To Think About at Christmas
Most of us are comfortable enough with the Christmas story; it has been with us all through our lives. We first heard it at school or possibly Sunday School; it is depicted on the cards we receive, and most years we hear or see bits and pieces of it represented on radio and television. It is often said that 'familiarity breeds contempt', and perhaps it does; but it is also true that we tend to be completely comfortable and at our ease with those things with which we are familiar. As a result, the Christmas story, accompanied by a good ration of the well known traditional carols, may indeed invoke in many of us a sense of comfort and well-being which fully complements the good food, good drink, and good company of the over laden and groaning Christmas table.
But this is no comfortable story. This is a story which ought to probe the limits of our experience, and open up for us all kinds of disturbing and unsettling questions... if only we were not so blinded by familiarity. Read the story again, from the Gospel according to St. Luke (2.1-7):
At that time Emperor Augustus ordered a census to be taken throughout the Roman Empire. When this first census took place, Quirinius was the governor of Syria. Everyone, then, went to register himself, each to his own hometown.
Joseph went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to the town of Bethlehem in Judea, the birthplace of King David. Joseph went there because he was a descendant of David. He went to register with Mary, who was promised in marriage to him. She was pregnant, and while they were in Bethlehem, the time came for her to have her baby. She gave birth to her first son, wrapped him in cloths and laid him in a manger -- there was no room for them to stay in the inn.
What do we hear when we read that? This is no comfortable story; it is full of offence. It speaks of a poll tax... and poll taxes (as we know) have never been popular; it speaks of displaced persons. That is what seems to be involved in the uncertainty that surrounds the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, and there in Bethlehem it speaks of homelessness. It speaks of an unmarried mother. It speaks of a baby born, perhaps in a stable, wrapped in strips of rag and laid in a trough.
The story is quite matter of fact. Other parts of the story are overlaid perhaps with elements of miracle and wonder; but here at the heart of the Christmas story there is just the raw report. Imperial bullying, an unwelcome journey to register for the hated tax; Joseph journeying to register with Mary who (we would say) was engaged to be his wife; and she expecting her child, not his. Then the birth of the child, and his being laid in a manger.
We always import an innkeeper, and a stable, into our nativity scenes and stories; but St. Luke does not mention any such details (nor does St Matthew). Perhaps, like us, he assumes them as the necessary background of such a birth. Or does he intend us to imagine a birth in the street... and a manger in the open air?
It is said that towards the end of the Second World War an old Jew, working among the graves in one of the death camps of Germany, heard the cry of a child, newly born to a woman who had taken refuge among the dead. And the old man exclaimed to God that this must be the Messiah whose cry he heard, for none but the Messiah could be born in a grave.
If we were to transpose the story into terms such as these, or, perhaps more appropriate to the 1990's, of a baby born to a homeless teenager taking shelter in an abandoned and crumbling factory amid dirt an debris, I think we would be rightly shocked. But the story we have in the New Testament is just as shocking as that. It tells of a baby born on the margins of society; born 'outcast and lowly'. Sometimes we sing these words in a Christmas carol, 'outcast and lowly', but do we ever allow our imagination to play on just what that means? And, if we do, can we ever be the same again?
The same carol continues, 'outcast and lowly, Lord of all'. And there is as much offence in that conjunction as in any other aspect of the Christmas story. God enters our human experience, not in any lordly way, but in the sheer and overwhelming vulnerability of this baby born an outcast, to an unmarried mother, and laid in a trough where animals feed. God help us if we can ever be really comfortable with a story like that!
The Christmas celebration that is only glitter and tinsel and feasting and drinking is a cruel deception. I hope that all of us will learn to look beyond the glitter and the tinsel of Christmas, and learn to embrace the deeper meaning of that birth so long ago, and that we will not evade the great challenge that birth implies for all our lives.
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