The Scandal of Christmas

If I were God, this is not the story I would write myself into. A story where God is revealed not through power, productivity or prestige but ordinary, unimpressive presence. Let’s recap. We’re out in the backwaters, trailing an unmarried Jewish teenage girl with no power, pedigree or prophecy-shaped résumé. Nothing special about her at all, in fact—except an alarming willingness to trust and say ‘yes’ to an angel named Gabriel who shows up unannounced and asks her to carry the savior of the world. In other words, a story where God not only becomes human but asks permission to do so. This is not only the last thing I would think of—it is the very last thing I would choose. To surrender my hearing, sight, speech, power, control, and independence for nine months in the dark interior of a nobody’s womb. I would not opt to be born after days—if not weeks, if not months—of travel to my non-father’s hometown, only to arrive during peak census season, all the rooms in the inn taken, like a badly planned Airbnb. All while those who weren’t even worthy enough to be counted in the census to begin with—shepherds minding sheep on the night shift—become the first witnesses to my birth. When you really sit with it, it’s hard to imagine anyone could think up this story at all. There’s a saying that if you gave an infinite number of monkeys enough time, one of them might eventually type the complete works of Shakespeare—but I can’t imagine, even with infinite time, they’d ever end up with a story like this one. Which makes it all the more astonishing that we’ve managed to take something so absurd, provocative, and frankly obscene, and domesticate it. Tinsel hung. Presents wrapped. Cookies baked with the cricket humming in the background, fighting to be heard over Mariah Carey’s anthem. But perhaps it’s understandable. Because this God who enters the mess of our time and space—who becomes fragile and finite flesh—doesn’t do this for spectacle. God does it so we might do the same. And this is no easy task: to inhabit our own fragile flesh fully, so that we might truly inhabit the messiness of the space we’re in and the time we’re given. Especially in a world that, more and more, seems marked by unpeace. Because even though many of us have been looking forward to and will enjoy peace today, there will be those of us carrying a kind of unpeace. One that rises to the surface, particularly on this day. It reminds us of loved ones lost. Of estranged family members. Of the quiet grief we’ve normalized throughout the year but feel the edges of on a day like this one. And even if our own personal lives are bathed in peace, we don’t have to look too far to see the unpeace all around us. An unpeace we’re still reeling from as a nation, after witnessing the second-largest mass shooting unfold in Australia since colonization. An event that might feel like an anomaly to us, but is a day-to-day reality for many across the world. This unpeace shows up in scarcity too. Not only in resources, amid an escalating cost-of-living crisis during a season of targeted consumerism, but in the nagging ache that arrives after the wrapping paper has been recycled and the guests have all gone home. It is an unpeace that, if we allow it depth and space, opens questions we might rather avoid: What does true peace look like—between Jews, Muslims and Christians? What does true peace look like within the complexity and diversity of Australia? And, if we are brave enough to go further—to reach for the question beneath the noise and the issues pressing in on us—what might true peace look like within ourselves? Earlier this week, I was speaking with one of you as you shared your distress about the events at Bondi, and how this atrocity reopened wounds from long ago. We lamented how such a thing could happen during such a holy time—Chanukkah, the summer holidays, the Christmas season. And although in an ideal world peace would be maintained at all times, especially during holy days, the irony is Chanukkah itself arose out of destruction and scarcity. And Christmas arose under a similar dreary sky where the clever marketing scheme of Caesar Augustus, known as the Pax Romana, was written into law. A scheme, as history buffs would know, subdued, silenced and stole from its people while enacting war upon war, all in the name of peace. The author of Luke doesn’t include this detail by accident. The author frames it deliberately, placing the Christmas story right in the middle of it. It would seem God doesn’t wait for the world to be perfect, for the stars to align or for circumstances to be just right. God enters into the mess of real lives in real time. And in this story, God enters Bethlehem some two thousand years ago—amongst bogans in the backwaters—to birth something “holy” under this dreary sky. A word we not only associate with a day like today, but a word we have too often understood to mean pure, flawless, and untouchable, too often tied to moral behaviour, something we’ve conflated onto our modern-day Santa Claus and his naughty-or-nice list. But this is not holiness in the Bible. And this is not holiness in the Christmas story. The Greek word hagios means something different. Literally. To be set apart—not above the world, not as better than the world, but deeply within the world. And the author of Luke uses this word not to cultivate private piety, not to polish the perfect parts of ourselves and not to condemn the body, but to show how holiness moves through bodies, through time, through space, and through history, where we are, as we are, in the good, the bad, and the ugly of our lives. Hagios is what the angel Gabriel pronounces over Mary, hagios is what Elizabeth prophesies from her own womb, hagios is what Mary sings in her Magnificat from her growing belly, and hagios is what the babe will not only be baptized into but what his ministry will grow out of. A holiness that enters into the messiness of our world and our lives. Good news that refuses to wait for our world—or even ourselves—to be anything other than what we are, and yet refuses to leave us that way. So when the angels appear in Luke’s story, they do not announce an escape from the world. They do not promise that suffering will end or that everything will suddenly fall into place. They speak instead into fear, into darkness, into a Roman-occupied and oppressed Judea, into fields where shepherds are working the night shift, and they say: Do not be afraid. Not because everything has been made right in that moment, but because the inbreaking of this kind of holiness will subvert the ways we have learned to live in unrest and invite us to see our bodies as the very place where peace is born. This is not the peace of empire or of the Pax Romana. This is not a quiet, polite peace grown out of our colonial culture. This peace is not the absence of suffering or denial of despair. Peace, here, is the presence of God in the midst of pain, persecution, and powerlessness—refusing to let them have the last word. And Luke is careful about where this kind of peace is born. Not in Rome. Not in Jerusalem’s halls of power. But in the small, unglamorous, not-even-a-town called Bethlehem. In a manger, wrapped in bands of cloth. Amongst ordinary folk. Amongst uncounted shepherds. A peace that rises from the margins, from fragile, finite flesh, from the sweat and the tears of a mother giving birth, next to a man who has no gain in this pregnancy, and a babe who cries in the middle of the night. And God does this—not for spectacle—but so that we might do the same. This is what holiness is. And this is what the incarnation—that is, God taking on flesh—is all about. If I were God, this is not the story I would write myself into. And maybe that is precisely the point. God’s peace is far more radical and far-reaching than anything I could even begin to imagine. God chooses not to bring salvation through acts of power in perfect Christmas pies or perfect lives but in fragile and finite flesh, in bodies that ache, in lives that grieve, in a world that reels in sorrow and suffering. This was true then and this is true now. For this is the scandal of Christmas: God takes on flesh not to remove us from the world, but to heal it from within through us. Because Christ’s birth is not a story that happened once upon a time in a land far away. It is a story that keeps happening. It is born whenever peace is practiced in the midst of unrest, whenever presence is chosen over power, and whenever we dare to believe our flesh is where the holy chooses to be born. Because, even though this is not the story we would write ourselves into, it is the story that writes itself into us. Merry Christmas.