I’ve been thinking, over the past month, about the Christmas narrative. About how the Almighty decides to make his presence manifest in human form…and chooses a peasant girl at the end of the world as the woman to impregnate for this purpose.
I mean—the chroniclers (all male) are primarily Jews, so I
guess they’d set the story in their region. Okay, fine. But Judea was hardly
the center of the universe for anyone; it was always the edge of empires—Assyrian,
Babylonian, Egyptian and now Roman. Why wouldn’t the purported son of God be
born in Rome, or even Alexandria? You know, give him some street cred?
Moreover, not only is Mary a teenager from the back of
beyond, married to a carpenter, if you please—in no respect can they be said to
be quality folk—but she gives birth in a <checks notes> stable. A place
that shelters working animals. A place that has to be mucked out on the regular
but still undoubtedly reeks of manure. What kind of pedigree d’ya call this?
Not a speck of bling—at least until the Magi show up. Just
straw, oxen and poop. That’s where Christ’s life began, to be shortly followed
by the family fleeing persecution to a foreign land, where they sought asylum. I
can’t get over this.
And what I can’t get over is how really impossible this
story is in the age of the Kleptocrat (the self-confessed germophobe and lover
of gold in all its manifestations) and his followers, who purport to worship this
Christ, but have so thoroughly bought into the gospel of prosperity that their
brains must break if they try to align the arc of the son of God’s origin and
life with the notion that “God helps those that help themselves.” They vote for
billionaires to run the government because their billions are (to them) a clear
sign that God approves of them and completely ignore the notion that a God who
chose to have his son born to a Brown couple in a stable in the back-end of
empire instead of in a palace must have done so for a reason.
Revisit Jackson Browne’s “The
Rebel Jesus”, if you will.
At no time in his 33 years of life did Jesus of Nazareth
praise the wealthy or admonish his followers to grow their capital. In fact,
the one instance that I can recall in his story of him being pissed all the way
off is when he drove the money changers from the temple. We’ve come a long way
from that, where a husk of a human being who could not name one Bible verse if
you held a gun to his head is praised as a “Christian leader” by people who
attend church and actually can recite passages from the Bible. (Although, tbh,
their interpretation may be somewhat off.) Where “pastors” of mega churches in
$6k suits preach prosperity on weekly broadcasts as the chyron flashes where
you can use your credit card to donate. Where followers of Christ—born in a
stable and on the run within days—nod in agreement when the billionaires, the
husk and the pastors tell them that refugees are “poisoning the blood of the
nation” and that to save us, they must be rounded up in their millions and
deported. End of.
And I wonder, as we focus in this season on the birth of
the Savior in that stable, how these billionaires, the husk and the pastors
would rewrite that story to make it make sense in our current reality? What
would this birthplace look like—marble floors and gold-plated toilets?
Manhattan or Cape Town? World leaders coming to pay fealty live broadcast on
CNN and Fox? Maggie Haberman writing the new gospel, complete with commentary
on the maternity wardrobe?
And what message will this messiah bring?
©2024 Bas Bleu
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