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.