The Suprise of Christmas

An undergraduate professor of mine once said that the key to a good poem is surprise.  There must be something in the text that is unexpected to the reader; something that confounds the reader's expectations concerning the poem's subject matter.  It is in that surprise that the power, creativity, and beauty of the poem resides.  As an example, From T.S. Eliot's masterwork, "April is the cruelest month." We don't associate April with cruelty.  The surprising association draws in the reader.  Without the element of surprise, the poem is boring and predictable. 

The beauty of the birth narratives of Jesus lay in what is surprising and unexpected about them.  The King of the Kings of the world was born in a barn because there was no room in the inn.  Does anyone think for a second that if the kings of the world were traveling through Bethlehem that there would not have been "room" at the inn? What about the Jewish religious establishment? Somehow, mysteriously, room at the inn would have appeared.  There was no room at the inn because of the one's who requested it: a Jewish Mediterranean peasant couple from an obscure village in Galilee.

The birth narratives of Jesus go from one surprise to the next, all confounding the reader's expectations of the nature and circumstance of the birth of God incarnate.  The theme that pervades the narratives is God's unequivocal rejection of all the world's power, glory, and majesty.  This is the surprise.

To truly honor and celebrate the birth of Christ, we must no gloss over the surprises, evade the surprises, or try to reconstruct the surprises.  Too often our liturgies, hymns, and celebrations of Christmas try to do so; downplaying, rather than extenuating the shock value of the narratives.  Doing so robs them of all their beauty and glory.  

God's Omnipresence

Advent is typically expressed in Church music and liturgy as a time when God suddenly, through the incarnation, became present in an open and obvious way, unlike the past and the present where God's presence is more elusive.  And the point of Advent thereby becomes a message of hope that God will one day again become revealed in a manner that is open and self-evident.

This understanding of Advent, and the story of Jesus generally, is not found in a close reading of the canonized gospels.  Instead, we see a God whose presence was evident in the same manner that God's presence was evident before Jesus and after Jesus.  When seen through the perspective of those who witnessed the events, God's presence would not have been self evident.

That, of course, does not mean that God was not present in Jesus, which is the whole point.  God always has been present and always will be; just not in the open and obvious manner that the world expects.  The task of the Church is to discern God's presence where human culture only sees absence.

Mark's gospel begins with Christ suddenly arriving and proclaiming a message of repentance.  Human culture would have seen an itinerant Jewish Mediterranean peasant rabbinic teacher.  The Church knows otherwise.  We are called to proclaim it