Unvarnished Christmas
Whatever your background, culture or faith, it’s very likely that you know at least something of the ‘Christmas Story’; the story of the baby Jesus, born in a stable and being visited by shepherds and by kings? It’s a lovely ‘cuddly’ story that never fails to produce a warm feeling in the hardest of hearts.
But is that all it is – a story?
Absolutely not and while it is true the version we all know and love is very sanitised. The unvarnished version is very different.
It all started in a ‘one-horse’ town called Nazareth in Galilee, a corner of the Middle East which at the time was part of the Roman Empire. A young girl, probably around 16 years old, has a surprise visitor – an angel called Gabriel. Now we don’t actually know what Gabriel looked like but it probably wasn’t some guy in very shiny white robes and giant wings as depicted in some pictures. Angels are messengers from God and generally speaking they are not instantly recognisable as such, so it seems likely that he looked to Mary like a pretty run of the mill individual. However, his message to her was anything but run of the mill. He announced himself by saying: “Greeting, you who are highly favoured, the Lord is with you”. In his Gospel, Luke records that ‘Mary was greatly troubled by his words’. I bet she was! God didn’t send angels to speak to teenage girls very often, to say the least! But Gabriel’s words were just the preamble. He went on to tell Mary that; she was favoured by God, she was going have a child, he would be a son, she would call him Jesus, he would be a king who’s kingdom would last forever. Whew! Some message.
When Mary had recovered from her initial shock, she pointed out to Gabriel that there was a bit of a snag – she was a virgin. Gabriel calmly informed her that that wasn’t a problem and that she would become pregnant, not in the usual way but by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Remarkably, Mary seemed to take this in her stride and simply replied :”I am the Lord’s servant”.
Now even in our modern society, for a young teenager to suddenly announce that she is pregnant is generally somewhat problematical, particularly when the father is unknown and not her boyfriend (Mary was engaged to be married). In Jewish society of the time, it was a disaster – the pregnant woman could even be stoned to death!
Amazingly, Joseph, her fiancé, after being spoken to by another (or maybe the same?) angel accepted Mary’s explanation.
So they all lived happily ever after?
Not a chance?
During the last month of Mary’s pregnancy, the Roman emperor had the bright idea of ensuring that the empire maximised its tax revenues, so he instructed that all adult men must return to their place of birth to be registered for tax. Now Joseph’s home town was Bethlehem, somewhat inconveniently, around ninety miles away from Nazareth. But how to get there? Well unless you could afford a horse or carriage, which Joseph most definitely couldn’t, the only option was to walk. Well that might have been an option for Joseph but not for Mary in her state, and he wasn’t about to leave for what would have been more than a week. Solution? Borrow a donkey. Anyone reading this who is or has been pregnant will testify that a ninety mile trip on the back of a donkey would not be much fun to say the least. And where would they spend the nights on the way? In all probability, huddled under blankets by the roadside, maybe with a fire to keep the chill off.
Things surely couldn’t get any worse could they? Yes they could and they were about to! Just outside Bethlehem, Mary went into labour. This was a long time before maternity hospitals, or any sort of hospitals for that matter, so Joseph went in search of some suitable accommodation in which Mary could give birth. Unfortunately no rooms could be found in any inn and time was running out. So, yes just as the story goes, Mary and Joseph found shelter in a stable. Now stables took all sorts of forms, some were caves, some lean-tos on the sides of houses or inns, some were little more than windbreaks. None of them were very hygienic, comfortable or warm but nevertheless it was in a stable of some sort that an exhausted, probably frightened and certainly in pain Mary gave birth to the baby Jesus.
All in all this whole episode was far from being an ideal start to family life and certainly was not how anyone would imagine the birth of a king.
And things didn’t get much better.
Yes there were certainly the portents of greatness; the visit of the shepherds directed by a host of angels and the gifts from kings who had travelled thousands of miles for this moment, but on the whole, things started tough and got tougher.
Why? What possible reason could God have to make things so difficult?
Jesus was Emmanuel, literally’ God with us’. If he was to show us the way back to God there could be no room for excuses. Jesus, the Son of God, had to live a truly human life, one that was as fraught as it could get. None of us could ever say: “ But it was alright for Jesus, he had it easy”.
Herod, the Roman’s puppet king of Israel, heard about this ‘new kid on the block’ and he wasn’t having any of it. He wasn’t having any challenge to his position so, after some research, he worked out that this ‘king’ had been born in Bethlehem some time over the past two years. But how to identify him? With great difficulty. So the solution? – Have all male children in Bethlehem under two years old killed! Unfortunately for Herod, Joseph had been warned in a dream to get his family out of there and escape from Herod’s clutches by becoming refugees in Egypt.
Not the best of starts for any child!
