BLOG 12/20/15. THE HOLY FAMILY: REFUGEES INDEED
At the beginning of this Christmas week, it might be worthwhile to try to untangle some of the common misunderstandings/myths that have become so much a part of our traditions. Right off the bat, the birth of Jesus didn’t take place in the middle of December since the shepherds were in the fields with the sheep, which would have made it bit more like, maybe, spring. Plus, the Eastern Church and others celebrate Christmas on December 6th (“Old Christmas”), which also it the celebration of Epiphany in the Western Church (the appearing of the star, the wise men, and all of that). The important fact is that God was made flesh in Jesus, son of Mary.
Of course that whole part of the world was incorrigibly under the rather strict rule of the Roman Empire and its ‘divine’ Caesar Augustus. You didn’t argue with the empire. So, in a sense what was taking place with Mary and Joseph was like a mandatory trip up to the county-seat to register for taxation. Bethlehem was Joseph’s ancestral home, so that is where he had to go. But note: Joseph was no anonymous artisan from a dink town called Nazareth—not at all. He was of the lineage of David, which meant that he would have been acknowledged as having royal blood.
So the city was crowded, and the inns were maxed. But given the protocols of middle eastern hospitality, the Bethlehem folk would have felt an obligation to provide housing for strangers, especially such as Joseph with royal blood. Middle eastern hospitality is well-known among those who are at all familiar with that culture to this day (such as New Testament scholar Kenneth Bailey, who spent most of his life in that part of the world, and upon whom I depend for these cultural insights). City folk did, in fact, keep livestock, cows and such, as part of their daily sustenance—but they did not have big back yards, or cow stalls out back. Rather, their houses were primarily very simple, consisting of a large room for living, and then another adjoining room at a lower level on the back of the house where they kept their animals. These two rooms were ordinarily divided only with a low wall between the two levels so that the owners could keep feed for the livestock accessible without going outdoors. Part of this low wall would have been, then, ‘the manger’ or a bin full of some sort of edible feed like hay. There was another very practical purpose for this adjoining lower room, and that would have been that the body heat of the animals would have been part of the heating system in colder weather.
It is also difficult to know the time line here. There is the episode of the shepherds, which evidently took place immediately after Jesus’ birth. But the coming of the magi from the East was probably some months later. When those magi didn’t report back to Herod, he plotted the massacre of all the boys under two years of age (a clue about the time involved), and it was about that impending terror that an angel warned Joseph and Mary to flee to Egypt. What was Joseph doing meanwhile? Mary undoubtedly needed time to recover from child-birth. Joseph had a skill and could have been employed by some kinfolk—we’ll never know. But sometime, probably months after Jesus’ birth, he and his parent became political refugees. (Have those of you who practice the church’s liturgical celebrations, noted how the church downplays the observance of Holy Innocents, or the Massacre of the Innocents on December 28th? In the world of terrorism and violence in which we live, it would be worth remembering the huge number of innocent victims in the world.) So then, for the next months or maybe years, the Holy Family were refugees escaping violence, and surviving in Egypt until Herod died. Jesus could have been a lad of several years old when they finally were able to return to Nazareth. They were quietly kept in communication with God, and only Mary’s eyewitness accounts to the gospel writers explains why we even know about this refugee chapter of their sojourn. Hopefully, this story will make God’s people very sensitive to the huge number of refugees present today, and looking for ways to minister to them.
