A dark, dismal story that brings light ... and hope
Today is the darkest day. Winter Solstice. Darkest day of the darkest month of, for many, a dark, dark year. In this season of giving and getting, loss - of health, a job, a home, a parent, a child, a husband, a wife, of hope itself - is felt with a special sharpness. Comfort seems cold as the midnight snow. Three nights from Christmas Eve the lights are dimmed and the carols out of key. "Joy to the World" seems muffled by a deep sadness. Try as we might, our bells do not jingle.
Christmas, it seems, is not for us.
And we are so wrong about that.
For all the glow and glitter it's dressed up in - no matter how much the truth of it is hidden by gift wrap and ribbon bows - the story told by Matthew and Luke is a grim tale, indeed.
Mary, a Galilean girl, poor, pregnant and conspicuously lacking a husband. It's certain that in the streets of Nazareth "Blessed Virgin" was never appended to her name, and it takes little imagination to hear the gossip passed among the women gathered at the village well.
Joseph - cuckolded by God no less. Blamed for what he didn't do or held up as the laughing stock of the village square for standing by the mother of some other man's child.
We're told how they go on an unwilling journey, compelled by a foreign conqueror to shoulder the ever heavier burden of Roman taxation. Approaching a strange city as night falls, she feels the first sharp pains of impending childbirth. No room in the crowded, noisy lodging house, no place for them among the darkened family dwellings. In fear, they huddle in the manure-smeared filth of the only shelter that will have them.
There, in blood and pain, a new life struggles to be born. Perhaps, but only perhaps, Joseph's ear catches the distant echoes of singing as he struggles in the dim torchlight to cut the cord and bring God's son into the world.
Yet in that dark night of fear, pain and poverty, angels appeared and a star blazed forth. In the person of an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger, everlasting hope was born into our world.
And that is the story of Christmas. How out of the dark, cold night came "glad tidings of great joy." There's no tinsel, no parties, no maxed-out credit cards and overtaxed UPS drivers - just chilly shepherds, smelly sheep, wandering wise men and two people who must have felt themselves on the journey through hell only to find themselves on the very doorstep of heaven.
It's a story not of and for the comfortable but about and for people in need of comfort. In other words, for all of us, especially for those whose nights are darkest and days are slowest to dawn.
Yet without the night, we could not see the star that leads to the manger. Without the night, the glory of the angels would be lost in the sun. Without the night, there would never be the new dawn that brings hope - the one thing each and every one of us truly wants for Christmas.