other system as the form of government they want. But the degree of their support for it depends on whether it works for them, in other words, whether they see that democratic governance is improving their lives.
In our own country, Afrobarometer’s most recent survey of public opinion shows that that seven out of every 10 South Africans are dissatisfied with the way democracy works for them. Unsurprisingly, we see unemployment as our biggest problem, followed by crime, insecurity, a lack of reliable running water, failing infrastructure and corruption. The result is that, as the academic and commentator Imraan Buccus points out, “despair now defines much of South African life”. Just one of the consequences of this is that gambling has, to use his words “become a form of economic self-medication, a desperate search for luck in a society that offers no opportunity.” Recently I was shocked to learn from a prominent businessman that online betting – easily available to anyone with access to the internet – now contributes to 60 percent of the 1,5 trillion rand gambling industry, trapping millions of people in a cycle of problem gambling.
Disillusionment with government is undermining the confidence of South Africans in democracy. Very disturbingly, the Afrobarometer survey found that support for an army takeover of our government has surged in just the last three years, from just over a quarter of respondents in 2022 to nearly half, or 49 percent, in 2025. Moreover the survey shows that although support for democracy has grown a little in the latter years of the Ramaphosa administration, more respondents support military rule than the numbers who reject it.1 This revelation comes after a previous Afrobarometer survey conducted four years ago reported that two-thirds of South Africans would be willing to sacrifice regular elections if a non-elected government could impose law and order and deliver houses and jobs.
We have seen this phenomenon of support for military rule in other parts of our continent over the last 60 years. But seizures of power by armies are not an answer to our problems. In other African countries, people have often taken to the streets to welcome military coups, only to become disillusioned when they find out that colonels and generals are no more capable than politicians of improving their lives. And only then do they realise they have no way of removing the army from power.
The crisis of confidence in democracy which we face is not only one for South Africa. Nor is it only one for Africa, nor only for the Global South. It is a world-wide crisis. When we look at the industrialised countries of Europe and North America, we see that many men and women in the world’s most powerful and prosperous economies are just as much the victims of the greed of self-serving elites who wield economic and political power for their own benefit as the poor in the South. The devastating consequences of inequality and the hoarding of power and resources for the benefit of a few have given rise to extreme right-wing parties and populist oligarchies, supported by those who stand on the margins, watching elites prospering while their standard of living is eroded. As I remarked in an address in Rome recently, as a result we are seeing people in many countries, both rich and poor, turning to political solutions reflecting economic chauvinism, xenophobic nationalism, woven in with resurgent racism and even the stirrings of a new kind of fascism. We see our faith perverted and transformed into a narrow Christian nationalism which seeks to demonise “the other”. Like a cancer, economic inequality is metastasising across the world.
Against this backdrop, the Christmas story tells us of a faith which was brought to and grew among powerless and marginalised people, to people born into displacement, overcrowding and exclusion, echoing the story of marginal people everywhere. Christmas is fundamentally the story of God’s fundamental option for the poor and of our solidarity with those who preach peace on earth and goodwill among all people. It is also a story of what Archbishop Desmond Tutu called the “little people” of history, the “so-called ordinary people”, people who were not noticed by political and religious leaders but who brought fundamental change to the societies in which they lived.
The Christmas story asserts that change comes from the margins, from the testimony of the poor and from within their struggles for justice, from people on the ground. Across the globe today, this is borne out powerfully. On the ground, people on the streets and in grassroots organisations are those whose voices and energy keep critical issues in the public domain. Like those who witnessed the original Christmas, they may not own much in terms of financial resources, but they find creative ways to proclaim the truth, to offer people hope, to share alternative ways of seeing things and doing things. Throughout history that is so often what has made the difference, and if we take it to heart, it can make the difference we need in South Africa today.
To share the good news of Christmas, to offer hope in times of despair and in places where peace on earth is drowned out by the din of war and the angry sounds of weapons, is something each one of us can do. For it does not depend on the resources or talents we have, or whether we are socially accepted by the privileged and the powerful. It simply depends of our availability to stand up for the truth, and to work relentlessly for justice.
This is the stuff of Christmas, to announce that a different world is possible, waiting to be born, conceived in the hearts of ordinary people, announced by the excluded, linked in the angels’ song to a new possibility for peace and expressed in the vulnerability of a manger. As midwives of the future, we have as believers to hold in our hearts that tension of what is being birthed and a new age of peace.
It is in the area of “holding the tension” that Luke understands Mary. Many theologians have written that in this pivotal hour, Mary is the sign of attentiveness and of holding these things in her heart. The theologian Denise Ackermann has written of “a spirituality of waiting that resists despair while refusing false security.” In her attentiveness, Mary embodies a faith capable of holding the tension between promise and fulfillment, between hope and hardship, between joy and vulnerability. Luke speaks to how she pondered these tensions, allowing them to prepare for the threshold moments that still lay in the future, of the wedding at Cana – where Jesus performed his first miracle at his mother’s bidding – and of the threshold moments of the Cross, and of Pentecost.
The same is asked of us as was asked of Mary – to be attentive to what is happening around us, to the way history beckons us and prepares for what the future demands. We are told that after witnessing the advent of the Christ child, the magi, the angels and the shepherds all returned to where they had come from. As told in the words about the magi, they each went home a different way, different people filled with different perspectives and illuminated with new hope for all our tomorrows.
May we too go home this Christmas a different people because we too have stayed a moment at the manger. God bless each one of you, and again, a happy, a blessed and a peaceful Christmas to you all. Amen.
* * * * *
