I admit I have to smile this year when reading anew the Gospel for Christmas Eve! We have talked so much during Advent about how we were in a season of planning, of preparation, how we were supposed to be alert, ready for the Lord’s coming…and so tonight I can’t help but smile at the gentle irony of the story we have just heard, thinking how unprepared and unready Joseph and Mary must have felt on that night and though it was without any fault of their own, I assume they both wished they had done a little more planning. I know we have a little boy among us who has noticed “How great it is that Jesus was born on Christmas day“, and we all had to smile at the sweetness of this observation, yet when we read Luke’s Gospel our smiles may turn a bit bitter thinking of what we use to call “the perfection of the Lord’s timing“: It seems that actually Jesus could not have been born at a worst time, first for his parents who were traveling in the midst of an occupied land, finding themselves at a hundred “donkey miles” from home and families, pushed away by all the good people of Bethlehem only to end up in a barn with the cattle and the shepherds. When we think about it, it also does not seem that this is a birth very fitting for a King.In the story, the Lord’s timing is a little unsettling to say the least, and we may realize that for us as well, the timing of the Lord’s does not feel always like perfect timing. It is quite striking to me to realize how many of us are mourning in this Christmas season, mourning untimely deaths of loved ones, mourning also some we knew were bound to go, and yet we still have this feeling of bewilderment, we all feel so unready and unprepared when it happens even if it was bound to happen, we’re caught by surprise by the Lord’s timing, and often left wishing we had a few more days just to get used to the idea, and maybe left feeling a little betrayed by the way God interferes with our lives. We often quote the Bible saying that God’s ways aren’t our ways, it could be fitting to say that God’s timing is not our timing either. Young parents always say there was no way they could have been ever ready for what was coming, but isn’t it how it is for most of what happens in our lives, from the greatest joys to the deepest pains? And yet, considering all of this, I ask myself if it isn’t part of the message and part of the wonder of Christmas that Jesus was born in such untimely circumstances. I wonder if Christmas would be so endearing to us, if we’d even started building nativity scenes if Mary had given birth at home in her bed surrounded by her sisters and mom.
What is it that is so magic about Christmas, what is it that keeps being magic well after our childhood or what it is that brings in us such a longing for Christmas to be magic, a longing that makes us feel that, would it be only for this season, we shouldn’t have to mourn and we should be happy? What is it that makes it that at Christmas war, injustices, loneliness seem to be more unbearable than the rest of the year? Well, I think it has to do with this untimeliness of Jesus’s birth and how Luke had come to describe it and how we still represent it in each of our nativity scenes, creches that we started building somewhere in the Middle Ages when people couldn’t write and couldn’t read and have to see the story: Angels, people, beasts. The throng of pure heavenly hosts, smelly sheep and muddy shepherds, a teenager, her new born, an older guy, a sleepy oxen, a dumb donkey, brought together under a bright, shinning star. It’s a little bit sentimental, isn’t it? And yet it speaks a very deep truth in the bottom of our hearts, a truth Isaiah has kept prophetising about: the reconciliation of God and God’s people, the reconciliation of God’s people and the rest of creation(Isaiah 11:6 “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them“). People born only to be caught up in sin, cattle born only to be slaughtered, suddenly all worshiping together under the stars with the angels surrounding the king of kings. It is a vision of perfect peace, it is a foretaste of heaven, the restoration of a broken world into the harmonic cosmos God has intended from the beginning: men and women, pure angels and dumb beasts, stars of the sky and fields of the earth, all brought together to rejoice and to adore.
God is using this very untimely birth to address our deepest longings, and again surely had Mary given birth in her bed at home we would never have known anything about this. Of course, we know that Jesus was born on the darkest night, and how fitting it is that Jesus the light was born on the shortest night at Christmas!, we know that Jesus was born in poverty, we know that even before birth he was rejected by distant relatives shutting their doors on his exhausted mother who had a suspicious pregnancy, and of course we know that his untimely birth sanctifes in many ways what would be the shame of poverty and loneliness, but we often fail to see how he also redeems it all: Jesus brings the whole cosmos to him. On that night, Mary and Joseph had to rely on the kindness of simple strangers sleeping in the fields and they had to rely on the gentleness of beasts who only had to offer the warmth of their own bodies (and their manger!), and it’s the angels and the stars themselves who bring them comfort and reassurance because they had no family willing to share their burden and their joy.
So what does it say to us tonight? Surely nothing that extraordinary happens to us, does it? And yet, this is our story too. We can be part of the story, if we choose to, and this is what we do as we come closer to the nativity scene, as we gather around the manger, the bread of life, our Eucharist… Jesus didn’t come first as a man who teaches with authority or works stupendous miracles, Jesus comes as an infant for the pure purpose of bringing all people and all things to him. It looks like from the beginning, Jesus is in the business of bringing people together. Unlikely people, broken people, lonely people and he made them his home and his family (Mark 12:49 “Pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers.””), and he makes a home and a family with them and for them. As soon as we all gather around Jesus, we are a family, and we have a home. An author I like observes that indeed our lives often feel like we are always torn apart from each other, by time and space, by conflicts, ultimately by death, but she says that God is in the business of mending it all, God mends people with each other, like a woman sews pieces of a patchwork, sews a quilt. God picks lonely and broken and mourning people and bring them together: it does not make any sense at first and yet it looks so very beautiful when they are all woven together. God’s ways and timing are made perfect when God’s people find together new beginnings.