Midweek Advent reflection 2

It’s funny what we think we can know about someone.

We know each other well: when you have children, you certainly know them well. Even someone who has never borne children knows a child; maybe even knows more about them than they know about themselves: time, place of birth. Weight. Their first giggle.

After a while, that knowledge becomes power. Reminds us that we were there when that little trial was born. A reminder to them of parental power. “I brought you into this world,” my mother used to remind me, “and I can issue a recall.” Tough words, from a tender heart.

Yet we know little of one baby’s birth. A forced migration. Joseph lived in Nazareth, part of a forced resettlement years earlier. A hard time to travel with a pregnant wife. But when someone reminds you of the power they have over you – you, go! – you are sent.

We know nothing of the journey, save by its completion so was Mary’s time complete. No space at the public inn, but the stable close by: warm, perhaps even cleaner than some beds. Whimpering cries. Did Mary have company? A midwife, maybe? Someone to hold her hand, soothe her in distress, to let her know her baby would be delivered, and would be fine? Maybe not. Maybe only the calloused hands of a carpenter saw the King of kings into the world. Maybe even that’s more fitting: that clumsy hands that had not delivered another living thing brought into this world the incarnate Word that created it. It seems that God trusts earnest devotion more than learned teaching.

But later, later its easy to play games about how much we know. Someone once said to me: why December 25? The bible doesn’t say that’s the day. Why do you think it’s then? My response was short: why not December 25? Luke doesn’t care what day the baby was borne; nor does Matthew, nor Mark, nor John, nor any of the other countless authors. I know the official answer: Pope Julius I, in the middle of the second century, poured over Roman tax records until he worked out an approximate date. It also coincided with several other holidays, so perhaps it worked out easier that the Christians could celebrate and worship without the fear that accompanied his birth – fear of soldiers, fear of being found out…fear.

Wanting desperately to know all the details of the Saviour’s birth is a quest for knowledge borne, I think, out of fear. Fear that if we don’t know everything, then maybe none of it is true.

Luke is the compiler; Luke poured over countless sources to find the information he wanted. They were told to travel. They travelled. There was no space for them at the inn, so Mary gave birth to her firstborn son, wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger.

Yet knowledge is power to us. We sit like Augustus, wanting the world to registered so that we can know all things that are due to us. And in sitting like Augustus, watching the high places, we miss what is happening below, as the baby, God with us, comes into our world with only the barest of stories.

Not the way we may want it, but the way that God wants to meet us: in the barest of bare places, stripped of the things that we desire to give us power, so that all we have is the small glimmer of hope: hope that the advent of Christ, in so humble a place, would hold for us the greatest hope of all.