Good morning.

“An event cancelled is better than a life cancelled”, so said the head of the World Health Organisation this week, responding to the rapid and global acceleration of the omicron virus variant. The WHO has no authority to force compliance with its wishes, it can only exercise such moral authority as it can muster. Governments, by contrast, can and do choose between recommendations and legally enforceable regulations, as we’ve seen in the UK in the last couple of weeks.

Deciding between the “soft power” of encouragement and the “hard power” of law is not a simple matter. Encouragement alone may fall short, we too readily consider our own selves a special case, even if we think everyone else should follow the guidance. But curtailing personal freedoms comes with its own price; we saw that with the parliamentary rebellion, by almost a hundred government backbench MPs, in England last week. Moreover, carefully drawn regulations, whether to combat Covid or to enforce payment of taxes, breed imaginative forms of avoidance. One government department last week, was forced to clarify that whilst removing face masks when singing Christmas Carols in church was “reasonable”, it would not be permissible for a shopkeeper to invite customers to remove their masks and provide vocal accompaniment to songs played over the in-store music system. In a difficult week, that made me smile.

The search for loopholes in the law is nothing new. It drives Jesus to draw his followers’ attention to the spirit of God’s law, as being more important than the letter. And it takes us to what I see as the heart of the Christmas story. The baby, lying in a manger, or cradled in his mother’s arms, that central feature of so many Christmas cards, can exercise no coercive control. What law alone cannot accomplish, Christians believe is in Christ addressed through the softest of soft power, through nothing more, or less, than love.

Law will always have its place. As a bishop, exercising discipline in my diocese, and as a parliamentarian, sitting in the UK House of Lords, I spend a fair share of my time trying to get it right. But law has its limits. When, a few days ago, I reluctantly sent out emails cancelling a series of Christmas parties, I was under no legal compulsion. Any life that decision may have saved is less likely to be that of one of my largely hale and healthy guests, than of some unknown individual, perhaps on the other side of the world, who will now no longer be infected in weeks or months to come. But they too are someone whom the love expressed in the story of the birth of Jesus compels me to care for, even if I will never meet them at the foot of my Christmas tree.