Every once in a while there comes a time when ancient wrongs are righted, and justice is finally done.
Friday December 4th, 2009 will go down as such a day.
One year ago the title of Belhelvie Church Quiz champions was cruelly snatched from the team known as the “Pumpkin Pears” by just half a point. But just over a week ago the record was set straight. A 13 point margin of victory, thanks in no small part to a ten point Christmas Carols round, and much trickier 5-point round on the Christmas story as it’s found in the gospels. Guess which team got 15/15 on those two?!
This is what we had to answer in that second question:
How many gospels have a nativity story? (Answer – 2)
Can you name them? (Matthew, Luke)
Which of those two tells the story of the shepherds (Luke)
Interesting isn’t it?! We think we know the Christmas story because we’ve heard it for years, but in actual fact, what we’re presented with at Christmastime is an amalgam of two nativity stories, laid over with a gloss of romanticism.
Don’t say it in front of the kids, but there’s no mention of a little donkey, or an innkeeper in either Matthew or Luke’s accounts. The stable’s by no means certain, and in all likelihood the wise men arrived a good few months after the baby was born.
Over the years, what’s happened is that the nativity-play version of the story has imprinted itself onto our minds and we accept it almost uncritically, forgetting to ask what the source material in Matthew and Luke really says.
That’s a good exercise for a snowy afternoon- sit down with a cup of coffee and read through the two different accounts of the nativity story. You’ll be surprised at what you find. And what you don’t find.
But the main thing you’ll discover is how different in tone the two accounts are.
Luke’s story is filled with joy and light and glory. It’s Luke who tells us about the delight surrounding Elizabeth’s pregnancy with John; he focuses on Mary’s feelings and her acceptance of this role she’s called to have. He recalls the song of joy she sang that’s known as the Magnificat.
Luke’s account is full of angels, who bring tidings of great joy to people who are wide awake. He has the word coming first to the shepherds who return to the fields rejoicing at what they found down in Bethlehem. He has Simeon and Anna, delighted to see the messiah with their own eyes in their old age. It’s all good.
Matthew’s gospel, by contrast, is much darker. The light is still there, but from the word go, it’s struggling against the darkness.
Matthew, perhaps as we’d expect for a Jewish writer of his day, focuses on the man in the story and spends a good deal of time on Joseph’s predicament.
It’s Matthew who tells us just how rocky things were between Mary and Joseph because of her pregnancy, and who raises the issue of divorce as a real possibility.
People see angels in Matthew too, but always in dreams, always in the darkness. There’s no mention of the shepherds or the angels – instead we have these strange mystics coming from the east, and getting things badly wrong at first by stirring up Jerusalem’s tyrant king.
They bring strange gifts more suited for a burial than a birth, and after they leave, Herod issues a decree that all the local boys aged 2 and under be slaughtered. Mary and Joseph have to flee and become refugees in Egypt until it’s finally safe to return and settle down in Nazareth.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the two accounts contradict one another because I don’t think they do. We have to take them together. But they do reflect two very different perspectives on what was going on.
They’re both Biblical accounts. They both carry weight. But which one do you think has had a bigger influence on what we call the Christmas story? It's Luke, isn't it?
When did you last hear a carol about Joseph’s dilemma; or the poor mothers who were robbed of their sons because Mary brought hers to full term? Or the fact that the infant Jesus started out life as a refugee? Maybe not a bad beginning for someone who in later life claimed he had nowhere to lay his head.
We’re missing Matthew’s influence, aren’t we?
And because of that, we’re missing part of what Christmas is supposed to be about.
At this time of year, we’re sold a vision of what Christmas should be. It’s tinsel and lights and open fires; it’s families and presents and good food; it’s love and harmony and goodwill to all men. It’s a secularized version of Luke. Goodwill minus God.
But what if Christmas, for you, doesn’t look the way the media people say it should?
What if it’s a lonely time for you, because you’re by yourself. Or the absence of that special person is particularly hard to bear?
What if the family get-together in your house is less like a Marks and Spencer’s ad and more like a fist-fight in Albert Square?
What if this is the first Christmas after your marriage has broken down, and your kids are waking up on Christmas morning to hugs from just one parent?
What if it’s hard to get into the spirit because you’re ill and you just don’t have the energy for it?
What if you can’t afford the Christmas everyone tells you you should be having, because you’ve lost your job, or you know it’s under threat?
If that’s where you’re at, the Christmas we’re sold in the shops and on the telly doesn’t have much to say to you. In fact, it’s rather embarrassed to have you around.
But Matthew has something to say.
Matthew reminds us that in the darkness of our loneliness, our conflicts, our illness and our loss, hope can still come. And in time, and with faith, that hope can become a light that changes everything.
And how does it come?
If comes as we wait and watch attentively and don’t give up. When we realise that no situation we find ourselves in is God-less or God-forsaken. There is always hope. It’s just that sometimes in life we have to look harder to find it.
John the evangelist has no nativity story, but of Christ’s coming into the world he says this – “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out”. I wonder if he pinched that idea from Matthew, because that’s the tenor, not just of his nativity story, but of his whole gospel.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the most popular American poet of his day, but at times, his life was scarred by tragedy. His first wife, Mary Potter, died after a miscarriage in 1835, and in 1861 his second wife, Frances Appleton, died from burns she sustained when her clothing caught fire.
That same year, the American Civil War broke out and two years into the conflict, Longfellow got the news he’d been dreading when his son was seriously injured in action.
He found it hard to write in the latter years of his life, And sitting down at his desk, one Christmas Day, he heard the church bells pealing out and their noise seemed to mock him in the grief he’d borne across the years.
He set himself to work, and penned these lines:
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
And in despair I bowed my head
There is no peace on earth I said
For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep,
God is not dead, nor doth he sleep.
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
With peace on earth, good will to men.
The hope that Christmas brings us isn’t a fool’s hope. A hope that tries to pretend things aren’t how they really are.
It’s the hope that looks realistically at our stories and says with Matthew – yes, there are problems, worries and concerns. But that’s not all there is.
For the everlasting light shines not only in the dark streets of Bethlehem, but the dark alleyways of our souls. And the darkness can never put it out.
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