A CHRISTMAS THOUGHT (not suitable for a card)
This isn’t Christmas card suitable, this thought. It’s more like, “Merry Christmas! Let me mess up the traditional message.”
But, I confess, like math, cosmology, and my mom’s recipe for Baked Green-beans, the traditional, mythical Christmas story may well benefit from honest review.
Here then, a revisionist’s view of Christmas. Like my sourdough starter, the content actively expanded as I wrote, so for your reading ease, chapters (of a sort). Take a break between. You know, turn to the twenty things yet not done but should have been—yesterday. Then, come back to think about Christmas.
CHAPTER ONE - It Wasn’t Easy
Slip your mind back to about 3BC (or BCE if you prefer). The bulk of the world’s 200 million people were settled around the Ganges, Tigris, Yangtze, Nile and Po rivers. My mind moves toward the Po, and the one million or so that benefitted from its irrigation near Europe’s number one city, Rome. The Bulk of its inhabitants were slaves crowded in kitchen-less, multi-storied fire-trap dwellings. Next to being a slave? The worst jobs available? Butcher, doctor, or dog dung collector.
In filthy Rome, the well-bathed Augustus Caesar ruled, Livy, the historian wrote, gladiators fought animals or other guys to the death before cheering, bread-chomping crowds of thousands. More than half the children born in there died before the age of ten and newborns, by a father’s choice, were either kept or discarded, abandoned at city walls. Slave-makers or wild dogs kept the walls cleared.
Over in Roman controlled Israel, fathers also ruled families, but babies were not thrown to wild dogs. Children were kept. Kept but not coddled. This was not the 21st century. Female people were less valuable than oxen since oxen earned income. A father could, and by his daughter’s twelfth birthday did, give her over to marriage. How old was the mother of Jesus when she was betrothed to an older man (tradition says, a widower with children)? How old when her first child was born? Death in childbirth—common. The childhood mortality rate in the ancient Roman empire, is calculated, at least 40% of births.
Like the youngster Mary didn’t have enough to worry about, being very pregnant and being perched on a donkey’s back for a ninety mile trek along side the Jordan River and over Jerusalem’s nearby hills before entering besieged Bethlehem.
I wold guess Mary would fear delivering along the route. But, fears rarely come unaccompanied. Another form of fear traveled with travelers, and perhaps in the mind of young Mary. This, thanks to the crappy command of Rome’s Caesar Augustus that required this barely-into-womanhood girl to travel with her husband, Joseph, and hoards of others, from Nazareth town (where she might already have installed nursery necessities), to the census-crowd-crowded town of Bethlehem, a town that offered not a nudge of care concerning her need to rest, or for heaven’s sake, to deliver a child an angelic visitor said would “be great.” God only knows how many outsiders were now inside. What we know is that by the time Mary made it, “there was no room.” Great.
Like she wasn’t uncomfortable enough. Add the fear travelers traded among themselves—of radical Jewish terrorists, the Sicarii, the “dagger-men,” who moved through crowds, set on throwing off Rome’s control by slipping up next to perceived enemies, stabbing stealthily, fatally, then sneaking off to erase that name from their kill list.
Let’s remember this, especially we who proclaim (the Bible doesn’t) what we call the Christmas Story, that this girl, her story, was in its time, an inconvenient, perhaps even terrifying, tale. I don’t hear jingling bells. Let’s start with this: that which we call Christmas wasn’t very Merry for Mary.
CHAPTER TWO - It Wasn’t December
It certainly wasn’t December, this holy birth we celebrate as rain falls in the PNW and snow covers my daughter’s yard in NYC. If I read rightly, shepherds didn’t work Judaean fields in December. Nor did calls for census occur in winter when temperatures could drop to freezing and roads of Judea were ridiculously wet with persistent rainfall and mostly untraveled.
Cut to the chase: it is likely that Jesus was born in late summer or early fall (You students of scripture might figure this out by the study of John the Baptist’s birth). Why then, December?
Very early on, well not so very early, likely around the time of Christian emperor Constantine, fourth century, it is traditionally believed that Jesus people borrowed the pagan (raucous, wild, way out of control) celebration of the Sun’s return, as a time to celebrate the birth of God’s son. Pagans were, for the most part, plowed, plastered, partying big time; plenty distracted and paying little attention to what their sober religious neighbors were doing in small house gatherings, remembering and retelling the story of Jesus birth. Ah! So December celebrations first belonged to pagans? Solstice and the Sun appearing! Are we Christians (celebrating a son’s appearing), by our shopping, sipping, and silly trappings simply giving back was was originally not ours? A borrowed December date.
CHAPTER THREE - SHEPHERDS
But, back to Mary’s delivery of a boy-child. Back to Bethlehem, back to “shepherds in the fields.” Back to our Christian tradition of believing shepherds were outcasts, low-lifers, barred from Temple worship or from witnessing in court. Perhaps. The very idea brings pleasure, that angels brought those guys the good news, “Unto you is born this day . . .” We like that God chose the unqualified, the wet-wool smelling unclean. Gives us hope—except when it comes to our personally caring for such people. God can. Often, we’d rather not.
Here’s a Think About It—In the Jewish Bible, shepherding was an honorable, family way of life (Abraham, Moses, King David, for goodness sake—guilty of much, but not of shepherding. Even God—“The Lord is my Shepherd”). And in the Christian New Testament, Pastors, Elders, even Jesus, get assigned the gentle role of shepherding. Matthew writes that out of Bethlehem will “come a leader who will shepherd my people, Israel.” And, John, well, John refers to his dear friend, Jesus, as the “good Shepherd.” Case made.
It is true that Aristotle had a low opinion of shepherds, calling them “the laziest, . . . those who lead an idle life,” that they “get their pay from tending tame animals that wander around, looking for pasture,” and the shepherds (stupid, in his opinion) “simply follow them around.” Aristotle was no friend of shepherds. But, that was the fourth century BCE. Apparently, much later, long after the time of Gospel writing, Jewish opinion of shepherds did drop below the “I want this guy as my friend,” social level. But, at the time of Jesus’ birth? Angels sang to shepherds and while their work made them ceremonially unclean, people who heard their report were “astonished.” That, plus their broadcast of wonder and joy is about all we know.
CHAPTER FOUR—LUCKY LOSERS
I was recently reminded by a pastor of great preaching skills, of yet another part of the Christmas story mostly ignored yet highly significant, and certainly worthy of mention. No, not that among the first to worship Jesus were unnamed pagans, wise though they were, bearing gifts, and traveled afar. Rather, what I want to call attention to is what many of us work to cover up, to hide, to outgrow, to deny in our own lives: family history.
Matthew, the gospel writer was committed to convincing his fellow Jewish worshippers that Jesus fulfilled the role of the longed for Messiah. You know, Messiah—a king, a restorer of Israel’s glory, the destroyer of oppressors, one to usher in and re-establish King David’s throne, finally giving Israel the right to thumb its nose at Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Syria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and one particularly hated Idumaean (all without having to stab anyone); you know, all those powers that trod through and all over Jewish history. In order to exalt Jesus, Matthew begins with an embarrassing exposure of Jesus’ past—his family history.
Matthew lays it out. Fourteen generations—all the way back to Abraham. It’s not an altogether pretty review. I doubt Jesus would win admittance to some of our finer private societies by waving the branches of his family tree.
Trust me, in the family tree of the One of whom we sing “Oh Come Let Us Adore Him,” and to whom we dedicate December 25th, are pagans, cowards, rapists, rotten parent, misogynist, harlots, foreigners, murderers, connivers, major betrayer, sniveling sneaks, bullies, and scandal-makers. And they are listed by name! I’ll only mention that I don’t now, nor have I ever, much liked Jacob (he’s in the genealogy) or his mother. I prefer Esau, but Esau didn’t make the cut.
“Holy Cow,” I would think, were I a first century Jew listening to Matthew, the tax-collector (now, there was a truly despised group—tax-collectors), as he tried to convince me to celebrate what we Christians complain is highly significant—the very incarnation of God; consequently, December 25th is ours. The characters in the family tree ought to have stopped me in my tracks. But I, we, don’t have stop time.
We are hurrying into Target to finish up our pagan shopping; decorating our pagan trees, hanging lights, placing elves and stuffed stockings, humming our secular Christmas tunes as we scratch an uncle off the dinner list and add the unexpected girlfriend of our kid coming home from college. We have turned this incomprehensibly holy happening into a happy but harried, and mostly unholy holiday. What the heck, how do we explain “God with us” to our children who sit on Santa’s lap for a photo? It’s not an easy thing, this secular/spiritual December event we Christians (and non) busily, blithely celebrate.
We don’t have time to imagine Mary’s misery, or the fright brought upon sleepy shepherds in a dark field by heralding voices from the sky. We, sure as heck, don’t want to ponder whether God, the planner of all this, honored and accepted the reverence of pagans come from, and returned to, “afar.” Or, what about King Herod—why would we remind ourselves (at Christmas time!) of this interloping Idumaean’s insane fear of losing his rule, to the point of slaughtering boy babies. Or, the young, honored “holy family” being forced to flee to Egypt? I mean, enough is enough.
No. We are Dreaming of a White Christmas, longing for at least one Silent Night before travels by air or automobile; or at least before chasing off late for an hour given (reluctantly—we are so darned busy) to a Christmas Eve church service, and finally! The grand finale of gifts and gadgets, eggnog and mistletoe, music and mischief, friends and families, goose or ham or turkey. You know, the important stuff.
I’m thinking about Christmas. I do love much of what occurs around this time of celebration, even acknowledging the prevalence of sadnesses alongside joy. Not much attention was paid in the first century to that baby born of Mary. At least, not much once angels, shepherds, and pagan wisemen left the place of his birth (wherever that was); not much, for another thirty years. The Church didn’t bother to mark his birth for notice for a few hundred years. Truth be told, not a whole lot of attention is paid him in today’s December celebrations. But, it is Christmas! And I wish you a Merry One!
