The Inconvenient Incarnation

Read Matthew 2:9-18

One of the illusions that was shattered by the events of September 11 was the illusion of control – the sense that, because life is predictable, we are in control. But the terrorist attacks – which came literally out of a clear blue sky – shattered that illusion of predictability. They burst our bubble of security.

And for those of us who were not directly affected by the attacks, that was the greatest casualty – our sense that life is manageable, predictable, and safe. So we are now learning to live with a new sense of uncertainty and a new feeling of insecurity.

And yet this new reality – this “new normal” as some are calling it – is really nothing new at all. It’s the way most human beings have lived their lives on this planet for millennia. And it was certainly true, and especially true of the Biblical characters who were involved in the Christmas story.

When you look at our modern-day Christmas cards, what do you see? You see a romantic image of a mother and baby. Little baby Jesus nestles snug and warm in a clean bed of hay. Mary and Joseph and the shepherds look on adoringly. The whole scene is backlit with a soft candlelit glow. The rough hewn wooden beams and timbers of the stable lend a warm, homey atmosphere to the picture – something reminiscent of a Norman Rockwell painting. You can almost hear Silent Night playing softly in the background.

And yet, the true story of Christmas – the story we read in the Bible – is nothing like that at all. The story of the Incarnation—the story about how God became a man—is a story that is actually full of pain, confusion, and outright terror. For the people most closely involved – Joseph, Mary, and yes, even Jesus himself – Christmas involved a major upheaval in their lives; a sense that life was spinning completely out of control.

Think of what Mary experienced. One day, she’s a happy Jewish teenager living in a small town in Galilee, planning her wedding. The next day, an angel of God announces to her that she’s going to have a baby, which has been conceived in her womb, without her knowledge or consent, by the Holy Spirit. This creates for her an enormous crisis. She’s engaged to be married to a good man named Joseph, and having a baby didn’t exactly fit in with her wedding plans.

Nowadays, with tens of thousands of babies being born to unwed mothers, this may not seem to us to be such a big deal. But I assure you that in first century Judea, it was a big deal.

Mary was going to have to live with the humiliation of an unwed pregnancy, the slanders on her character which would result. And she would have to live with this stain on her reputation for the rest of her life.

And meanwhile, her wedding to Joseph was in jeopardy, too. What would Joseph think about her pregnancy? How was she to explain her swelling womb to her fiancee?

Think of what Christmas meant for Joseph. When Mary was found to be with child, as far as Joseph was concerned, it meant that she had been unfaithful to him. But because he still loved her and didn’t want to disgrace her publicly, Matthew 1:19 tells us that he had in mind to divorce her quietly.

We have to realize that engagement, as practiced in those days, was much more binding than it is today. The only way for a man and woman who were betrothed to break that relationship was through divorce. That was Joseph’s biblical right - the Bible sanctions divorce in cases of adultery. And it certainly looked as though Mary had committed adultery.

But the Lord intervened and sent an angel to explain to Joseph that things were not exactly as they appeared. Mary was still pure. She was still a virgin. She had been faithful to him, but she had also been faithful to God who had asked her to undertake this awesome responsibility.

And the result of her willingness to submit to God’s sovereignty was inconvenience, embarrassment, and uncertainty. And for Joseph, it was confusion, humiliation and that feeling that men hate most of all—the feeling of not being in control.

Think of what happened next: Joseph and Mary lived in Nazareth, a small town in Galilee. Joseph had a carpentry business there. He was a woodworker—a builder by trade. You can imagine how he felt when he heard the news that he had to leave his business in Nazareth and move. Why did he have to move?

He had to move because a thousand miles away, in Rome, an emperor named Caesar Augustus decided that it would be a good idea to take a census for the purpose of taxing the citizens of the Roman Empire. Everyone had to go back to his ancestral home to register.

For Joseph and Mary, that meant that they would have to leave their home in Nazareth and make an inconvenient and dangerous 150 Km journey to Bethlehem, the home of their ancestors. And the timing of this move couldn’t have been worse.

This edict came when Mary was almost due to give birth. This meant that she would be taken away from her home and her family - her whole support system – at the most crucial point in her young life.

But they had to go. They had no choice. Not because of Caesar’s decree, but because of an even greater, overriding decree: God’s decree, given through Micah the prophet, that the Messiah should be born in Bethlehem.

Micah 5:2 “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.”

So Joseph and Mary went to Bethlehem. I’m sure that, by now, they were beginning to feel shell-shocked, and uprooted. We know that expectant mothers have a heightened need for security and support. But for Mary, these things were being pulled away from her.

We can only imagine what they must have felt when they finally arrived in Bethlehem, only to find that all suitable accommodations were long-since filled. Surely, if God had sent these young people to Bethlehem to have this baby, He could have at least had the decency to arrange for a hotel vacancy. But there was nothing. There was no room waiting for them. Nobody there to welcome them. It seemed, for all intents and purposes, that nobody even knew or cared that they were there.

Can you imagine how frightened, confused, and exhausted they both must have been? Something like the refugees from Afghanistan. But we don’t see any of that on our Christmas cards, do we?

The time soon came for Mary to give birth. The place they had found to live was probably a cave—the town of Bethlehem is built on limestone that is honecombed with caves. Shepherds in those days used these caves to house their animals. We learn that Mary laid her newborn baby in a manger, a feeding trough.

I would remind you that human birth is a messy process. There is blood, there is pain, there is a certain amount of fear, and there is a mess to clean up afterward. This birth may well have been unattended – no doctors, no nurses or midwife, no sterile delivery room, no layette or incubator for the baby. Just a cave, a feeding trough, and two frightened kids. We don’t see that on our Christmas cards.

If that weren’t bad enough, things get worse.

Imagine that a young couple – Joe and Maria - give birth to a baby boy here in Mississauga at Credit Valley Hospital. They take little Josh home with them and he begins to grow. But then a few months later, the Joe receives some disturbing and very reliable information in the middle of the night. He is told that his Josh’s life is in imminent danger.

Somehow or other, Josh’s name is on the RCMP’s most wanted list. In fact, the Prime Minister of Canada has put out a warrant for the baby’s arrest. But the government doesn’t yet know the exact whereabouts of Joe and his family; all they know is that this little boy was born several months earlier somewhere in the Greater Toronto Area.

So the very next morning, Joe and Maria quickly throw a few clothes into a suitcase, bundle up little Josh, hop into a cab to Pearson Airpot and catch the next flight to Mexico. And that’s where they find themselves a few days later—strangers, fugitives, in a strange land.

Meanwhile, the RCMP, acting on a tip, closes in on Mississauga. The OPP throws up roadblocks on the main highways. People in minivans with infant seats start getting pulled over by the Peel Regional Police. Hospital records are checked. Families with infant sons born in the last two years receive a terrifying phone call from OHIP. They are ordered to take their babies to the nearest hospital for special medical testing - the babies are going to be put in quarantine and it is unknown when they will ever see them again.

Sound far-fetched? This is what happened in Bethlehem. A paranoid king named Herod got wind that a new king had been born in Bethlehem some time in the previous year or so. So he responded in typical fashion. Herod was a man who had already killed his own wife and two of his sons. He ordered that all the male babies two years old and younger be taken from their parents and executed.

That’s how the Christmas story ends in the Gospel of Matthew . With a verse that reads “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.” But you never see that verse on a Christmas card.

The birth of Jesus brought pain and disruption to Mary and Joseph. It brought pain and disruption to the community in which he was born. And it also brought pain to Jesus himself.

The Bible teaches us that when God became a man, he emptied himself. Listen to the words in Philippians 2 as I read them from the Contemporary English Version…

Christ was truly God. But he did not try to remain equal with God. He gave up everything and became a slave when he became one of us. He obeyed God and even died on a cross.

What did Jesus give up when he became one of us? He gave up his glory and his place of prominence as God. He gave up his independence and power as the Creator of the Universe in order to become a tiny little baby who couldn’t talk, couldn’t eat solid food, couldn’t control his own bladder, and had to rely on a couple of scared Jewish teenagers for shelter, food, and safety.

As a human being, one of the awful tolls of aging is that you begin to lose your faculties. Your hearing goes, then your eyesight. Your teeth fall out and so does your hair. You begin to lose your memory. You may lose your ability to walk. Some elderly people experience the terror of losing their minds and their personalities.

Take that, and multiply it a thousand-fold and you begin to have an inkling of what it must have been like for God to become a man. He emptied himself, and that emptying must have been excruciatingly painful. That’s what it cost Jesus to be involved in Christmas.

There is something we need to remember about all the pain and confusion of the Christmas story. For the perspective of Joseph and Mary, from the perspective of the other parents in Bethlehem who lost their babies, life must have been terrifying – like they were caught in a hurricane, and things were spinning out of control.

But from God’s perspective, all of this was happening under his sovereign control. Joseph and Mary and Jesus were in the hands of a loving heavenly Father. Not one thing was happening to them that was outside of his control.

And we need to remember that, because the same thing is true of our lives. We are in the hands of a Sovereign God who loves us. We matter to him, just as much as Joseph, Mary, and Jesus mattered to him.

Does that mean that our lives will be free from pain? Does that mean that we will never have times when we think that life is out of control? Does that mean that we will never feel victimized by events? No.

But it means that God loves us and watches over us and is worth clinging to even through the pain.

The Christmas season often brings disruption into peoples’ lives. We think: “How can that be? I thought that Christmas was supposed to be a happy time, a joyous time, a comfortable, enjoyable time with family and friends.”

Well, the first Christmas certainly wasn’t. And Christmas 2001 certainly won’t be that for the families of the 3,000 plus victims of the terrorist attacks. And Christmas 2001 may not be that for you, for whatever reason.

But just remember that the God who was in control of the Inconvenient Incarnation is the same God who is in control of your life and my life.

Is. 41:10 So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.