Three Days of Paradox

This email is being delivered on the 5th day of Christmas.  Yes, contrary to our society's observance of Christmas which begins sometime around Halloween and ends on Christmas Day, the Christian celebration of Christmas only begins on December 25, and then goes for 11 more days.  (Thus the song about the 12 days of Christmas.)  From December 25 until Epiphany on January 6 each year, we get to continue the celebrations and thanksgivings, the wonder and the joy of Immanuel - God who has come to be with us in Jesus Christ our Lord.  I like this about our Church's liturgical year!  We get lots of days to celebrate Christmas!

However, our calendar also does a few strange things during these days of Christmas observance.  The three days that follow Christmas traditionally recognize these people or events:

·      December 26 - St. Stephen, Deacon and Martyr

·      December 27 - St. John, Apostle and Evangelist

·      December 28 - Holy Innocents

So on December 25 we are invited to revel in the joy and wonder of the coming of God into our world in the birth of the Son, Jesus.  But then on December 26 we are invited to remember the first person martyred for believing in this Jesus?  And then on December 28 we are invited to remember all those young infant boys whom the despot, Herod, ordered to be killed, vainly hoping to get rid of the One who the Magi told Herod was born "King of the Jews?"  Talk about dampening the Christmas spirit!!!

I've thought a lot over the years about this seemingly incongruent juxtaposition of these events.  And this is the only thing that has come to make sense to me... We often tend to sentimentalize and sanitize the birth of the Savior.  We forget that the barn would have smelled, the baby would have cried, Mary would have screamed during labor, there would have been blood and fluids, Joseph would have felt helpless, the shepherds were uninvited societal outcasts who barged into this intimate family moment.  And so we send each other beautiful Hallmark-type cards and marvel at our idyllic depictions of Christmas.  Yet the birth of Jesus most certainly involved all of those above things that we tend to forget or ignore.  Jesus was born into a broken world in need of redemption.  Jesus was born into a world filled with hatred and prejudices, with non-sensical and indiscriminate violence, with suffering and pain.

Jesus did not come into a brightly lit and sanitized world.  Such a world would not have stood in need of saving.  Jesus came into the very real and sometimes brutal world of his day.  And Jesus continues to come, by the Holy Spirit, into our very real, sometimes brutal, often violent, terribly broken world.  I think that to juxtapose Christmas with reminders of the martyrdoms of St. Stephen and the Holy Innocents is meant to remind us that it is into the very midst of our very real world that Jesus still comes.

And I need to keep remembering that.

So we still can say to each other, with perhaps a deeper, more profound understanding of all that means:  Merry Christmas.