With Christmas around the corner, I thought I would reproduce one of the Christmas meditations from my book Could this be God: Bumping Into God in the Everyday. It’s called: And in the Chaos, God…
Did you get your fair share of nativity plays this Christmas season? I certainly enjoyed watching a host of little children wend their way through improbable presentations of pregnant Marys, dazzling angels, lofty wise men and the rest of the Christmas crew. It was the unscripted moments that produced the greatest mirth—the accusatory cry of a four year old, ‘That’s not Jesus. That’s Megan’s doll.’ Or the sheep who would have preferred to be an angel and kept flapping imaginary wings rather than utter a simple ‘baa’.
I rather like nativity plays that don’t stick to plan. After all, nothing in the original run was as would have been imagined. I wonder what Mary thought after being told that she would be the mother of God. It would have been understandable if she started to contemplate a future of luxury and delight.
The reality was very different. You know the story. A heavily pregnant Mary makes the lengthy journey to Bethlehem as a result of a government census. Blissfully unaware that his bureaucratic muscle-flexing was really the result of another’s prompting, Caesar Augustus ensures that the Christ child is born in the place predicted by the prophets. I wonder what Mary thought of the journey. I imagine she reflected that this wasn’t exactly what she had in mind after the angel departed.
Worse was to follow. An inhospitable Bethlehem closes its doors to Mary and Joseph. The Messiah is born in a stable—his first cradle is a feeding trough for cattle. Who would have thought to locate the Messiah there? A yet nastier turn follows. The despotic Herod, panicking at the prospect of the birth of an alternate leader, orders the execution of all babies in the vicinity of Bethlehem. The couple plus child narrowly escape to Egypt. So not what Mary would have had in mind.
That first Christmas—nothing ran to script. But with the wisdom of hindsight, we look back and say, ‘and in the chaos, God’. Some things don’t change. Somewhere, perhaps even in your chaos, God might be at work.
As always, nice chatting…
