The Christmas story retold

It was Christmas time when this story started....Except of course it wasn’t. Christmas was invented later, to put an event into a story. Eventually it rather got out of hand, with tinsel and trees and jingles. Personally, I blame Prince Albert, who gave Queen Victoria some odd ideas about how Christmas should be celebrated. But that’s another story! There certainly weren’t any snowmen in Palestine, although it can get bitterly cold at night on the hill-sides where shepherds watch their sheep.

Then as now Palestine was a poor country; and Joseph wasn’t well-off, just a carpenter. But he was related to the royal house of David; and even though King David was dead centuries ago, and his family out of power almost as long, there was this idea that he would come back to save the nation. Rather like with the Scots and Bonnie Prince Charlie, I suppose, or King Arthur, England’s once and future king, Israel longed for their king to return, to expel the hated Roman colonialists. There were always rumours, with someone trying to say he was that king, the Messiah. But the Roman police were on to the plots almost before they could begin to be hatched.

Then it happened, and it worked because it happened in ways no one expected. You need fighters and weapons to chuck out an occupying force. But this was to be a different sort of king, a different sort of return. For some reason – I put it down to their being dreadfully tidy-minded and control-freakish – the Romans decided to tell the Jewish people to go to their home towns for a census, i.e. to be counted. It didn’t matter how inconvenient or dangerous it might be. “Jump!” said the Romans; and, if you knew what was good for you, you jumped.

Now Joseph lived in Nazareth, way up North, but his home town was Bethlehem, South of Jerusalem. So the census meant a round trip of over two hundred miles, with his fiancée Mary. Bethlehem was an obscure little town. But it had the David connexion, and a legend to go with it that something special would start there one day.

Mary was heavily pregnant, near her time to give birth. To us it is not unusual for people to live together before marriage, even to have children. Not so in Joseph’s day. The idea of getting pregnant before marriage was definitely out. If it happened a woman could expect to be on her own. Joseph wasn’t even the father of the baby; and what made him do the right thing by Mary I don’t know. He said he had been told by God to stand by her. Good for him!

So we have Joseph and Mary coming to Bethlehem, probably with a donkey, as in the carol; and failing to find a hotel room – no www.latebookings.com in those days. A helpful inn-keeper found them a bed in an outhouse with the animals, which was probably where a lot of other people ended up too amid the general chaos. It was in this outhouse that Jesus came to be born. And it was there that some shepherds came to worship the young baby, because they had been given a vision telling them that the event which Israel longed for had actually happened – the birth of the new David, the Messiah.

We only know about history after the event. When it’s happening we can’t work out what it’s all about. We only know Christmas for what it was because people afterwards thought about it, and put the event of Jesus’ birth into a story that has a beginning and an end and makes sense of it all.

The beginning was before the beginning of time, because God saw it happening even then; and it took in the whole of Jewish history to date. But we need only go back nine months, when Mary was at home, thinking perhaps of her wedding, when an angel came and told her that she was to have a baby who would be the Messiah, Israel’s promised new king, whose kingdom would last for ever. If Mary had thought of having a family, it certainly wasn’t until she was married to Joseph, and the date hadn’t been set. But the angel says she should not worry. God himself would be the father. And she agreed. Amazing when you think about it. There’s the beginning, and we’ve got the birth. So what about the end? Well, that means looking at what followed the birth of Jesus, the life and teaching and work of the man who had been that baby. And his death and resurrection too. It turned out not to be about getting rid of the Romans, which is what everyone expected, but about changing people’s minds and their way of life. It wasn’t about fighting and weapons, but about peace and love: putting God at the centre of our lives, and loving him and our fellow humans. Being a poor baby in a stable, not a prince in a palace, was the first step in a revolution that has never ended. I think Mary may have had an inkling of what it was about, but the shepherds can’t have had much of a clue. Christmas had to become a story, which showed how it was not just a historical fact, but the turning point of history.

Timothy George See other articles published in the God Slot

This page was last modified on 15 December 2009, it has been accessed 307 times.