Rather than doing the usual preacher thing and telling you stuff, I am going to use this time to ask you a question about the story you have just heard. It will be a simple question, but the story is so rich, that I just want to take a few minutes to riff about it a little bit.
This story starts off historically enough: the government wants to do some sort of bureaucratic process for its own mysterious reasons, and cheerfully disrupts the lives of all and sundry in order to do it. Cue an image of all sorts of people wandering around the country, heading back to their ancestral homes in order to fill in some government paperwork, regardless of personal convenience. Perhaps it’s sort of like being summoned for jury duty for a particularly long lasting court case.
Then it kind of morphs into some sort of fantasy novel. The child of prophecy, descendant of the fabled House of David, the first, great, true king, returns to claim what is rightfully his.
It makes me think of the retelling of the Arthurian myth, when the young squire, apparently from a humble background, encounters a sword in a stone with inscribed “whoever draws the sword from this stone is the rightful king of all Britain.”
Then a familiar traveller’s tale. You finally do arrive at your destination after hours of flight delays and hassle at immigration, and discover there isn’t a spare room in the city and you end up grateful to grab a few hours of sleep in a hotel storage cupboard.
Actually, can I just make a quick sidebar here: we tend imagine something Mary and Joseph bedding in down in a barn in a field. Probably it is better to imagine a prosperous peasant’s house with a big room for the family up on the first floor, and a big space on the ground floor where you kept the animals safe at night.
Now I think of it, maybe it is like putting up unexpected guests on an airbed in the garage?
At any rate, Mary and Joseph, they are not guests of honour, the are not staying at a cool AirBnB, and they are not the honoured guests of local officialdom.
Which also suggests a political theme: who are this Emperor Augustus and all his cronies, and by what right are they bossing people around? The rich are sitting in their palaces issuing orders, and the strong arm of the state is compelling the poor to obey, regardless of trifling inconveniences like being nine months pregnant and hardly in a fit state to trudge halfway across the country to tick a box in some bureaucrat’s form.
So that’s the first intersection: here, into this story of bureaucratic fiat and huge personal inconvenience for all involved, the rightful heir has arrived to his home, but no-one recognises him or pays any special attention to him.
It a great setup for an exciting story.
Then, suddenly, the scene, and indeed the genre, changes to a science fiction story.
A bunch of yokels are up on a dark mountainside, guarding the sheep. I imagine them gathered round a small fire, passing around a flask of moonshine, trying to keep awake after a long day of sheep-related agricultural labour.
Then, suddenly, shazzam!
They are confronted by first one, and then a vast horde of bright, shining, kind of terrifying beings, who deliver a strange but compelling message, perform a beautiful work of choral music, and then vanish as abruptly as they arrived.
Then the different genres intersect again. The shepherds hustle off into town to see what on earth the shining beings were on about and find Mary and Joseph on the airbed in the garage, and tell them their amazing story, before rushing off to tell their friends.
As this strange mishmash of a story draws to a close, it zeroes in on the solitary figure of Mary. She ponders it in her heart, wondering what it could all mean?
That is the question I am going to leave you with. It is a question that has preoccupied many, many people of all sorts, from the most brilliant thinkers to agricultural workers swigging moonshine on mountainsides. Hundreds, millions, billions of people are wrestling with it right now.
This strange story of a child, the rightful heir, born amongst the humble, ignored by authority, announced by mysterious beings and shepherds, heedless of official policy – what do you make of it?