Fourth Sunday of Advent – 21 Sunday December – in the wake of Bondi Terrorist Attack
In these final days of Advent, when our hearts would ordinarily be light with expectation, they are heavy. Last Sunday’s terrorist violence at Bondi Beach, occurring at exactly the time our own parish was sharing the joy of Christmas Carols on the Concourse, has shaken us deeply. A place of sunlight and festivity has been pierced by terror and death. Names, faces, families now carry wounds that will not easily heal. We gather this Sunday the Sunday before Christmas – carrying all the emotions of the past week: shock, grief, anger, fear, and an aching question never far from the surface: How can God be near when darkness breaks in so suddenly?
And yet, it is into a world like this that Christ is born.
The 17th century Italian painter Caravaggio helps us see that truth with unsettling honesty. His Nativity scene that is on page 3 of our bulletin is not bathed in sentimental glow. At the time in 1609, Caravaggio was a fugitive, moving between Naples, Malta, and Sicily after being sentenced to death in Rome for killing a man in a street fight. The Nativity scene is dark—almost oppressively so. Not the gentle night of carols and candlelight, but a thick, enclosing darkness, the kind that seems to press in on the body. Caravaggio gives us no star-filled sky, no glowing horizon. The world into which this child is born feels poor, uncertain, and exposed. The stable is not picturesque; it feels cramped, poor
Mary is there, not enthroned, not idealised. Lying, she bends inward, her body curved protectively, her face marked by fatigue and tenderness. Joseph stands close by, a quiet presence. He does not command the scene. He watches. He guards. He trusts, even when the weight of responsibility is far heavier than certainty.
Around them gather figures who seem almost to emerge from the darkness itself. Saints, shepherds, witnesses—drawn in by something they do not yet fully understand. Their faces are marked by awe, but also by unease.
Light comes from no obvious source. It does not radiate outward in triumph. It simply reveals—faces, hands, the fragile body of a child. The darkness is not banished. It remains. But it is no longer empty. God is in it. The shadows press in from every side. And yet, at the centre of that darkness, there is a small, vulnerable light: a child laid on the ground, not even raised in a crib. This is not the birth of a king who overwhelms evil by force. This is God choosing to enter human history at its most fragile point.
That matters today.
Because the Gospel of this Fourth Sunday of Advent—Joseph’s courageous obedience—is not about escaping a violent world. It is about God choosing to dwell within it. Emmanuel does not arrive once the danger has passed. He comes precisely when the night is long.
The Bondi Beach massacre confronts us with the brutal reality of human sin and the terrifying capacity for violence. It would be tempting to ask where God was in that moment. Caravaggio answers, not with an explanation, but with a presence. God is there lying on the ground, unprotected, refusing to stand apart from human suffering. God is there in the victims, in the wounded, in the families now living with unbearable absence. God is there in those who ran toward danger to help, in those who held strangers, in those who now grieve together.
The darkness in Caravaggio’s Nativity is not denied or explained away. It is inhabited. And that is the Christian claim at Christmas.
This is not naïve hope. It is costly hope. The child we adore today will grow into the man who is rejected, beaten, and killed by the violence of the world. The wood of the manger already casts the shadow of the cross. But that is precisely why this child matters. God does not conquer terror by mirroring it. God undoes it by absorbing it—and transforming it from within.
As we stand so close to Christmas, we cannot go forward putting Bondi behind us, or to rush past grief into forced joy. Advent faith is quieter than that. It asks us to keep watch in the darkness, trusting that even the smallest light matters. It asks us, like Mary and Joseph, to make space for God when everything feels unsafe. It asks us, like those figures in Caravaggio’s painting, simply to remain—present, faithful, and compassionate.
In a world shaken by violence, this is our vocation: to stand near the vulnerable, to refuse despair, and to believe that God is still being born—in wounded places, in broken communities, in hearts that choose love over fear. For this reason, too, we must acknowledge the rise of anti-Semitism in our own time and condemn it. We must disentangle the political situation of the Middle East from any form of anti-Semitism. Never must we participate in any form of it. And most importantly, we must actively look for ways to build friendships with our Jewish sisters and brothers and develop vibrant forms of community with them, precisely as, thanks be to God, we have done here in our own parish.
This Sunday as we edge toward Christmas, we do not deny the darkness. We name it. We grieve it. And then, with trembling hands, we point to the child on the ground and dare to say: Here. This is where God is. Emmanuel. God-with-us.
