Titus 3: 4 – 7; Luke 2: 8 – 20
One of my favourite Christmas cards has a picture of the scene in the stable and these words: “No one is an outsider to this happiness.” For me this neatly summarises the good news which the angels brought to the shepherds “to you is born in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord”. That’s what we’re celebrating today.
It’s such a familiar story, isn’t it, that it’s hard to really hear it? Let’s forget the scenes on Christmas cards and our beautiful crib here and try to really imagine what it was like. It may have been in a cave – there were many caves used as stables on the outskirts of Bethlehem. It’s night time – dark, dirty and smelly. Perhaps there are animals, or perhaps they’ve been moved out to make room. Within the last hours a very young woman has given birth. Perhaps she’s sleeping now. Babies can sleep anywhere when they’re small. This one has been carefully laid in a feeding trough for animals. It’s off the floor, away from draughts and dangers, but not what any of us might choose as a place for a new baby. It’s quiet in the cave. And then suddenly in stumbles a gaggle of shepherds. They’re rough men, outsiders because they live outside the town in the fields with the sheep, outsiders because they’re not very respectable. In they come, out of breath, smelling of sheep and babbling about angels, asking to see the Messiah. And they’re quite content when they see the baby; they say this was just what the angels told them. Perhaps they fall silent, kneel down and worship, perhaps they just shift uneasily from foot to foot, not knowing what to say or to do now that they are here. After a while they leave, and go off into the night to tell their story to anyone who will listen.
Perhaps, as the months and years roll on they remember this night, and they wonder, What did it all mean? We have the benefit of 2,000 years of pondering. So, what does it mean to us, here and now?
Listen to this, from Thomas Merton:
“Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, his place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, those unjustly accused and condemned.”
We don’t know the precise social status of Jesus’ parents. He was born in the stable, not because they couldn’t afford the inn, but because there was no room. They probably weren’t the poorest of the poor because they seem to have been able to afford an education for him. But there is no doubt that in His ministry Jesus chose to identify Himself with the poor, those who were not respectable, those who, like the shepherds, were on the margins of society. This must cause us to question our position of relative comfort in a world where millions still suffer from grinding poverty. One farmer in Latin America put it this way: “A single star for the well born and wealthy wise men compared with a whole host of glorious singing angels on the hillside to warm and welcome the poor and scruffy shepherds. That’s how we know how much God loves the poor. He gives them his very best.”
There are, of course, different kinds of poverty. We can have every present we could possibly want for Christmas and still be poor inside. Our reading from Titus reminds us that in one sense we’re all poor. It is only through the goodness and loving kindness of God in sending His Son that we are welcomed into His kingdom. Oscar Romero put this well when he wrote: “No-one can celebrate Christmas without being truly poor. The self-sufficient, the proud, those who have no need even of God – for them there will be no Christmas. Only the poor, the hungry, those who need someone to come on their behalf, will have that someone. That someone is God, Emmanuel, God with us. Without poverty of spirit there can be no abundance of God.”
May God give us the grace to respond to the poverty of others, as Jesus did. May He also give us the grace to recognise our own need of the Saviour of the World.
“No one is an outsider to this happiness.”
Happy Christmas!