WCC Christmas Message 2025: 'Holy Family, Holy Faith'

Icon at Orthodox vesper during WCC Central Committee meeting, Johannesburg 18-24 June 2025. Photo: Albin Hillert/WCC

Source: WCC

God's love incarnates in unlikely ways and places.

Our gauzy picture of the Holy Family and the Lord's nativity often fails to capture the fraught situation that Luke's gospel portrays. Mary and Joseph's betrothal was jeopardized by her pregnancy and potential scandal. Her confinement was upended by an imperial edict to traversing a difficult journey to a far-away town. Jesus himself was born on a cold night in a humble stable, and his first days were spent as a refugee fleeing danger from a mad king. In such desperate and unlikely circumstances did the Holy Family begin.

Now as then, families today experience the risks and perils and vicissitudes of being human in our too cruel world. Millions of families around the world are assailed by poverty and persecution, displaced by climate and disasters, torn apart as refugees flee from conflict and violence.

And the Word became flesh…

Yet, then and now, into this scene of hurt and harm, disruption and displacement, Jesus' life and our hope are born. Angels sing and shepherds kneel! God's incarnation in human form, Jesus embodies God's love and confirms our infinite value as children of God, elevating, illuminating, and enlarging our lives and the whole human family in a deeper kinship with God and each other.

For us and for our salvation

In his person, in his life and teaching, Jesus invited his disciples-and us- to walk with him, to encounter God, and to be discipled in authentic faith, inclusive love, and heedless service.

It is in him that we gain access to faith and the assurance that, despite the losses, setbacks, and disappointments that confront us today, the God of Life continues to work with and for and through us to redeem our lives and our often-disheartened world.

In its tenderness and fragility, its quiet yet persistent cradling of divine life incarnate in human form, the Holy Family is the icon of our kinship with God, each other, and the human prospect. In this original "kin-dom" of God, our family is all humanity, wherever love incarnates; our home is wherever fidelity to God leads us; our neighbour is whoever needs us. Through holy faith, we are invited into and united in God's holy family. We are not alone in our struggles, pain and suffering. We are connected and interconnected. We are family. And Immanuel, God is with us forever!

Glory to God in the highest,
And peace to all people on earth.

Rev Prof Dr Jerry Pillay
General Secretary
World Council of Churches