Tomorrow
– the third Sunday of Advent – we will hold our annual Nativity at St Nicholas’
church. We have invited everyone to come dressed as their favourite character
from the story – it does not matter whether we have one Mary or fifteen (the
Gospels are full of women called Mary) because there is room for everyone.
Nativities
– retellings of the events surrounding the birth of Jesus, usually pitched for children
and popular in primary schools – remain reasonably familiar, and poorly
presented. Famously, they involve Mary & Joseph turning up at Bethlehem on
the very night she will go into labour, desperately going from inn to inn
seeking a room, being turned away by innkeeper after innkeeper, until a kindly
one, deeply apologetic at having nothing better to offer, let’s them sleep in
his stable. Nothing could be further from what the Gospels actually portray.
Jesus
is born in the home of a relative of Joseph, who, some time earlier, has returned
to Bethlehem with his bride Mary, from her father’s home in Nazareth. In
keeping with custom, a newly married couple (that is, having completed the
legally binding contract of betrothal) would expect to live with the bride’s
parents for the first twelve months of their life together – Joseph may well have
been working for his father-in-law by way of a dowry – before the bride was
taken to live in the home of the groom’s parents (marked by what we would
recognise as a wedding feast). There is not space in the room allocated to the
couple – Luke uses a term we might translate as ‘guest room’ and definitely
should not translate as ‘inn’ – for Mary to give birth, attended by female
relatives and town midwives, and so Jesus is born in the main, shared living
space. He is then washed and wrapped tightly in bands of linen – all he has
known so far is the confines of the womb – and laid in a stone depression
hollowed out to form a manger in the dividing point between the lower end of
the home, where animals slept at night, and the upper end, where the humans
slept. Luke makes a point of describing he manger in detail, perhaps because it
is a relevant detail for the shepherds (possibly a particular manger in a home
known to them) but also because he is foreshadowing the stone shelf in the tomb
where Jesus, wrapped in linen strips, will be laid following his crucifixion.
The whole town of Bethlehem – the ‘city of David’ – rejoice that God has at
last restored the fortunes of the house and line of David – though their joy
will turn to sorrow within a couple of years, when Herod orders the massacre of
every male child of two years and under in and around Bethlehem.
This,
then, is a story set firmly in history, in the history and cultural practices and
hopes and expectations of a particular community. It is a story of hope and of
joy, albeit a story that will not run smoothly, because there will be powerful others
who contest the story.
And
the invitation is, where do you find yourself in the story? Not as a shepherd
or as townsfolk or relatives, but where does the story resonate with your life –
lived in a very different culture?
Where
will the God who broke in there and then, break into your life here and now?
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