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By Jeremy | December 18, 2007
For those of you familiar with the "
Jesus Justice" article, the first half of this post might be familiar. But the boy it describes redefined Christmas for me.
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There's this teenage boy I know. He appears ordinary enough, with nothing much to distinguish himself except that he's studious and works with his stepdad in construction. Like many teens he's struggling to find his place and feels like a curiosity.
Living in the ghetto is hard, especially since he just immigrated to the neighborhood in the last few years. Try as he might, he hasn't mastered the accent and local customs. And forget the slang; that's like learning a third language. Worse, the old-timers all seem to know something about him that he hasn't figured out yet. He gets the distinct impression that they talk about his family, reinforced by the overheard name-calling. His peers can be especially cruel, teasing him to his face and instigating fights after school. The soldiers occupying the streets find the bullying funny.
Sometimes the mocking gets to him. He wants desperately to fight back, but mom forbids it, promising that someday the rejection will make sense. He tries to take comfort in her words, but for now his heart just hurts, and the unfairness makes him angry.
So he sneaks off to the outskirts of town and hides behind a gnarly old sycamore tree. There he remembers the hunger and loneliness of the refugee camp, and recollects vague memories of a midnight flight from the small town where he spent his childhood. The details are sketchy, but he recalls stories of bloodshed and murder that he barely escaped. Not fitting in has been a recurring struggle for him.
Then his memories fade, and he hears the echo of mom's voice telling him about his birth. No way would his schoolmates ever find out he was born in a barn. The ammunition that would give them! They already call him choice animal names.
But really, why did he have to be born in a stable, surrounded by donkey dung and cow manure? And why did it matter that Joseph wasn't his real dad? And why did the gossips congregating at the stoop down the street call him a bastard and his mother a whore? Even if that was true, what business was it of theirs? And why did they disdain him as if he should be dead?
Perhaps you know this friend of mine. No longer a nameless and faceless teenager, his name is revered and reviled around the world, and artists have imagined his likeness for centuries. In case you missed it in Sunday school, this boy we call Jesus Christ.
He was born into straw poverty made worse by political exile, and lived as an immigrant teenager in the ghetto. He worked his ministry with no place to lay his head (Matt. 8:20); made his last trip on a borrowed donkey; spent his last evening alive in a borrowed room; watched his lone possession, a robe, become a gambler's prize at his death; and was buried in a borrowed tomb.
When the King of kings decided to usher his Kingdom "on earth as it is in heaven," he penetrated class lines to do so -- not as a well-intentioned outsider but from within the community.
Consider that God Almighty, by any standard a class above even the wealthiest humans, measures the universe with a span, or the nine inches between your pinky and thumb (Isaiah 40:12); owns "the cattle on a thousand hills" (Psalm 50:10); and is the source and creator of all things (I Corinthians 8:6). Yet he determined to "become flesh and blood and move into the neighborhood" (John 1:14, The Message), and his manner of doing so invited scorn.
At its core, Christ's birth was unseemly (single mothers were capital criminals); unsanitary (born in a barn, surrounded by farm animals, stench, and bugs); lowly (shepherds got it, innkeepers did not); controversial (astrologers were the first to perceive it, by reading the stars); dangerous (it provoked the ire of a villainous king); deadly (the king slaughtered innocents in response); not to mention politically radioactive (Jesus was "king" of an occupied people) and religiously scandalous ("Messiah"). Yet we sanitize the tale (for the kids or for us?) and tend to focus on angelic messengers and cuddly sheep.
Imagine how we might respond if Jesus was born in 21st century America. When my wife was pregnant with our son, the Prospect Park petting zoo was nowhere near our list of possible birthing facilities. If Maria from my youth group claimed her future baby's father wasn't her boyfriend Jose but God who impregnated her, she'd likely end up in Bellevue's psychiatric ward. (As it was, Mary and her unborn baby barely survived capital punishment, which Maria wouldn't have to worry about, and knew her baby would live with the stigma of her unmarried pregnancy.) If security guards boasting of angelic visitations in the middle of the night in Central Park's Sheep Meadow told us about a king being born in the Westside horse stables, we'd suspect them of smoking too much. If Iranian fortunetellers showed up at church on Sunday claiming a prophetic word interpreted from the alignment of stars, they'd be forcefully removed from the sanctuary.
Yet all marked Christ's entrance into this world. When his impoverished parents dedicated him at the synagogue at eight days old, they offered a peasant sacrifice, two pigeons. When a genocidal kingpin executed a gangland hit attempt on Jesus' life, his parents escaped with him to Egypt, where no self-respecting Jew wanted to go after their ancestors had fled 400 years of slavery. There he lived as a political refugee with the knowledge that an entire village of toddlers and baby boys paid for his life with their blood. When Jesus returned to Israel as a preteen, he moved to Nazareth, a community with a reputation for producing no good thing (John 1:46). He spent his teens and twenties working a blue-collar trade, and didn't enter public ministry until the age of thirty.
Related
+ "
Barnyard Births in the City: Wishing you an Unconventional Christmas"
+ See also, my chapters on class and economic justice in the upcoming
Deep Justice in a Broken World: Helping Your Kids Serve Others and Right the Wrongs Around Them
(YS/Zondervan, January 2008
Topics: Christmas, deep justice | 3 Comments »
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December 21st, 2007 at 11:00 am
I wanna read a portion of this to my congregation Sunday, it’s great.
December 21st, 2007 at 10:45 pm
Reimagining Christmas…
Jeremy sums up Christmas as well as can be done. I love imagining Gospel stories in modern contexts, and he does a great job of it here.
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December 22nd, 2010 at 5:48 pm
[...] Re-imagining Christmas [...]