The Christmas Story Is Bigger Than A Virgin Birth Or A Star Over Bethlehem
(ANALYSIS) In a few days we’ll arrive again at Christmas. Christmases come around faster now than they used to. When I was young it seemed as if the next one would never get here, and now they zoom past at such warp speed I have to set an alarm to even notice them.
I’ve been trying to pay attention to this Christmas, though, given that earlier in the year I wasn’t altogether certain I’d be around to see it. But here I am.
There’s a transcendent story — a philosophical story, a cosmic story, a moral story — in Christmas that we sometimes fail to remember. Even in religious circles, it easily gets lost among the tales of a virgin giving birth, a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes, a star standing a trillion miles over Bethlehem pointing directly at that obscure town.
In a way, all those thing are mere details. The real story is bigger.
Today there are thousands of Christian denominations. We can’t agree with each other about much, and that’s particularly true of Protestants, those of us whose very name means to “protest.” We’ve long contested every imaginable detail of scripture, theology and history. We’ll protest the color of your church building’s carpet if we get bored enough.
Still, so far as I’m aware, every Christian sect I’ve ever crossed paths with agrees on this: Jesus was the much-prophesied messiah promised by God in the Old Testament. (Even that statement can mean different things to different people, though.)
Our spiritual forebears, the Jews, who had received and recorded the messianic promise, were looking for this mysterious figure to arrive and in some way unite heaven and earth, introduce God’s kingdom into this world and, in doing so, transform, well, everything. The messiah would turn existing power structures upside down. Good would prevail. Evil would be cast out, violently if necessary.
As I said, we Christians will fight about whether Mary was a virgin or whether Jesus was raised from the dead in a tangible body or whether God is one being or three. But we do claim Jesus was the messiah. The Christ. The Anointed One of God.
The power and the glory of that claim is that Jesus arrived on earth with no power and no glory. Nearly everybody in the Christmas story is a nobody, a loser, an outcast.
His mother is a teenage peasant. His supposed father is a carpenter or, by some accounts, possibly a stonemason. They’re poor. They’re betrothed but not fully married, and Mary has no business being pregnant. She tells some wild tale of having been impregnated by the Holy Spirit, not Joseph. “Right,” the neighbors say.
In one scholar’s interpretation, the idea there was no room for the couple in the inn is a linguistic misinterpretation and a cultural misunderstanding. More likely, he says, they were staying among Joseph’s extended family, who exiled them from the main house to an outbuilding because of their supposedly unholy behavior.
I used to think of the shepherds in the story as rather humble working men with hearts of gold, good old boys in the best sense of that phrase, who suddenly find themselves surrounded by a choir of angels and are understandably astonished.
But dig into the history of it a bit and you discover that those shepherds were society’s dregs — profane, dishonest and looked down on by everybody. Knowing that gives you a different take on why they were “sore afraid” of the angels. They were down-and-dirty sinners who assumed they’d suddenly met their comeuppance.
Then there are those wise men who arrive from the east to confirm that Jesus is indeed a messiah, a king. The problem with them is, they’re not good observant Jews. They’re pagan astrologers from a foreign land, considered literally untouchable by all the faithful.
Practically everybody in the story has no business being there. They’re all the “wrong” sorts of people.
And born in their midst is a baby who is their messiah — a baby helpless and dependent on their kindness, bleating for milk like one of the lambs in the stable. That’s who God sends to deliver them, to bring the mighty kingdom of heaven to earth: the weakest among the weak.
See a pattern? See the bigger story?
This is a news flash. God is saying, “This is what the kingdom of heaven looks like.” Heaven has come to earth, and it has no outsiders, no untouchables, no losers. The savior isn’t a valiant warrior with a sword but a newborn who is simultaneously being saved by his motley flock. Foul-mouthed shepherds sit at the center of God’s kingdom. Pagan soothsayers are in, too. And unwed mothers with weird visions. And puzzled carpenters.
The self-appointed powerbrokers and religious gatekeepers of this planet are all but irrelevant in this new kingdom. They don’t get the story God’s telling.
The big message of Christmas isn’t political, mind you. It transcends politics. It’s not Roman or Jewish, Republican or Democratic, right wing or left wing.
But it is revolutionary to its core. It’s that God loves losers. Loves them best. Accepts them all. Will use them all for his glorious ends.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.