On the eve of Christmas, at the dawn of a new millennium, speaking at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., Archbishop Desmond Tutu used an unlikely metaphor to describe the miracle of Jesus’ entry into the human experience: graffiti. What does graffiti have in common with the coming of God’s Son? How can an act of vandalism be used to describe the birth of a holy child?
Archbishop Tutu was suggesting that Christ’s entrance into the world was as bold and as incongruous as the scribbled writing we see on schools, businesses, churches, billboards and freeway overpasses. Jesus was God’s graffiti! Yet the retelling of the Christmas story has become so commonplace that we hardly hear how strange and offensive the whole scenario really was.
The birth of Christ has lost its power to surprise us. Let’s consider some of the odd twists in this story. Mary, the mother of Jesus, lived in Nazareth of Galilee, a lowly town when compared to the capital of Jerusalem in Judea (a much more likely place for rearing a king). As an unwed pregnant teen Mary walked almost 100 miles with her fiancé to Bethlehem (only mothers can understand the distress this might have caused late in the third trimester). Due to a convention in town, the young couple couldn’t find a room to stay in and their baby was born in a less than sanitary environment (and no Demerol or epidural). After the delivery, the only birth announcements were sent via a band of angels to a despised group of migrant field workers that Joseph and Mary had never met (wouldn’t King Herod’s court have been a more appropriate place for the royal announcement?).
Where would Jesus be born today and would anybody take notice? In modern-day Jerusalem the world famous King David Hotel is the place where diplomats and dignitaries stay. I doubt Jesus’ parents would be able to afford the $2,000-per-night deluxe suite overlooking the Old City (I checked and all the rooms are full this Christmas Eve anyway).
We have to be careful in trying to predict where God would arrive on our planet. He has the strangest knack of showing up where we least expect him. This is evident throughout Scripture but especially in the life and teaching of Jesus. Here are just a few ways he surprised his followers.
It was the foreigner of another faith, a Samaritan, that helped the beaten and left-for-dead Jewish man on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. It was the woman at the well, an outcast who had been abused by many different men, that ended up being the first evangelist in the Gospel of John. It was those who did not know they were serving God that were invited into the kingdom simply because they were helping “the least of these,” not the self-righteous folks who constantly invoked the name of the Lord in an attempt to gain His favor. Surprise!
Where would God show up? I do not know, but there is one thing I am sure of: He wouldn’t be in the places or with the people I would expect. This is the danger of discrimination. Nazareth, Bethlehem, unwed mothers, stables, shepherds—all the stuff of first-century discrimination. I wonder, would God appear with the people I am most prejudiced against? Will He continue to come to the places I and others might find offensive?
Mary did not ride into Bethlehem on a donkey; the innkeeper never said, “There’s no room in the inn;” there is no mention of a baby sleeping in hay; Jesus’ birth more likely took place in a cave or grotto than a barn; and the magi were not kings, did not arrive until two to three years after Christ’s birth and no one knows how many there were. Unfortunately, most of our understanding of Christmas comes through carols and cards rather than through the recorded narrative of the Bible. Reread the story this holiday season and be ready to be surprised. And watch for God’s graffiti as He reveals himself in the most unexpected places.
(Originally posted on my blog for Christmas 2007. The story of Archbishop Tutu was taken from The aWAKE Project.)
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