In our busy lives Christmas does not often offer us a peaceful time for purposeful reflection, but we do encounter God in our humanness.
The Bible readings of Christmas offer us several snapshots of humanness. One is that though Mary was betrothed to Joseph, she was with child before the marriage. This was seen as a stigma. And this stigma followed her and Jesus even when he was an adult.
After Jesus began gaining a reputation, he visited his hometown of Nazareth. And there, people reacted by asking: “Isn’t this the son of Mary?!” They did not say “the son of Joseph,” as was the cultural norm. No, the son of Mary. They went straight back to the fact that they definitely knew that Jesus was Mary’s son, but they were still not sure about his father.
And what of Joseph? He was of the house of David of Bethlehem, far to the south. Why did Joseph leave his southern family, adjacent to cosmopolitan Jerusalem, and go so far north to rural Galilee? Did he get into trouble somehow and have to leave his kin? Maybe his move was due to political trouble or family infighting. Maybe even religious trouble — or maybe, all three. (The child he took as his son, Jesus, eventually got into all three kinds of trouble!)
All this may be mere speculation, but remember, when Joseph returned to his hometown of Bethlehem for the census, he found no doors open to him or his nuclear family. Strange that his kin did not take him in, provide for him or welcome his wife and child on his return to Bethlehem.
So, the scene we are shown is of Mary under suspicion and Joseph estranged from his family of origin. Maybe that’s what they were reliving as they made their way to Bethlehem. A very human experience. Separation. Being alone. Just us.
Now, here is another human experience. One that we not only feel at Christmas but that we often consciously attempt to create.
We all know that there is a lot of talk about the commercialization of Christmas. But we do something else, too. Of all parts of the year, the Christmas season is a time when we go out of our way — sometimes to extraordinary lengths — to come together. To invite, to reconcile, to acknowledge, to make space for those whose lives we are part of — and even to make provision for people we do not directly know.
It might not be perfect, but we strive to make sure, to the best of our ability, that everyone has an opportunity to feel that they belong, that we are all part of a greater whole.
We encounter God in our humanness, even when only half-hearing the accounts of rejections of Mary, Jesus and Joseph found in the Christmas narratives. Maybe, just maybe, those narratives turn out to be the very tool God surreptitiously uses to open our hearts to others at Christmas. It doesn’t have to be conscious. That’s the mind. It only has to be felt. That’s the heart. And the heart almost always knows how best to react and respond.
Featured image: Mary and Joseph make their way to Bethlehem to register for the census. (iStock)
