Few could have imagined that the woman many now call “Elizabeth the Great” would reign for 70 years, striving to lead by example after the suffering of World War II and into an age in which humanity would be united by the Internet, terrorism, pandemics and other challenges.
Throughout her life, Queen Elizabeth II understood the symbolic importance of kneeling, according to former Durham Bishop N.T. Wright. After one Church of England synod, she privately expressed surprise — disappointment, even — that worshippers in Westminster Abbey simply lined up to receive Holy Communion, instead of kneeling.
“Kneeling was important to her,” said the popular author, in a Premier Christianity podcast. In his encounters with her, Wright found the queen “very friendly and clearly a very devout, what we would consider ‘old fashioned’ Church of England Christian. I remember thinking during more than one Christmas broadcast, she has just preached the Gospel to the nation in a way that perhaps nobody else could have done.”
While the queen delivered thousands of public addresses, her Christmas talks — surrounded by family pictures and holiday decorations — were the occasions when she most openly discussed her faith and challenges facing the nation and even her own family.
In her first Christmas message, she welcomed the chance to face her people through television. “New inventions” are rarely the problem, she noted. “The trouble is caused by unthinking people who carelessly throw away ageless ideals as if they were old and outworn machinery. They would have religion thrown aside, morality in personal and public life made meaningless, honesty counted as foolishness and self-interest set up in place of self-restraint.”
In 2011, she warned: “Although we are capable of great acts of kindness, history teaches us that we sometimes need saving from ourselves, from our recklessness or our greed. God sent into the world a unique person — neither a philosopher nor a general, important though they are, but a Saviour, with the power to forgive.”
In what would be her last Christmas message, the frail queen reflected on losing her husband, Prince Philip, while reminding viewers life is about “final partings,” as well as new births.
“For me and my family, even with one familiar laugh missing this year, there will be joy in Christmas, as we have the chance to reminisce, and see anew the wonder of the festive season through the eyes of our young children,” said Elizabeth. “They teach us all a lesson — just as the Christmas story does — that in the birth of a child, there is a new dawn with endless potential.” And so it was with “the life of Jesus, a man whose teachings have been handed down from generation to generation and have been the bedrock of my faith.”
