Some Christmas reflections from one of my absolute favorite Christian writers — Philip Yancey. Oh, how I LOVE him! He speaks to me about the Christian life the way no other modern, Christian author quite can. He’s unabashedly honest; almost uncomfortably so. I mean, this is, after all, the author of a book boldly called “Disappointment with God” — a singular, brilliant book which every Christian should read, because if we’re honest, really, REALLY honest, we have all felt disappointment with God at one time or another. I always feel comforted and encouraged and less alone when I read a Yancey book.
Anyway, right now, I’m reading “The Jesus I Never Knew” and in typical Yancey fashion, he cuts through platitudes and offers a fresh perspective on Christmas that I really needed to hear.
So here are some snippets:
Christmas art depicts Jesus’ family as icons stamped in gold foil, with a calm Mary receiving the tidings of the Anunciation as a kind of benediction. But that is not at all how Luke tells the story. Mary was “greatly troubled” and “afraid” at the angel’s appearance, and when the angel pronounced the sublime words about the the Son of the Most High whose kingdom will never end, Mary had something far more mundane on her mind: But I’m a virgin!
Once, a young unmarried lawyer named Cynthia bravely stood before my church in Chicago and told of a sin we already knew about: we had seen her hyperactive son running up and down the aisles every Sunday. Cynthia had taken the lonely road of bearing an illegitimate child and caring for him after his father decided to skip town. Cynthia’s sin was no worse than any others, and yet, as she told us, it had such conspicuous consequences. She could not hide the result of that single act of passion, sticking out as it did from her abdomen for months until a child emerged to change every hour of every day of the rest of her life. No wonder the Jewish teenager Mary felt greatly troubled; she faced the same prospects even without the act of passion.
In the modern United States, where each year a million teenage girls get pregnant out of wedlock, Mary’s predicament has undoubtedly lost some of its force, but in a closely knit Jewish community in the first century, the news an angel brough could not have been entirely welcome. The law regarded a betrothed woman who became pregnant as an adulteress, subject to death by stoning.
Matthew tells of Joseph magnanimously agreeing to divorce Mary in private rather than press charges, until an angel shows up to correct his perception of betrayal. Luke tells of a tremulous Mary hurrying off to the one person who could possibly understand what she was going through: her relative Elizabeth, who miraculously got pregnant after another angelic anunciation. Elizabeth believes Mary and shares her joy, and yet the scene poignantly highlights the contrast between the two women: the whole countryside is talking about Elizabeth’s healed womb even as Mary must hide the shame of her own miracle.
Today as I read the account of Jesus’ birth I tremble to think of the fate of the world resting of the responses of two rural teenagers. How many times did Mary review the angel’s words as she felt the Son of God kicking against the walls of her uterus? How many times did Joseph second-guess his own encounter with an angel — just a dream — as he endured the hot shame of living amongst villagers who could plainly see the changing shape of his fiancee?
Nine months of awkward explanations, the lingering scent of scandal — it seems that God arranged the most humiliating circumstances possible for his entrance, as if to avoid any charge of favoritism. I am impressed that when the Son of God became a human being he played by the rules, harsh rules: small towns do not treat kindly young boys who grow up with questionable paternity.
That humbles me — how he so humbled himself to be among us, to be one of us.
Later, Yancey gives a perspective that give me chills — the view of the incarnation from the heavenlies:
There is one view of Christmas I have never seen on a Christmas card, probably because no artist could do it justice. Revelation 12 pulls back the curtain to give us a glimpse of Christmas as it must have looked from somewhere far beyond Andromeda: Christmas from the angels’ viewpoint.
The account differs radically from the birth stories in the Gospels. Revelation does not mention shepherds and an infanticidal king; rather, it pictures a dragon leading a ferocious struggle in heaven. A woman clothed with the sun and wearing a crown of 12 stars cries out in pain as she is about to give birth. Suddenly, the enormous red dragon enters the picture, his tail sweeping a third of the stars out of the sky and flinging them to the earth. He crouches hungrily before the woman, anxious to devour her child the moment it is born. At the last second the infant is snatched away to safety, the woman flees into the desert, and all-out cosmic war begins.
I’m chilled when I read that. God, breaching the cosmos, willingly entering TIME as a helpless babe, igniting an unseen battle that rages still.
A long way from “Silent Night,” no? A long, LONG way.
