Pondering Things

The words of Luke 2:1-20 sound so familiar to me that I have a hard time not glossing over the text as I read it. Regardless of the year in our cycle of Scriptural readings we hear Luke’s Nativity narrative at the primary celebration of Christmas—maybe Christmas Eve, maybe Christmas Day, or maybe both. Not only this, but chances are if you go to a Christmas pageant, then Luke’s words will make it into the production. The repetition of the story can have a profoundly negative effect, as we miss the beauty and absurdity of the story of Jesus’ birth.

When I force myself to slow down enough to take in the details of the Third Gospel’s Christmas message I find myself hearing the words in my head in a British accent. No, I don’t think I’m crazy, this anglophile-hearing of the tale is a force of habit. Every year my family maintains a tradition of listening to the Festival of Lessons and Carolsbroadcast around the world from King’s College, Cambridge. This year—like most years—Luke 2 makes it into the service—twice! The sixth and seventh lessons tell of Mary’s and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem and the angels’ visitation of the shepherds respectively. Sadly though, the Festival’s seventh lesson stops after the 16^th verse leaving out a phrase that calls us to a bold task in this season when we call to mind the Advent of Christ past, present, and yet to come!

As the shepherds arrived at the manger they told Mary of their angelic visitors. Shepherds finding a baby wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger seems difficult enough in the town of Bethlehem, but that these instructions came from an angel makes it all the more outlandish. Now imagine being Mary who after just giving birth in a barn now finds herself being visited by a pack of smelly shepherds! If some farmers or factory workers burst into a maternity ward demanding to see a patient today security would be called. And yet, as strange as this seems the shepherds’ message and Mary’s response—that bit that is helpful to us—might be even weirder.

The sheep-herders tell Mary that her child will be the Messiah and that this message came from angles nonetheless. We might expect that Mary would kick these messengers out of the stable for being lunatics who claim to have been visited by God, but something else happens. Mary who had also been visited by the angel Gabrielle had the ability to accept these words instead of reject them because she had such faith in God that even the unbelievable to her was believable. Unlike others who were amazed and perhaps too perplexed by the shepherds’ words to receive them, Mary pondered all these things in her heart. She let the words pass her defenses and into her soul!

We, like Mary, are called to allow the crazy message of Jesus’ birth to hit us square in the heart. Even though our instinct might be to just gloss over what we are hearing because these words come around to us this time each year, we are called to model our faithfulness after bold Mary who in turn shaped her life of trust after God’s own! The God of all—the infinite, the omnipresent, the omniscient, Almighty One—became the vulnerable baby lying in a manger. That little child, who could not speak a word, cure others, or even take care of himself came to be the Messiah, the Savior of us all. The wild juxtaposition of the God of all coming to dwell in an infant child who had to rely on others strikes me as a crazy act of faithfulness on God’s part. God trusted in human beings to take care of the baby Jesus. This is wild and it is something that I must ponder, not just with my head, but also in my heart. 

May we spend time this season hearing Luke’s message of Jesus’ birth and like Mary ponder all these things in our hearts!