What Twelfth Night teaches us at the turn of the year

Christmas is over. Oh no it isn’t! As December draws to a close and we look forward to 2022, we reach Twelfth Night or the eve of Epiphany.

In earlier times, the days after Christmas were often a time of celebration as opposed to the more solemn period of Advent – something which is hard to imagine now, when ‘Christmas’ seems to start in shops and TV adverts as soon as we hit November!

Having recently been teaching Shakespeare’s play of the same name, I have been thinking about Twelfth Night celebrations and in particular their links with pantomime and what both of these might have to say to Christians as we begin a new year.

Up until the 19th century, Twelfth Night was probably the most popular day of the festive period. There was a Twelfth Cake, a dense, rich fruitcake, often decorated with crowns to symbolise the Magi and, like later traditions with the Christmas pudding, it contained a hidden bean and pea. If your slice had one of these then you would be crowned king or queen for the day, even if you were one of the servants. The Elizabethans also followed this idea and elected a ‘Lord of Misrule’ for the day. Comedy chaos ensued with everything being turned upside down – status, hierarchy and gender roles – only for order to be restored at the end of Twelfth Night.

For those readers who are familiar with the play Twelfth Night, the parallels are obvious. We see their shadow in our own traditional pantomimes, where comedy, confusion and cross-dressing reign. Many of our most popular pantomime stories also tell the story of ‘rags to riches’, whether it be Aladdin or Cinderella.

The Christmas story is full of unexpected reversals – a King born in poverty and obscurity, the lowly and the foreigner being invited to worship the Messiah – but Jesus started as He meant to go on. In the Twelfth Night traditions, play and pantomime, order is restored at the end – but Jesus came to turn things upside down permanently.

Jesus’ words in Luke 4:18 from the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue in Nazareth proclaimed that He was bringing ‘freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind’, turning this fallen world on its head. He famously taught us that it is harder for the rich to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle and that we need to be like little children. Perhaps most revolutionary of all, the first shall be last and the last shall be first.

The last two years have been full of unexpected events, disappointments and plans put on hold. We only have to turn on the news or look around at our neighbourhoods to see chaos and confusion, sadly with very little comedy. During the pandemic we have talked a lot about ‘the new normal’. But our ‘normal’ is not based on Kingdom norms.

Jesus’ arrival that first Christmas was like that of the Lord of Misrule – shaking things up, turning human expectations on their head and subverting our ideas about status, importance and value. But it was really the other way round; He was entering a jumbled, mixed up, chaotic world and introducing God’s true order and rule over sin, sickness and death.