THE FIRST UNTIDY CHRISTMAS
What if we had not been given the infancy Gospels of Luke and Mathew? What if we had met Our Lord only as a splendid adult? Revelation would not have been complete. True, we would have assumed that he was once a child, but that fact being absent from the Gospels would lead us to suppose that it was not important or meaningful. Happily, God has taken care that our attention is drawn to it in a big way. Human birth, infancy, childhood, the fact that Christ had a human mother, a foster father who gave him legal status, that he was a member of a basic working class family unit - these are facts of Revelation, that have worked themselves into the painful labour of human history. They are facts of who and what God is. “The God who made light shine out of darkness has shone in our hearts.” He gives us knowledge of himself in the face of this little child, cradled within a family. Easter, like the Transfiguration, is pure light, beyond our ability to see. Resurrection is something we cannot imagine or pin down or find words to express. It belongs to the dimension of light inaccessible. But Christmas is that pure light broken up into a thousand slivers refracted through the human experience of his birth and family life. The divine assumes the human milieu in order to become accessible and understandable. Easter can mean nothing to us unless we have first lived with its reflected light in the mysteries of Our Lord’s earthly life. In the mystery of Christmas and all that Christian love has built around it, we have a facet of God that is indispensable to a true knowledge of him. The profound sense of God as the utterly holy and transcendent can never be lost. But an awesome perception of the deity is not the only revelation of the Triune God. He is love, offering intimacy, and to be found in that primary cell of togetherness and emotional sustenance, called the family.
Untidy wedding
When the time for the wedding approached, it became painfully clear to Mary’s fiancé, Joseph, that she was pregnant, and not by him. In a patriarchal culture like theirs, Joseph would have had every right to hand Mary over to public scorn. And even though he was “ish tzaddik” (an upright man), his sense of justice was about to be stretched or tempered by the requirements of mercy, that would be the hallmark of the teachings of Jesus. The penalty for adultery was death by stoning (Lev 20, 10; Deut 22, 24). Jesus, whose conception caused so much worry, and about whom ill rumour might have spread were it not for the shielding backup of the foster father, Joseph, would soften the harsh strictures of the law in defence of a woman caught in adultery (John 8, 1-11). Did the dilemma faced by the carpenter of Nazareth, whose bride-to-be was with child, project a light beam on the actions of the foster son?
Joseph learned that God’s will for him was to be a father to someone else’s son. Like so many other people in the stories about Jesus’ birth, he is not to be afraid to do this.
Untidy families
Jesus was born into a non-traditional arrangement. We, too, shouldn’t be afraid or discouraged at this time of the year because our families happen to be different from other people’s. Nor should we believe that messy families are somehow inferior to tidy ones. “.....happens in the best of families.” It’s not that the Family of Nazareth didn’t have problems, but that they dealt with them graciously. Even if our Christmases do not go as we’d like, we can still, with the help of God who “arrives”, cheerfully make the most of problems as opportunities to demonstrate God’s loving providence.
Messy First Christmas and Visitors
The first Christmas was anything but perfectly organised. The anxiety surrounding the wedding of Mary and Joseph transmutes into turmoil as the time for the child’s birth draws near. The expectant partners will be away from home, thanks to some kind of quirky bureaucracy. On arrival at Bethlehem they are greeted by blank faces and an absence of blank spaces. Too honest and poor to pull strings by bribing the concierge, they are directed to a makeshift shelter. Then, at the worst possible moment, Mary gives birth. So, as humans do when it gets tacky, the family of Jesus improvises, though not very successfully:
Poor little Jesus, naked and bare,
For his poor Mother has no covers to share.
Has no cloth for his bed, so she cuts up her shawl,
Makes a pillow for his head to cover the straw.
His cold little toes she rubs and makes warm;
A bitter wind blows, and he sleeps in a barn.
(Jesus MALUSIENKI” – Polish traditional carol)
A tumbledown barn with starlight slanting through ramshackle rafters; the hard bare place of birth projecting the hard bare cross of death; the straw pricking the tender body of the child, prefiguring the thorns and nails. And that’s not all.
The social environment is hardly helped by the first visitors, the shepherds, that messy lot of congenital liars who are going to be the first announcers of the birth of the One Who was to come, prefiguring the women, those conventionally discredited gossips, who would breathlessly announce the Resurrection. Returning to their field, the shepherds had a new light to sort out their grimy cogitations.
What it’s all about
That’s precisely what the Gospel telling is all about: Jesus who is the Christ comes preferentially to the riff-raff, the human trash that revolted decent people, to those whose lives are shambolic enough to block access to God, to whom nothing worse could happen so they have “nothing to fear”. So God has come to them with “tidings of great joy” with the first time ever assurance that on them “his favour rests.”
What if we had not been given the infancy Gospels of Luke and Mathew? What if we had met Our Lord only as a splendid adult? Revelation would not have been complete. True, we would have assumed that he was once a child, but that fact being absent from the Gospels would lead us to suppose that it was not important or meaningful. Happily, God has taken care that our attention is drawn to it in a big way. Human birth, infancy, childhood, the fact that Christ had a human mother, a foster father who gave him legal status, that he was a member of a basic working class family unit - these are facts of Revelation, that have worked themselves into the painful labour of human history. They are facts of who and what God is. “The God who made light shine out of darkness has shone in our hearts.” He gives us knowledge of himself in the face of this little child, cradled within a family. Easter, like the Transfiguration, is pure light, beyond our ability to see. Resurrection is something we cannot imagine or pin down or find words to express. It belongs to the dimension of light inaccessible. But Christmas is that pure light broken up into a thousand slivers refracted through the human experience of his birth and family life. The divine assumes the human milieu in order to become accessible and understandable. Easter can mean nothing to us unless we have first lived with its reflected light in the mysteries of Our Lord’s earthly life. In the mystery of Christmas and all that Christian love has built around it, we have a facet of God that is indispensable to a true knowledge of him. The profound sense of God as the utterly holy and transcendent can never be lost. But an awesome perception of the deity is not the only revelation of the Triune God. He is love, offering intimacy, and to be found in that primary cell of togetherness and emotional sustenance, called the family.
Untidy wedding
When the time for the wedding approached, it became painfully clear to Mary’s fiancé, Joseph, that she was pregnant, and not by him. In a patriarchal culture like theirs, Joseph would have had every right to hand Mary over to public scorn. And even though he was “ish tzaddik” (an upright man), his sense of justice was about to be stretched or tempered by the requirements of mercy, that would be the hallmark of the teachings of Jesus. The penalty for adultery was death by stoning (Lev 20, 10; Deut 22, 24). Jesus, whose conception caused so much worry, and about whom ill rumour might have spread were it not for the shielding backup of the foster father, Joseph, would soften the harsh strictures of the law in defence of a woman caught in adultery (John 8, 1-11). Did the dilemma faced by the carpenter of Nazareth, whose bride-to-be was with child, project a light beam on the actions of the foster son?
Joseph learned that God’s will for him was to be a father to someone else’s son. Like so many other people in the stories about Jesus’ birth, he is not to be afraid to do this.
Untidy families
Jesus was born into a non-traditional arrangement. We, too, shouldn’t be afraid or discouraged at this time of the year because our families happen to be different from other people’s. Nor should we believe that messy families are somehow inferior to tidy ones. “.....happens in the best of families.” It’s not that the Family of Nazareth didn’t have problems, but that they dealt with them graciously. Even if our Christmases do not go as we’d like, we can still, with the help of God who “arrives”, cheerfully make the most of problems as opportunities to demonstrate God’s loving providence.
Messy First Christmas and Visitors
The first Christmas was anything but perfectly organised. The anxiety surrounding the wedding of Mary and Joseph transmutes into turmoil as the time for the child’s birth draws near. The expectant partners will be away from home, thanks to some kind of quirky bureaucracy. On arrival at Bethlehem they are greeted by blank faces and an absence of blank spaces. Too honest and poor to pull strings by bribing the concierge, they are directed to a makeshift shelter. Then, at the worst possible moment, Mary gives birth. So, as humans do when it gets tacky, the family of Jesus improvises, though not very successfully:
Poor little Jesus, naked and bare,
For his poor Mother has no covers to share.
Has no cloth for his bed, so she cuts up her shawl,
Makes a pillow for his head to cover the straw.
His cold little toes she rubs and makes warm;
A bitter wind blows, and he sleeps in a barn.
(Jesus MALUSIENKI” – Polish traditional carol)
A tumbledown barn with starlight slanting through ramshackle rafters; the hard bare place of birth projecting the hard bare cross of death; the straw pricking the tender body of the child, prefiguring the thorns and nails. And that’s not all.
The social environment is hardly helped by the first visitors, the shepherds, that messy lot of congenital liars who are going to be the first announcers of the birth of the One Who was to come, prefiguring the women, those conventionally discredited gossips, who would breathlessly announce the Resurrection. Returning to their field, the shepherds had a new light to sort out their grimy cogitations.
What it’s all about
That’s precisely what the Gospel telling is all about: Jesus who is the Christ comes preferentially to the riff-raff, the human trash that revolted decent people, to those whose lives are shambolic enough to block access to God, to whom nothing worse could happen so they have “nothing to fear”. So God has come to them with “tidings of great joy” with the first time ever assurance that on them “his favour rests.”
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