2 of 3

Who is he in yonder stall?

Christmas art shows Jesus' family, the Holy Family, as icons stamped in gold foil. In the paintings, a calm Mary receives the news of the Annunciation as a kind of benediction - but that is not at all how Luke tells the story. Mary was "greatly troubled" and "afraid" at the angel's appearance, and when the angel delivered the lofty words about the Son of the Most High whose kingdom will never end, Mary had one thing only on her mind: "But I'm a virgin!"

Once, a young unmarried lawyer named Cynthia bravely stood up in my church in Chicago and told of a past sin of fornication, which we already knew about: we saw her hyperactive son running up and down the aisles every Sunday. Cynthia had taken the lonely road of bearing him and caring for him after his father decided to skip town. Cynthia's sin was no worse than many others, and yet, as she told us, it had such conspicuous consequences. She could not hide the result of that one act of passion, sticking out as it did from her abdomen for nine months until a child emerged to change every hour of every day of the rest of her life. No wonder the Jewish teenager Mary felt greatly troubled - she faced the same prospects even without the act of passion.

In the modern United States, where each year a million teenage girls get pregnant out of wedlock, Mary's predicament has undoubtedly lost some of its force, but in a closely knit Jewish community in the first century, the news an angel delivered could not have been entirely welcome. The law regarded a betrothed woman who became pregnant as an adulteress, subject to death by stoning.

Matthew tells of Joseph generously agreeing to divorce Mary rather than press charges, until an angel shows up to calm his feelings of betrayal. Luke tells of Mary hurrying off to the one person who could possibly understand what she was going through: her relative Elizabeth, who has miraculously become pregnant in old age following another angelic annunciation. Elizabeth indeed believes Mary's story and shares her joy, and yet the scene poignantly underscores the contrast between the two women. The whole countryside is talking about the miracle of Elizabeth's healed womb; meanwhile, Mary has to hide the shame of her own miracle.

A few months later, the birth of John the Baptist took place with great fanfare, complete with midwives, doting relatives, and the traditional village chorus celebrating the birth of a Jewish male. Six months after that, Jesus was born far from home, with no midwife, extended family, or village chorus present. A male head of household would have sufficed for the Roman census; did Joseph drag his pregnant wife along to Bethlehem in order to spare her the ignominy of childbirth in her home village?

C. S. Lewis has written about God's plan: "The whole thing narrows and narrows, until at last it comes down to a little point, small as the point of a spear - a Jewish girl at her prayers." Today as I read the accounts of Jesus' birth I tremble to think of the fate of the world resting on the responses of two rural teenagers. How many times must Mary have gone over the angel's words as she felt the Son of God kicking against the walls of her uterus? How many times must Joseph have second-guessed his own encounter with an angel - just a dream? - as he endured the hot shame of living among neighbors who could plainly see the changing shape of the woman he planned to marry?

next page... |  2 of 3

share this page

December 12 1994, Vol. 38, No. 14