First Thoughts on Gospel Passages from the Lectionary

Christmas Day 1+2

William Loader

Christmas Day 1+2: 25 December Luke 2:1-20

My ears recall young readers stumbling over Luke’s political detail which begins this passage: ‘a decree from emperor Augustus..when Quirinius was governor of Syria’. The story is simple enough, once you get to it – wonderful – but why these lines which must be so practised beforehand? Luke relates the story to real history. That is Luke’s interest. He earths the events, even if here he is probably not so well informed. The best evidence suggests that Quirinius was governor of Syria nearer to 6 CE when there was also a census, though not a world wide one, whereas elsewhere (3:1-2) Luke indicates, as does Matthew, that Jesus was born near the close of Herod the Great’s reign in 4 BCE. The discrepancy need not bother us. Compared with historians of his time Luke’s combination of verisimilitude and historical accuracy does us very good service – but hardly the material for a Christmas day homily!

Yet the story of the baby wrapped in cloths and laid to rest in an animal’s eating trough – all from verse 7 – needs a context. These few details have cried out for expansion and not in vain. ‘No room in the inn’ – we imagine the local hotel. ‘In a manger’ – what’s a manger, mummy? ‘In a stable’ – like they used to have in rich houses before garages and carports? And soon we see the shepherds and the wise men in bent stature, sheep nodding wisely, donkeys, cattle, goats and doves – the Christmas scene is complete. And why not! Historical reconstruction is also imagination.

A ‘manger’ is where they put food for the animals to eat, my child, probably just a hollow with straw in it at one end of a one room house. Not really an ‘inn’; more a sheltered area to protect people from the cold for the night and where guests might stay, sometimes a small room attached or on the roof. A stable? not really a stable, probably just the eating hollow at one end of the single room, used because the guest shelter was full. The scene is more familiar to those who have watched the creative way bits of cardboard and sheets of metal can make a shelter on the pavement for refugees or village people seeking work in overcrowded cities, but with some still needing to sleep on the ground outside. It's a very ordinary typical one room house with such an attachment. ‘What kind of bathroom did they have, daddy?’ – none, of course, they had to make do. ‘That’s not very nice.’ – No, it’s not.

So behind the romance of the ‘stable suite’ of the modern Christmas card is Luke’s one verse scene of basic simplicity, poverty – well, as most, then, would have reasoned, with a little money Joseph could have bought them into a better space. ‘Blessed are the poor, the meek..’ These are the people who (still) cry out for redemption, liberation, peace, their inarticulate cry, a mere whimper beside the loudly proclaimed peace of Rome. By force and efficiency, the conquering Romans had brought the famous pax romana to their world, which included Palestine and their emperor was hailed a ‘son of God’. Law and order at last, sustained by ruthless suppression of people’s rights.

That is why Luke must have the reader stumble over officialdom to get to the story. For here is a different kind of ‘son of God’, a different kind of peace. Luke’s scene in verse 7 is a subversion of common human value systems. This scene at the beginning does what the cross will do at the end: a crown of thorns will mock the arrogance of the rulers, a life poured out will hang in contrast to those who suck out the goodness and strength of the people. Little wonder there is an implicit conspiracy to suck out the power of the Christmas story and render it a celebration of giving and mostly receiving wealth.

Luke moves on to the shepherds, a common image for rulers in the ancient world, an echo also of David, the shepherd king, in his town of Bethlehem. One simple way to portray divine transcendence was to speak of angels. God is saying something in this story. There is a peace! It is a peace only possible where God as the God of compassion is acknowledged, for God’s pleasure is not that of the tyrant but that of the generous giver. This is to be celebrated in song, in dance, in liturgy, in living! In verse 12 the angel repeats the all important detail of verse 7. This ‘saviour .. Christ/Messiah, Lord’ is down with the least. The same detail comes again in verse 16. A counter saviour is born, a counter ‘son of God’, bringing a counter ‘peace’ – for a counter people.

If Luke means us to guess what Mary might have ‘pondered in her heart’ (2:19), he has given us already a wealth of information in Mary’s song (1:46-55). God has lifted up the lowly, has remembered the poor. In moments of our own deeper truth we can also find ourselves facing our raw humanity, facing our own poverty, stripped of our shining garments and clad in just the basics. Then the angels are there for us. They are always there for us. And we know ourselves in solidarity with the saviour of the world as our saviour. And we know ourselves in solidarity with all who have no peace in the world’s order of peace. And we know that in this new peace there is a place for all.

The eucharist is a strange kind of eating trough. But the end is as the beginning and the beginning as the end.

Tell the story. Its simplicity invites drama, poetry, pageant. The communities I know come together in the context of the special, the giving and receiving of presents, the feast, the Christmas music. They come to celebrate. It is not the time for heavy sermons.

It is for many both an exciting and a stressful time. Family members come together who might normally not get on well together. Someone is usually carrying more than their fair share of responsibility, so efforts of niceness may be overlaying resentment. For others memories of closeness are accompanied by memories of loss and grief. Christmas is a space which invites the coming together of many very significant life issues, but not as issues to be thought about, more as issues of experiencing, frequently unexpressed and inarticulate. That is why we need the angels, the romance, the symbols, the colour of the story. People can enter the story, find themselves there, make their own exploratory or rededicatory journeys with the shepherds, just to see, to be there.

For some who may make the Christmas service their one church visit for the year, perhaps just to be back with family and old friends, the story is still familiar, a mixture of fantasy and faith, an opportunity to engage that latent spirituality which has not found the church rings their bells. The inarticulate spirituality which will sometimes bring children for baptism in a kind of vaguery too often despised. The Christmas story remains a sacred site for very many people inside and outside our churches. Today is the day to encourage people to enjoy it, to touch its sacredness and let it touch them.

One of the best ways to engage the story and help others engage it is to build its motifs into the liturgy. We are sometimes like the shepherds sitting on dark hills, needing to be surprised by the divine, needing to hear about hope. We can make our approach in prayer with the shepherds to the Christ child and what he represents. We can bring our gifts.

Fantasy and reality are not opposites. Part of our role is to help people make the reality connections in the fantasy. This is not the space for untangling what appears to be Luke's confusion in dating Jesus' birth to a census which took place in 6CE, rather than back in the last years of Herod 6-4 BCE. But the politics are not irrelevant. Caesar Augustus was hailed as son of God, as bringer of peace, as saviour, as a good news person. Rome made much of these claims to legitimate its regime of suppression and exploitation, law and order, throughout the empire. So the Christmas story is a cheeky response. It parodies these claims: the Son of God is a baby whose family can't find accommodation; the good news of peace comes to ordinary shepherd folks of the hills; the peace is about real peace, real inclusiveness. It is people's peace, people's power, people's salvation and liberation. The parody at birth reflects the parody at death, where we see the king crowned with thorns upon the throne of a cross.

Without its subversive theme the story degenerates into a myth of origins: the reason why we all have a good time, a kind of aetiology of the west. At the same time it is more than a reactive story. It sets the meaning of Jesus' ministry in the picture frame of his nativity. In Jesus we celebrate God's reaching out to all humankind, none written off, none despised, none too strange, too bad, too inhuman. In Jesus we celebrate the meeting of earth and sky: the divine human encounter which gives sense and purpose to existence, the possibility of participating in the life of God and the peace of God in the world of reality. In Jesus we identify the life of God in the finger mixing the mud or writing in the dust, in the homeless itinerancy, in the broken bread and poured out wine.

The Christmas story is the transposition of all of this back into the imagined setting of his birth. Its motifs function as codes to convey something not really about a baby, but about a year of ministry, of compassion and death. It is like the language of dreams. It is a way of approaching reality which engages our fantasy. We see it already in the story's location: Bethlehem, the city of David; here is the Son of David, the Messiah. We see it in the shepherds: David was a shepherd boy. But its deeper message is that Jesus offers a vision of peace which the world needs and we as individuals need. The story will do that in the retelling if we, the storytellers, give it its setting, conserve its creative and subversive tensions, and expose the opposites it reconciles in a way which invites people to find space for themselves within it. Today we are frequently doing so in contexts where the story has been hijacked. Faithfulness to the tradition entails ensuring its marking stones are not displaced and clearing the space for what is profound ceremony.