The
real Christmas story is far from sweet, cute and sentimental, no matter what all those Hallmark Cards have to say! If one reads the story of the birth of Jesus
carefully, without all the embellishments and preconceptions, a pretty pathetic
situation is presented. I invite you to lay aside all your preconceptions about this story for
a minute and let me help you look at it through a different lens. The truth is that this story is quite
pitiful, really! On the other hand, however, it also offer us great comfort and hope in the desperate moments of our lives!
1. In the Gospel of Matthew, from which we read tonight, Mary,
who was betrothed to Joseph, but not yet married, found herself pregnant.
Joseph almost divorced her because of it, before he had the chance to
understand the facts in a vivid dream. 2. In the Gospel of Luke, which we will read at Midnight Mass, we hear all of the most familiar details of the Christmas story. Mary came due at the very same time that Joseph was
required by law to register in a Roman census that was taken every 14 years. It
meant Mary and Joseph were forced to travel 80 miles from Nazareth, across country on
donkey-back, to the far-off town of Bethlehem. This whole inconvenience happened so that the foreign
government occupying their country could collect more taxes! 3. Away from home
and unable to find a place to stay, with no family or friends to help her with
childbirth, Mary delivers her baby in a barn and places him in a box out of
which animals ate. Luke could hardly have painted a bleaker picture if he
had ended there.
However,
Luke knew that if this event had taken place back home, the birth of their Jewish
son would have been an occasion of great joy. In accordance with their
tradition, when the time of the birth was near at hand, friends and local
musicians would have gathered around the house to await the news. When the
birth was announced, the musicians would have struck up the band and broken into
song. There would have been universal congratulations, singing, and dancing
around the house.
Luke,
the teller of the most familiar Christmas story, looking at it through the eyes of faith, not through
the eyes of a modern-day reporter, takes this pathetic situation and has the Savior
of the world welcomed by a surrogate family and stand-in heavenly musicians: farm
animals, smelly shepherds and a choir of angels. According to Luke, himself a
Gentile, God became flesh in the humblest of situations, using this motely crew of stand-ins to
give Jesus a traditional Jewish welcome!
We
know all the details of the Christmas story quite well, but we also need to
know the point of the story. We need to know what it means. Luke is not just
reporting facts here. He has a point to make. The story of the incarnation is basically a
disarmingly simple story about God kissing the earth and every human being on
it. By sending his Son, Jesus, into the world in this way, God is saying to us
that heaven is involved in our lives, even in the most pathetic and unlikely
situations, even when things seem hopeless and God seems absent. Think of the tortured people in places like Ukraine and how they read the Christmas story this year! By sending his
Son, Jesus, into the world in this way, God is saying that he loves us, all of
us, every part of us, including the weakest and most vulnerable of us, believers
and unbelievers, even those of us the world considers worthless - in spite of how we treat each other! The Savior of the world was born in a situation very similar to what so many desperate people today have to endure so as to teach us that he is with us even in our desperate situations.
Most of us know this story by heart. But what does it mean? It means that God so loved the world that he bent over backwards to prove it. He took on human flesh, experiencing everything we experience, but sin. His whole life became one great “show and tell.” By word and deed, he showed us how to live our lives and how to treat each other. The short of it is that he showed us how to love! To prove it, he laid down his life for us, dying like a common criminal, rejected and scorned, all while loving those who did it anyway! Then he left us with this challenge: “All I ask is that you love one another as I have loved you!” It's that simple and it's that difficult!
The
Christmas story, in the Gospel of Luke tells us that Jesus was “laid in a
manger” when he was born. From that word "manger," we get
the French word for “to eat,” “manger.” A “manger” then is a trough from which
animals eat. That story also says that he was born in Bethlehem. “Bethlehem”
means “house of bread.”
On
the night before he died, this same gospel says that Jesus gave his followers
one last gift - bread, ‘breaking it” before passing it around, as a symbol of his body which would be broken for them. He told them to keep "breaking bread" in his
memory after he was gone.
Like
the shepherds who attended the birth of Jesus, shepherds who were considered
religious non-conformists, Jesus didn’t just give himself as bread to his faithful
followers. He even gave it to those who betrayed him, including Judas, to show
that his love was unconditional.
What could we do better this Christmas Eve than to share that “broken bread” with each other in celebration of God’s unconditional love for each of us, in all our variety and levels of faith? God’s universal, unconditional and inclusive love is the very essence of Christmas! Christmas, above all, means inclusion, not exclusion.
We desperately need this message in a world where hate, division, separation and exclusion is growing stronger every day! Maybe the reason the world is filled with so much anger, hatred, mistrust and division is that we no longer remember that Christ is the reason for this wonderful season! Fundamentally, he did not come to teach us a bunch of complicated theology. He is above getting involved in our silly little liturgy wars. He simply came to teach us to love each other just as he loved us - that is "without condition" "friend and enemy alike - and everyone in the middle! Christmas isn't meant to be "cute" really! Christmas is more like an atomic bomb of love that was dropped on all of us in the person of Jesus Christ over 2,000 years ago! That same love is being showered on all of us tonight whatever condition we find ourselves in!
"They shall name him "Emmanuel," which means "God is with us!"
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