LAST month I accompanied the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, to Istanbul to visit Patriarch Bartholomew, the head of the Orthodox Church. Just before that visit, suicide bombers had attacked two synagogues in the city, and the Archbishop and I were taken to one of them. We stood before the blackened and damaged façade of the synagogue, at our feet was a large crater left by the bombing. Behind us was a lighting shop, its window blown out and the lamps on display hanging at crazy angles. The dark crater seemed symbolic of a deeper darkness. When, two days later, after we had left, two other bombs killed many more, among them the consul who had been worshipping with us and generously entertaining us, the image of the dark crater was reinforced.

The pit, the place of death, darkness and destruction, is part of the powerful symbolism of evil in many religious traditions, not least our own. It has an archetypal resonance which a multitude of films — not least The Lord of the Rings — exploit, with scenes of battles in imprisoning caves, and redemption and rescue when those imprisoned in darkness emerge again into daylight. The psalmist praises the God who brought him up from the horrible pit, out of the mire and clay, and set his feet on a rock and ordered his goings. Another psalm links the experience of drowning, of being overwhelmed by floods of water, with the fear that the “pit will close its mouth upon me.” The great maw of Hell in medieval doom paintings links together the chaos monster of the deep with the darkness of the pit.

The same day that Archbishop Williams and I stood by the bomb crater outside the synagogue we were taken to the Church of St Saviour in Chora, a late Byzantine jewel of a church near the ancient walls of Constantinople. The mosaics set out the cycle of love’s redeeming work first in the preparation of Mary for her supreme calling to be the Mother of God, the one through whose obedient response the Word was made flesh, and then in the infancy of Christ.

Central to the mosaics depicting the infancy is the scene of the Nativity itself, in which, as always in the Eastern tradition, Christ is born not in a stable but a cave. God becomes incarnate, Christ is born, in the darkness of a cave or pit. In the identification of the Creator with the creature, who empties himself in love and compassion, there is already in the birth at Bethlehem a descent into hell. God comes down into the horrible pit, into the mire and clay, into the darkness of our human condition. The God who is vulnerable, weak and helpless is in and through that very weakness the one who saves and delivers, the one who transforms and redeems our lives.

The cave or pit appears again in the great fresco of the Resurrection in the parecclesion, where in the black chasm of the foreground the gates of Hell are seen to be broken and shattered, their locks and keys scattered on the ground, and Satan is bound and fettered. The Risen Christ, who had descended into Hell, now bestrides the world in victory, robed in luminous white garments, drawing Adam and Eve, the representative figures of humanity, from death to life. This is the fulfilment of redemption that began when God came to us at Bethlehem and took us by the hand. It is what Charles Wesley wrote of in one of the most popular of Christmas hymns:

Mild he lays his glory by Born that man no more may die Born to raise the sons of earth, Born to give them second birth!

That new Creation, and that new life of grace, is a love which is and will be in the end triumphant over the sin, darkness and evil of the world. It is that love which searches, judges and transforms us, drawing us out of the mire and clay, setting our feet on rock, and ordering our going. It is that same love which runs to meet us in our Christmas worship, and is at the heart of our Christmas celebrations.

The Right Rev Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe