Christmas Mystery

Christmas, I think, never loses it’s magic.  The delight of our school’s kids at the decorations we put up.  The holiday music.  The parties and goodies.  The grandchildren opening gifts. The first snow of the season with ice to coat al the trees.  Yet the magic of our celebration cannot compare to the mystery of the Almighty. 

            Not enough to promise a M’shiah, God come to earth to change the order of things, He sprang it upon us in the most absurd way that nobody of that era recognizes the significance.  Yet this plan, according to Isaiah 43 is the Glory God holds dearest, considers His most majestic accomplishment.  It is recorded in only two gospels but Matthew is so true to Judaism and Luke so accurate, they are now considered beyond much doubt, stunningly telling different sides of the same story. History; His Story.  And unlike all the pastoral scenes and white Christmases we try to embellish it with, the Christmas story is one of chaos, upheaval and scandal. Luke starts with the story of John the Baptist being foretold and born.  His mother Elizabeth is a cousin to Mary, whose entry comes next.  Mary, mother of Jesus also has a sister, Salome, mentioned at the foot of the cross later and wife of Zebedee who owns a fishing business.  Mary, according to the early church father Polycarp, was 16 and engaged to Joseph, an impoverished tecton (builder, carpenter) who is 40.  Arranged marriages were the rule and we think Joe probably had to save for years to afford a dowry.  So why is Mary engaged to such a poor guy while Elizabeth marries a rich priest and Salome a successful fisherman?  Was she ugly?  Shy? Behavior problems?  Or was Joe just closely acquainted with the family?  Why would  God chose them?  Perhaps it had something to do with their acceptance of His message.  We read how Mary was filled with fear and Joe with misgivings, but they went through with it.  Mary knows that to be pregnant out of wedlock is punishable by stoning.  Joe could have had it done, or abandoned the girl.  But Mary, though troubled, runs to Elizabeth and Zecharias, and praises God for his goodness.  Joe listens to the angel in his dream, takes her for a wife, and trusts God for the outcome.  If one of us had been in such circumstances would God trust us for His hopes and dreams? The real story is so wild we don’t know whether to call it tragedy or comedy or soap opera.

            For years skeptics and scholars have thought that the reason Christians celebrate December 25 is because they were trying to pre-empt pagans in the 4^th century who celebrated Feast of the Unconquered Sun and Saturnalia at about that time.  Trouble is, North African Christians were celebrating Christmas much earlier, just prior to 200 AD, on December 25.  It has now been discovered that Tertullian of Carthage wrote about how this date was chosen. It was held that Jesus entered the earth the same day of the year that he died.  And his death in AD30 was on the 14^th of Nisan, or March 25.  So then add nine months and he should have been born Dec. 25 or thereabouts.  When Zecharias went to the temple he belonged to the priestly division of Abijah which served, according to Jewish records, in October.  So then Elizabeth was six months pregnant in March, the month of Mary’s conception. It was also early church tradition that Jesus was born on a Wednesday which would have been Dec. 25, 6 BC. So much for our smart-guy, pagan pre-emption theories.

            Whatever the real date, it was one lowly and humiliating birth. A census was called to enroll everyone to be taxed.  Romans taxed heavily, about 25% of earnings.  In many countries this was peacefully accepted since it brought Roman civilization and law and order.  Not in Palestine where the Jewish religious authorities demanded another 23 %.  Many people could not pay, and so the puppet ruler Herod had his tax agents seize their land. By the time he died in 4 BC, he owned half the land in Palestine.  This is likely the reason Joseph was from Bethlehem in Judea but was working as a ditch-digger and carpenter in Nazareth, Galilee.  It is about 95 miles between the towns.  Poor guys don’t have donkeys.  Mary likely walked the distance.  She wasn’t required to show up at the census, but Joe took her along anyway.  Maybe it was to get her away from the scandal and keep her close.  Walk that far and labor often comes.  The couple evidently had no relatives in Bethlehem or else they were scandalized and turned them away.  Inns were tough places where caravans stopped.  Sleep there and you guard your possessions.  No room there either.  And so the baby came and was to be found in a manger, Luke tells us.  Where?  Probably the couple found refuge under the rock outcrops which shepherds used as crude barns.  These were dug out into shallow caves to shelter the sheep at night when the shepherds were grazing crop stubble “in the fields”, during the winter rainy season, as it says in Luke 2.  Shepherds slept on a raised platform at one end of the pens full of manure and sheep.  They were mostly young boys, aged 12 to 14.  Next to the platform they put mangers full of hay to supplement the livestock.  Here is where they laid the new baby.  And so the other shepherds found them, just as angels informed. For Mary to give birth in a stinking cave barn, surrounded by animals and young teenagers, the One who made the heavens to be first held by peasants fleeing scandal, it is so humiliating it brings tears to the eyes. Surely the story is divine. No human would make this up. Any editor would have whitewashed the tale.  Proof? Look at our Christmas celebration today.  We’ve surrounded it with holly and snow, Christmas cookies and fireplaces, Santa and gifts. But God had a far greater mystery in store.      

            When an angel in another dream told Joseph to take the child and flee, he didn’t hesitate.  He had no questions if the dream was due to something he ate or a bad night’s sleep in the barnyard.  Would you walk 200 miles to Egypt based on something you thought you saw in a dream? The shepherds couldn’t shut up about the birth. So why didn’t the Romans informants listen? Bethlehem was just 3 miles from the Herodian, Herod the Great’s sumptuous summer palace, surrounded by a garrison camp of 6000 Roman soldiers. But Herod was in Jerusalem in his winter palace when the astrologers from the east arrived.  Best scholarly thinking at this point is that the astrologers saw a sign in the constellation Aries, the symbol of Israel and wanted to see the new king this foretold.  Only then, Herod got interested, was betrayed and got mad and killed all the babies in tiny Bethlehem, population 200.

            What do we learn?  God, amazingly, is humble instead of mighty like a god is supposed to be.  He can be small and  approachable instead of fearful.  He is suffering, born lowly, takes on the evil of every person who lived or ever will in order to save us.  God has guts.  He laid his power aside to be born as a human, limits Himself and risks His very Essence under temptation.  If Jesus had sinned just once, well then He, God, would have ceased to be God.  God is genius to have cooked up a plan like this.  300 predictions in the Old Testament and almost no one could figure it out. But the one thing that means most to me is that God comes after me.  For this story shows that He will stop at nothing to find a lost child of mankind.  He will come wherever your messed up life is.  It hints at his surprise ending in dying on a cross and then imparting His Spirit within a soul both to believe and to follow.  Like Joe and Mary we don’t claim to understand this stuff.  It’s too incredible.  Mystery, like I was saying.