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My first church here in Canada was a small church but we had enough youth to have the challenge of a youth group. One year they decided they wanted to come up with a drama of what if Jesus were born today somewhere in the Greater Toronto Area. It was an interesting presentation that culminated with them gathered around the piano singing The Beatles tune, Let It Be. What they came up with was Jesus being born to a young, unwed teenage couple at the Finch subway station. They were disappointed that there was not a station at Jane and Finch. They thought they would have been able to highlight better the circumstances of prejudice that surrounded Jesus’ birth. You see, Mary and Joseph were from Nazareth and Nazareth was considered to be an undesirable little town in Northern Israel. “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” they used to say. The youth also had this child’s parents resting Jesus in a homeless man’s shopping cart. Not the cleanest of places for a newborn, I’m sure. Jesus himself was wrapped in rags and laid in a feeding trough…not quite the image we have of “swaddling clothes” and a “manger”.
Looking at the Bible’s account of the circumstances of Jesus’ birth and trying to understand them in the way first century people would have is an eye-opening experience. We’ve accumulated a lot of Christmas pageant nostalgia that prevents us from seeing his birth clearly. It was as eye-opening in their time as it would be if Jesus had really been born in a subway station at Jane and Finch today. Let me give you a few examples.
Little baby Jesus had several visitors the night of his birth, shepherds and Magi. Shepherds in his day were near the bottom of the food chain along with drunks and lepers. The Magi were indeed kings and scientists. Interestingly, their science was astrology, that’s horoscopes and stuff. They were following a heavenly sign they had discerned to mean the birth of a great king in the land of Judea. Scientists today say it was probably a supernova they saw, but we people with enquiring minds who want to know, well, we know it was a UFO leading them to Judea, right?
God’s announcing his coming to shepherds and astrologers was a bold slap in the face of the Judean king and the religious leaders back then. They were the ones who should have known what this heavenly sign in their own backyard meant. But they didn’t. They were blinded by power and privilege. The birth of the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ caught them by surprise and threatened their privileged positions. When Herod the King otherwise known as Herod the Great famous for killing his own sons because they were a political threat to him; when he found out, he wanted Jesus dead and actually killed all the male children in the area of Bethlehem under the age of two. Incidentally, in the youth’s drama they have Jesus’ birth announced to some homeless people who go to welcome him which should remind us that we church-going, upper-middle class white folk just might not have a monopoly on who God speaks to and reveals himself to.
Then there’s the question of the paternity of Jesus. Mary was pregnant. Joseph knew the baby wasn’t his. His choices were to believe an angel or break the engagement as quietly as he could. He didn’t want to go through with the marriage. Nazareth was a small, very religiously conservative town. Everyone would have likely been thinking that Joseph had dishonoured himself by having relations with his fiancé before being married. And we have to think about Mary’s predicament. According to Old Testament law, Mary’s life would have been ruined had Joseph not decided to continue with the engagement and adopt the child as his own. It is quite possible she would have been stoned to death had Joseph not gone ahead and married her. That Joseph adopted or claimed Jesus as his own by being the one to name him is important. That’s what links Jesus to King David and Messianic bloodline.
The story of Jesus birth really is an eye-opener. Our Lord was born out of wedlock, to say it politely, to a couple who were a young teen-age girl and a man likely in his thirties. They came from Nazareth of all places to a stable in Bethlehem outside of an inn because, for whatever reason, no one in the inn had compassion enough to forfeit their room to a birthing mother. Jesus was born in a stable. How scandalous can all this be? God choose to unite himself to humanity in not only a humble birth but a troubling birth. It was indeed under very humiliating circumstances. So also, the scandal surrounding Jesus’ birth was not unlike the scandal surrounding his death. It leads us to believe that if we want to know where to find God at work in the world maybe we should start looking in the most troubling of circumstances.
While we’re on the topic, maybe we should stop and ask where is it that we should look if we want to find God? If the profoundest meaning of Christmas is that God is with us and deeply bonded to us, then where is he? The answer would be not in the nostalgia of religion but in the troubling details of real life; in the brokenness, in the shamefulness of the everyday lives of everyday people like us. Jesus was not born in the glamour of the temple in Jerusalem and praised by the good, upright, wholesome, and devout “robe-wearers” of his day. He was born to an unmarried couple; a teenage girl and a slightly older gent who both said “yes” to a call to endure shame and scorn for God’s sake and for human healing.
So, where should we look for this Jesus present in our lives. Well, getting together with family and friends is a good place to look, even better if you welcome into your celebrations those who have not the luxury of family and friends, and even better if you all gather to worship and to pray and even better if you try to heal the rifts that exist your families with confession and forgiveness. But, I think there is an even better place to look for Jesus. That is to look inside ourselves and go to that person called “me” who hides from others, hoping that nobody ever finds out who “me” really is…we all have a “me” that we try to compensate for… a “me” who’s been victim as well as victimizer, a “me” who is powerless as well as powerful in this world, a “me” who grieves because life is unfair…go there this Christmas…that’s your dirty, dark, dank stable in the basement of the inn. It is there that Jesus will be born in you and you shall be born from above. In an inexplicable moment of grace your heavenly Father will pick you up and say “My Beloved.” That, my Beloved, is the miracle of Christmas. Amen.
