A Way In A Manger

I’ve been thinking a bit about Christmas and what it means to me these days. The Christmas story is so well-known and so re-told that it has pretty well lost traction with most non-churchy Australians now. While they may know the bones of the story, we have probably come to a generation or even two, who don’t know much more than those bones and have never thought much about it. But rather than me fleshing out the skeletal remains of the Christmas story here – others can do that far better than me – I thought I might just say a word or two about some of the metaphors in the story that are there to be found without too much analysis and what they might say to us today.

First, notice how according to the account, Mary and Joseph are to give birth to this child who was conceived in a miraculous way. This is not the only story that has such a phenomenon and it goes to the notion that this boy will be special. That he will be a gift, maybe from God, to humanity. As a special boy, he is certainly one to be watched as he grows. As a boy born in a special way, he is to be watched to see what he will do and what he says. Even the heavens seem to bare witness, in the Star of Bethlehem, that this is a special birth and that we should take notice.

But second, despite the specialness of his birth, we notice how even at this neonatal stage of his life, goodness even while he’s still in the womb, he is rejected and no-one wants to know him. There is no room in the inn for the likes of Jesus. He doesn’t fit in. Never did. Still doesn’t. I felt like that growing up. In fact, lots of people do. Instead, he gets shoved out the back with the low-lifes and the animals and gets born in a barn. He doesn’t get born in a hotel or a palace, with comfort and trappings and honour. No, not for this one. His birth will be mired in dishonour and disapproval.

In this, this little baby would set up a life-long custom of associating with such people. The marginalised we call them today. Undesirables, like tax collectors, sinners, prostitutes, Roman collaborators, unclean people, the sick, the lame, the demon-possessed. It’s not so difficult to translate that lot into modern language; the down and outs, the drug addicts, the alcoholics, people in and out of gaol, sex workers - but also the ordinary people who don’t fit in, like the gays and the trans people, the eccentric, the geeks, the ordinary looking, the uneducated, the selfish, the ego-centric, the poor, the HIV AIDS folk, the person of colour, the foreigner, the refugee. A little later, this boy and his family would become Middle Eastern refugees themselves and flee tyranny and persecution. Ring any bells for those who want to block the refugees and asylum seekers today?

I cannot also help but note the absence of religious figures from his own tradition at his birth; no rabbis, no priests and no religious piety or ritual – just some ratty-looking smelly shepherds and a couple of astrologers from another land and a different tradition who seem to recognise something in him. It was always going to be these people, the ones not in charge, whom this boy would associate with. And he would do it for the rest of his life. Even to the point where later on, the privileged would mock him for it.

It was these people that he would later say that to such belonged the Kingdom of Heaven. Apparently, he thought that God was somehow connected and concerned with such people in a special way. And because he himself associated solely with such folk, it really didn’t take too long before he became one of them. Or as I like to think of it; one of us. If incarnational theology has any truth to it, then it is that this boy was one of us. In other words, he was not an elite; he was like me.

As a gay man, I belong to a group which has traditionally been relegated to the ‘other’, to ‘less than’; a group of marginalised people who have been judged by the mainstream. Gay people have been discriminated against and oppressed for centuries by society and the Church, yet we are still here asserting our claim to our fair share of human dignity.

This boy, Jesus, came in a long line of prophets who acted this way and taught this stuff; that the essence of spirituality is looking out for the widow, the orphan, the poor person, the person in need, the destitute and the despairing. It’s about loving your neighbour. Any God stuff without this, is pretty vacuous. That’s what he taught later on when he grew into manhood. It seems that his brother James was one of the first to get this, and he tried to write about it and spell it out in his eponymous book.

Being a member of a minority group gives you a prophetic voice like Jesus. Minority groups don’t have the power. That’s why they’re the minority. The power rests in the mainstream and in the privileged, who protect it and resist change with all their might, sometimes even with violence of one kind or another. But you can say all kinds of stuff when you’re in a minority group. You can speak to your family, your friends, your society, your nation and offer something different. You can offer an alternative position to that of the mainstream and maybe even help to correct a great wrong You can show by your life an alternate way to live and see things. You can be prophetic, just like Jesus.

This Christmas, I welcome the birth of this boy in a shitty old barn with just his parents and a few no-bodies there to greet him, and appreciate more what the symbology around his birth, life, teaching and death mean for how we can live our lives and treat each other and make a better world. I think he really was a special boy.