Grace to you, and peace
As Advent and Christmastide are upon us once again, I find myself, for obvious reasons, meditating once again on the story of Christmas. I find myself wondering why this story has captured the imaginations of generation after generation of people. What is it about this story that people find so captivating and so compelling? All of us, both us church folks and those of a more secular persuasion, will likely find every element of the story instantly recognizable even out of context. You see an image of shepherds, a star, a woman on a donkey, three wise and wealthy looking ancient gentlemen, a baby in a manger – almost everyone will recognize these as parts of the Christmas story.
So, what is it? Is this just one of the greatest stories ever told? Certainly it’s not as action packed as, say, Beowulf; not as epic as Arthurian legend; not as witty and clever as Chaucer’s tales. While the Christmas story is by no means devoid of the magnificent, the core details are surprisingly mundane. It’s a story about the birth of a child, born to a rather unremarkable couple, in a rather unremarkable place, surrounded by a fairly unremarkable cast of characters. Mary and Joseph are not exactly epic heroes, Bethlehem was a backwater nowhere place, shepherds were basically riff-raff. And yet this moment is hailed by angel choirs who split the heavens in the night sky to declare that something monumental has happened.
One of the reasons the Christmas story continues to capture my imagination is just how many angles one can ponder it from, how many perspectives are represented in the story, and just how many layers of meaning can be teased out of it depending on which angles you examine it from. The Gospel of Luke sets up the birth narrative in the context of political power struggles – in the days of Caesar Augustus… when Herod was King in Judea… when Quirinius was governor in Syria… Luke has Jesus born amidst mentions of these great and terrible and powerful human rulers. He is their antithesis. He is born to knock these and every other tyrant from their thrones and to become Lord over all. His Lordship and his Kingdom are not like these other lords and their kingdoms; in his Kingdom, the poor are blessed and the meek inherit the earth – and these values are made evident from the very beginning of the story – a humble birth, in a humble place, adored by humble shepherds.
You can also look at the story from a cosmic perspective, as in the Gospel of John, when we are told that Jesus is the eternal Word of God, the Word by which God created all things and through which God sends his light into the world. We are told that this Word – which created all things – becomes a created thing, becomes part of the very world he created. “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” Creator and creation become united in a person; Heaven and Earth brought together in the space of a tiny little baby. The beginning of a new creation.
You can look at the story from Mary’s perspective, imagining the great fear she must have felt when she found herself pregnant out of wedlock and consider all of the potential consequences a woman in this position could have faced in that world. You can admire the trust she puts in God through this perilous ordeal. You can consider the enormous honor and wonder of a human being carrying divinity itself in her womb and giving birth to the Immanuel – “God with us.”
You can look at the story from the perspective of the Shepherds and how when God came into the world, he chose as his first audience the poor and the outcast, those among the least respected in society. Or from the perspective of the Wise Men, and how among those first to recognize Jesus as the Christ were gentiles, signaling how God intended to bless all the nations of the earth through him. You can even look at it from the perspective of the animals by the manger, and see how all created beings get to play a role in this unfolding drama of salvation.
One perspective that I resonate with personally, one which is often overlooked in meditations on the Christmas story, is that of Joseph. Though historically Mary has been the focal point – after all, she’s the one who has to do the hard part and give birth to the little Messiah – if we consider Joseph’s point of view, whole new theological and moral dimensions open up in the story. When we profess that for our sake Jesus took on our humanity and out lot, we aren’t talking about humanity in the abstract. Jesus lived a real, human life – and part of that human life, part of Jesus’ human experience, was being adopted and fostered by Joseph. Jesus, in a certain sense, was a foster child. This was a perspective I had never really contemplated before becoming a foster parent myself. And when I put two-and-two together, suddenly my role as such took on so much larger significance in my heart.
The Gospels don’t shy away from this detail about Jesus’ parentage, despite the fact that it would have been considered a mark of shame upon the entire Holy Family. There are, of course, historians who speculate that the truth of Jesus’ parentage was considerably more grim than portrayed in Scripture, that perhaps Mary found herself pregnant by a non-consensual encounter – likely at the hands of a roman centurion, against whom she would have had no recourse. And in the world Mary found herself in, a woman losing her virginity outside of wedlock, whether the act was consensual or not, was at best a great shame upon her and at worst a crime worthy of capital punishment. Such historians see the virgin birth narrative as a way by which the early Christian community transformed Mary’s shame into her glory, proclaiming that not only was Jesus the product of divine conception, but that Mary retained her virginity, her honor, perpetually.
Such historians reject ideas like a miraculous, sex-less conception. Maybe you, also, are more comfortable reading the story symbolically. Or maybe the idea of questioning the virgin birth of Jesus makes you angry. For me personally, I don’t need the virgin birth to be historical for it to be meaningful, but I also believe I live in a world far too weird and too wonderful to reject the idea of miracles outright. Because I believe in a God who can do all things, and because I believe this God created a world far more extraordinary than we can even yet imagine, I believe miracles can (and do) happen. I only include this tangent to provide yet another perspective on the Christmas story.
Regardless of whether you take the virgin birth to be a historical event or an early Christian story to preserve Mary’s (and by extension, Jesus’ and Joseph’s) honor, the position Joseph finds himself in at the start of the story is the same. He’s faced with the choice: to either dismiss Mary, freeing himself from her shame and abandoning her to whatever society decided would be a fitting consequence for her; or he could wed her, taking her shame upon himself, and accepting the responsibility to raise a child that was not his own. We all know which path he takes, but recall that it took an act of divine intervention to get him to do so. Everyone would know that this child wasn’t his, that his wife had not been “pure” on their wedding night. He was facing a lifetime of mocking comments, judgmental glances, of not being invited to parties, of losing respect among family and neighbors. And all of this on top of the task of raising a child – a monumental task even when you’re raising an ordinary child, let alone the child who is supposed to grow up to be the savior of the world. Of course Joseph needed some angelic nudging. The Gospels don’t give us any information on Jesus’ childhood, and by the time Jesus reaches adulthood Joseph seems to have already passed away. While we have no information on those most formative years of Jesus life, if we consider the fact that Jesus’ favorite word for God is “Father,” I think it is safe to assume Joseph did a pretty swell job.
Saint Paul often talks about salvation as a matter of being adopted by God. You can see this theme in Ephesians 1:5, Romans 8:14-16, and Galatians 4:4-6, the latter of which reads:
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law,in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as his children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba!Father!”
I find it striking that, as Saint Paul talks about our adoption to become children of God, he references the birth of Jesus, whereby Jesus was adopted by one of us. We talk about salvation all different kinds of ways – Jesus takes on our humanity so he can give us his divinity; Jesus takes our sin to give us his righteousness; Jesus takes our death to give us his eternal life. To this list of “great exchange” (as Martin Luther called it) we can add the insight we have learned from Saint Joseph, that Jesus was adopted and fostered by a human being so that humankind might be adopted and fostered by God. Simply incredible, if you ask me.
A final note on the story. The definition of “foster” according to a quick google search is “to encourage or promote the development of something.” In this way, we’re all fostering something in this life. Those of you who have had children, whether by blood, through marriage, or through adoption or fostering – you helped foster the growth and development of that child into adulthood. Or maybe you were there in an important way for nieces and nephews, cousins, neighbors, or community kids. Or maybe it wasn’t a child at all, but a friend or relative who leaned on you during a rough patch in their life, or looked to you for comfort and guidance. Maybe you’ve fostered life in flowers or garden vegetables. Probably you’ve had pets at some point who relied on your fostering care to live and thrive. In some way, large or small, you’ve fostered growth in the world around you. And when you’ve done so, you’ve done something divine. You’ve imitated your Father in Heaven, the one who ultimately fosters all growth and flourishing throughout all of creation. But looking at this divine activity through the eyes of Saint Joseph, we also see the face of God in all of those children, in all of those people, and in all of those things that you’ve helped life and thrive more fully. As Christ himself said, “what you’ve done unto the least of these, you’ve done unto me.” In every act of love we encounter God twice! Once as we allow ourselves to be an instrument of God’s love unto others, and again as we behold the face of God in those upon whom we shine God’s love. For as the Scriptures also tell us, Christ is “all in all” (Colossians 3:11).
So may your eyes be renewed this Christmas season, that you may see Christ as all in all – in all of your deeds of love and care, and in all the faces of every beloved child of God.