BLOG 12/19/17. THE BIRTH OF JESUS AMIDST THE TRAGIC

BLOG 12/19/17. THE BIRTH OF JESUS TOOK PLACE AMIDST THE TRAGIC

There is a famous North American folk artist by the name of Thomas Kincaide, who became quite popular and prosperous painting idyllic rural and domestic scenes notable for their soft light, rich colors, and total absence of any conflicts or negative elements. On this week before Christmas, it is worth reminding ourselves of how prone we are to reduce and interpret the nativity of Jesus to something like a Kincaide painting, what with joy to the world, peace on earth, candlelight services at the church, warm manger scenes where all is devoid of any negative elements.

But it wasn’t like that at all. When “the Word was made flesh” and came into the human scene, it was into a cultural and political context that sounds all too familiar to our own, what with the tyranny of the Roman Empire that required a census and taxation, which caused Joseph and Mary to have to uproot and travel to the city of Bethlehem—no excuses, not even Mary’s advanced pregnancy was to prevent it. Not only was there the occupying Roman army, but there was the insecure, half-breed Jewish king Herod, who when learning from the Eastern astrologers that the promised messiah had been born in Bethlehem, decreed that all boys under two years of age should be slaughtered to prevent any such challenger to his throne.

That meant that Joseph and Mary, within weeks of Jesus’ birth, and being warned by an angel, fled as refugees to Egypt, where they lived in exile until Herod died. Then it was back to their peasant lives in Nazareth, where even the Jewish faithful were not ultimately able to comprehend the messianic claims that Jesus made when he went public in his young adulthood. The whole social-cultural-political-economic setting can only be described as tragic. No Thomas Kincaide interpretation fits that scene.

When the church, later on, began to designate certain days as feast days, by which to remember significant events in the unfolding history of Christ’s mission, it designated December 25th as Nativity, then the 26th as the Feast of St. John the Apostle, but then on the 27th, the Feast of St. Stephen the Martyr, followed by the observance of The Massacre of the Holy Innocents.

Interesting! The church gave itself the reminder that one can get hurt, even killed, being a follower of Jesus. Jesus, also, warned people off who sought to follow him for the benefits he could bring to their lives … if they were not willing to suffer violent death, i.e. take up their cross, pay the price.

The late Oswald Chamber, whose devotional book My Utmost for His Highest is a composition of talks he gave at the Bible college in England before the 1st World War, became a chaplain to the British army in Egypt during that war. He wrote that he liked it there in Egypt with the troops because they were “real men with real problems”. He continued to explain that his memories of the church in his Scottish homeland before the war was that it was “all twilight and unreality, …  very nice people sitting in very nice parlors, drinking very weak tea, and eating very thin cucumber sandwiches.”

No, the nativity of Jesus is not in a setting of twilight and unreality. It is the inauguration of the age to come, of the in-breaking Kingdom of God, God’s new creation. It comes into all of the broken-ness, inhumanity, indifference to human need, political ambition, economic greed, prejudices, racism, moral cowardice, and endless cultural icons.

But, … it is also the advent of God’s message of true hope and joy and God’s infinite love – right in the midst of the tragic, in the context of the humanly impossible. Merry Christmas!

[If you find these blogs provocative, recommend them to your friends. Then don’t forget that I love hearing your comments.]

About rthenderson

Sixty years a pastor-teacher within the Presbyterian Church. Author of several books, the latest of which are a trilogy on missional ecclesiology: ENCHANTED COMMUNITY: JOURNEY INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH, then, REFOUNDING THE CHURCH FROM THE UNDERSIDE, then THE CHURCH AND THE RELENTLESS DARKNESS. Previous to this trilogy was A DOOR OF HOPE: SPIRITUAL CONFLICT IN PASTORAL MINISTRY, and SUBVERSIVE JESUS, RADICAL FAITH. I am a native of West Palm Beach, Florida, a graduate of Davidson College, then of Columbia and Westminster Theological Seminaries.
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One Response to BLOG 12/19/17. THE BIRTH OF JESUS AMIDST THE TRAGIC

  1. Love it! Thanks so much for writing this and re-centering our perspective.

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