Christmas Eve

It's 9:30pm and Christmas Eve. A great time to start my third blog ... only this one I will actually start, you know, rather than just making it and not knowing what to write. I think this title, "Theology is Poetry," (catchy right! intriguing) will free me up to write about whatever I want. I hope so. This wont be like those bands you started as a kid where you and your friends got together and spent a day thinking up a name only to find that practising the actual music was too much work - I promise!

So being Christmas and all I let my mind wonder to the Christmas story, the birth narrative with Baby Jesus in his manger, Mother Mary looking lovely and saintly, and three wise men with their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Attending Sunday School as a little guy I never took much to the story of that first Christmas. It was just boring. I knew it was important, that it deserved my respect, my intellectual and emotional assent, particularly in late December, but it was hardly practical and it's details seemed arbitrary! It was only years and years later, upon actually reading the Gospel accounts of it that I realised how grimy, and also how peculiar, and how real the original version was, how fresh it is now. Did you ever notice how Jesus' family were outcasts from an impoverished land under Roman oppression? Or how they were living not just as foreigners in an unwelcoming and strange place but as refugees fleeing persecution? Or how on top of that they were dealing with an unplanned, illegitimate pregnancy in a culture that looked upon such shameful circumstances with cold eyes and large stones in hand...? What a difference!
How clean did we need to make Jesus before he became acceptable to our middle-class eyes? How lovely did we need to make the story before it could be taught in our Sunday Schools?

Australia right now faces the question of "what to do with asylum seekers?" I don't know the answer. Somewhere in this gritty gospel story, though, lies a big question for the "Christian" nation, or those who profess faith in Christ - do you actually know Jesus of Nazareth? Or is your conception of God and of faith and of being a Christian too clean for the middle-east where Jesus was born, the feeding-trough in which he slept, the prostitutes and outcasts alongside whom he lived, the Roman cross on which he died? If we have nothing in common, no solidarity with the asylum seeker, do we have any with Him?

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On a side note. The three wise men. Well there were three gifts, potentially only two men or a thousand men! And as for their wisdom. Is that in the Bible? Check it out in Matthew 2. They were "magi" (magicians, astrologers, sorcerers, whatever you want to call them), not wise men, not godly or good men. How strange that upon following a star (the kind of thing Deuteronomy 4:19 expressly forbids) these men (the kind of men Isaiah 47:13-14 derides) are led by some divine providence to behold the "King of the Jews" and, although they were not themselves Jews, bow before him in adoration. There is no case here for following stars, but there is a strange picture of God getting his hands dirty and revealing himself to the sort of people we don't like.
If only I had known this earlier! I wouldn't have had to play Sheep #34 in the school play but could have been one of the twenty wizards instead.

11:41pm. I write too slow. Good night and Buon Natale!
May we know Jesus our Lord more and more.
May we meet Him in the lowly and mistreated.
May we meet Him in the other.
Amen.