by Perhaps more than anything else, 2020 has been unexpected. This unexpected, abnormal Christmas that caps off 2020 is actually an apt tribute to the first Christmas. Circumstances are not what we want. Our plans are drastically altered. Traditions have been cast aside. The situation is not what we planned. We have no idea what will happen next. It’s lonely, uncomfortable and beyond our control. We are exiles in a foreign land. But in the middle of it all, we can find joy.
The year Jesus was born, the social and political climate was incredibly hostile. Around 4 BC,a corrupt, imbalanced, paranoid King Herod was coming to the end of his reign and trying desperately to cling to power. Jesus was born into times so tumultuous that they make 2020 look like Shangri La.
Our pursuing God will stop at nothing to be with us, and He could have come to us in any way He chose. Based on their knowledge of Scripture, the Jewish people expected their Messiah King to ride on to the scene triumphantly, publicly, victoriously, with liberation coming definitively and instantly. We humans have always longed for instantaneous relief.
Instead, our God chose an unexpected entrance without fanfare or trumpets. Jesus showed up quietly, humbly, unceremoniously, amidst chaos and scandal, as the unplanned child of a teenage mother.
Dumbfounded, young Joseph and Mary faced their “new normal” in resigned waves, one after another, as the life they’d planned was forever altered. Mary said yes to a baffling announcement delivered by the angel, though she had to wonder if her beloved would cast her aside. Joseph relented. “Okay, so we’ll get married even though you’re pregnant by the Holy Spirit. The scary angel told me it was all going to be okay. How much worse could things get?” Famous last words. The upheaval of their lives persisted. Poor, young Joseph and his new bride were called across the countryside, along with everyone else, for a census. This was not what they’d planned with a baby on the way, having to leave their home, the new nursery, their friends, their support network. Instead, they were extracted from everything comfortable and familiar to arrive in Bethlehem where they couldn’t even get a decent hotel room. The king of the universe would be born in a barn.
It’s all so wrong, isn’t it? Nothing about this image is IG or FB-worthy. No filter. No carefully curated feed. When the baby came, Mary was no doubt craving the care of her mother, aunts and grandma, who otherwise would have been there to help her through a painful and arduous delivery. She must have been really scared and lonely giving birth in a drafty, smelly stable so far from home.
Once the baby arrived, there were no neighbors bringing casseroles. They were miles away in the midst of their own census-induced upheaval. Just a motley crew of lowly shepherds, stinking animals, foreigners bearing strange gifts and scary-looking angels to welcome this swaddled bundle.
I often think of the stable, the star, the shepherds, the angels singing as the climax to the Christmas story. Nope. Just when the Holy Family was thinking they’d weathered the worst of it, they’d be on the run once again from the corrupt king who plotted to kill them.
Jesus was dropped into the middle of crappy circumstances in a cold, lonely setting that’s completely off-kilter from what we’re used to, in scary, perilous,unexpected times. Sounds about right. In so many ways, it’s like Christmas 2020.
These are off-kilter times, and we are in strange, uncomfortable territory. We have no framework to help us make sense of our eerily quiet (and yet chaotic) surroundings. None of us knows how or when or if things will ever return to “normal”. We find ourselves waiting for the next scary angel to deliver the next chapter of a strange and unsettling story we wish weren’t our own.
In the midst of a world turned upside down, Jesus is a God who shows up in unexpected ways. If we don’t get hung up on the form we think He ought to take, it becomes easier to recognize His presence. He reveals Himself to us quietly, meekly, without pomp and circumstance, meeting us in the eye of the storm.
Feature image photo by Pro Church Media on Unsplash