HOW SILENTLY, HOW SILENTLY, THE WONDROUS GIFT IS GIVEN
In the birth stories of Luke and Matthew, only one person seems to grasp the mysterious nature of what God has set in motion: the old man Simeon, who had long clung to the belief that he would not die before seeing the Messiah, instinctively understood that conflict would break out. "This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against … ," he said, and then gave the prediction that a sword would pierce Mary's own soul. Somehow Simeon sensed that though to all appearances little had changed – Herod was still king, Roman troops were still stringing up patriots, Jerusalem still overflowed with beggars – under the surface, everything had changed. A new force had arrived to undermine the world and its powers.
At first, Jesus hardly seemed a threat. He was born under Caesar Augustus, at a time when buoyant hope wafted through the Roman Empire. More than any other ruler, Augustus raised the expectations of what a leader could accomplish and what a society could achieve. It was Augustus, in fact, who first used the Greek word for "gospel" or "good news" as a label for the new world order represented by his reign. The empire declared him a god, and established rites of worship. His enlightened and stable regime, many believed, would last forever, a final solution to the problem of how to structure a government.
Meanwhile, in an obscure corner of Augustus's empire under the local dominion of Herod the Great, King of the Jews, the birth of a baby named Jesus was barely noticed by the chroniclers of the day. We know about him mainly through four books written years after his death, at a time when less than one-half of 1 percent of the Roman world had ever heard of him. Jesus' biographers would also borrow the word for "gospel," proclaiming a different kind of new world order altogether. They would mention Augustus only once, a passing reference to set the date of the census that ensured Jesus would be born in Bethlehem.
God's visit to Earth took place humbly, in a berth for animals with no attendants present and nowhere to lay the newborn king but a feed trough. Indeed, the event that divided history, and even our calendars, into two parts had more animal than human witnesses. For an instant, the sky grew luminous with angels. Yet, who saw that spectacle? Illiterate hirelings who watched the flocks of others, "nobodies" who failed to leave their names. Shepherds had a randy reputation, and proper Jews lumped them together with the "godless." Fittingly, it was they whom God selected to help celebrate the birth of one who would be known as the friend of sinners.
Perhaps the best way to understand the "underdog" nature of the Incarnation is to transpose it into terms we can relate to today. An unwed mother, homeless, was forced to look for shelter while traveling to meet the heavy taxation demands of a hostile government. She lived in a land recovering from violent civil wars and still in turmoil – a situation much like that in modern Bosnia, Rwanda, or Somalia. Like half of all mothers who give birth today, she gave birth in Asia, in its far western corner, the part of the world that would prove least receptive to the son she bore. That son became a refugee in Africa, the continent where most refugees can still be found.
I sometimes wonder what Mary thought about her militant Magnificat hymn during her years of exile in Egypt. For a Jew, Egypt evoked bright memories of a powerful God who had flattened a pharaoh's army and brought liberation; now she fled there out of desperation, a stranger in a strange land hiding from her own government. Could her baby, hunted, helpless, on the run, possibly fulfill the lavish hopes of his people? Even the family's mother-tongue summoned up memories of their underdog status: Jesus spoke Aramaic, a trade language closely related to Arabic, reflecting the Jews' history as a subject people.
Growing up, Jesus' sensibilities were affected most deeply by the poor, the powerless, the oppressed. Today theologians debate the aptness of the phrase "God's preferential option for the poor" as a way of describing God's concern for the underdog. Since God arranged the circumstances in which to be born on planet Earth, his "preferential options" speak for themselves.
THE WORLD IN SOLEMN STILLNESS LAY
There is one view of Christmas I have never seen on a Christmas card, probably because no artist, not even William Blake, could do it justice. In Revelation 12, the Bible contains a scene that pulls back the curtain to give us a glimpse of Christmas as it looked from somewhere far beyond Andromeda: Christmas from God's viewpoint.
The account in Revelation differs radically from the birth stories in the Gospels. Revelation does not mention shepherds and an infanticidal king; rather, it pictures a dragon leading a ferocious struggle in heaven. A woman clothed with the sun and wearing a crown of 12 stars cries out in pain as she is about to give birth. Suddenly, the enormous red dragon enters the picture, his tail sweeping a third of the stars out of the sky and flinging them to the earth. He crouches hungrily before the woman, eager to devour her child the moment it is born. At the last second, the infant is snatched away to safety, the woman flees into the desert, and all-out cosmic war begins.
Revelation is a strange book by any measure, and you would need to understand its style to make sense of this extraordinary scene. In daily life, two parallel histories occur simultaneously: one on earth and one in heaven. Revelation, however, views them together, allowing a quick look behind the scenes at the cosmic impact of what happens on earth. On earth, a baby was born, a king got wind of it, a chase ensued. In heaven, the Great Invasion had begun, a daring raid by the ruler of the forces of good into the universe's seat of evil.
John Milton expressed this point of view majestically in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, poems that make heaven and hell the central focus and Earth a mere battleground for their clashes. The modern author J. B. Phillips also attempted such a point of view, on a much less epic scale, and last Christmas I turned to Phillips's fantasy to try to escape my earthbound viewpoint.
In Phillips's fantasy, a senior angel is showing a very young angel around the splendors of the universes. They view whirling galaxies and blazing suns and then flit across the infinite distances of space until at last they enter one particular galaxy of 500 billion stars.
As the two of them drew near to the star which we call our sun and to its circling planets, the senior angel pointed to a small and rather insignificant sphere turning very slowly on its axis. It looked as dull as a dirty tennis ball to the little angel, whose mind was filled with the size and glory of what he had seen.
"I want you to watch that one particularly," said the senior angel, pointing with his finger.
"Well, it looks very small and rather dirty to me," said the little angel. "What's special about that one?"
When I first read Phillips's fantasy, I thought of the pictures beamed back to Earth from the Apollo astronauts. They described our planet as "whole and round and beautiful and small," a blue-green-and-tan globe suspended in space. Jim Lovell, reflecting on the scene later, said, "It was just another body, really, about four times bigger than the moon. But it held all the hope and all the life and all the things that the crew of Apollo 8 knew and loved. It was the most beautiful thing there was to see in all the heavens."
To the little angel, though, Earth did not seem so impressive. He listened with shocked disbelief as the senior angel told him that this planet, small and insignificant and not overly clean, was the renowned Visited Planet.
"Do you mean that our great and glorious Prince … went down in Person to this fifth-rate little ball? Why should He do a thing like that?" … The little angel's face wrinkled in disgust. "Do you mean to tell me," he said, "that He stooped so low as to become one of those creeping, crawling creatures of that floating ball?"
"I do, and I don't think He would like you to call them 'creeping, crawling creatures' in that tone of voice. For, strange as it may seem to us, He loves them. He went down to visit them to lift them up to become like Him."
The little angel looked blank. Such a thought was almost beyond his comprehension.
It is almost beyond my comprehension, too, and yet I accept that this notion is the key to understanding Christmas and is, in fact, the touchstone of my faith. If it is true, this Bethlehem story, it is a story like no other. Never again need we wonder whether what happens on this dirty little tennis ball of a planet matters to the rest of the universe.
How did God the Father feel that night, helpless as any human father, as he watched his Son emerge smeared with blood to face a harsh, cold world? Lines from two different Christmas carols come to mind. One, "The little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes," seems to me a sanitized version of what took place in Bethlehem. I imagine Jesus cried like any baby the night he entered the world, a world that would certainly give him much reason to cry as an adult. The second, a line from "O Little Town of Bethlehem," seems as profoundly true today as it did two thousand years ago: "The hopes and fears of all the years / are met in thee tonight."
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Adapted from a book in process: "The Jesus I Never Knew" (forthcoming from Zondervan).
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