I know it is a beloved Christmas carol, and a beautiful hymn, like a lullaby to the son of God. But there was no silent night.
I was present for the delivery of most of my children; there was nothing silent about any of them. Nor was there anything silent about that night in Bethlehem. The mother screamed and cried tears of pain and exhaustion, until the baby was pulled from her, and she could finally breath and weep with relief and joy. There was a lot of sweat and blood and afterbirth and dirt from the floor. Then the baby would scream until he was washed and swaddled and nursed. There would have been people coming and going, particularly local women helping with the delivery. They would have been chatting and encouraging and rejoicing loudly with the new mother. Mary and Joseph were not alone; to picture them that way is to read a Christmas card, not the Bible. There were no “radiant beams” coming from the face of Christ. No halos, no drummer boy, no worshiping animals. To a passerby it would have looked like any other birth, just an unusual location.
To think of the birth of Jesus as “ordinary” makes us uncomfortable. Why? We feel the need to adorn the Incarnation (God in the flesh) with mystique, with other-worldly ethereal goo that can only be perceived by the initiated. The very commonness of the scene makes us squirm. It all seems so natural, so physical, so unspiritual. We think the common is not sacred. We think the physical is not spiritual. We think we are doing God a favor by keeping Heaven at arm’s length, so it does not become dirty. But the whole point of Christmas is to bring Heaven and Earth together again. Stop thinking that Earth is less than Heaven. Stop thinking that physical is less than spiritual.
We make Jesus unrelatable when we try to dress him up in nice spiritual clothes. Jesus was not some floating translucent being when he walked this earth, and he is not one now. Gallons of ink have been spent by theologians trying to explain the Incarnation, how the creator became one of us. God became a physical person in order to save a physical world. I cannot explain the physics of that; I can only wonder, and worship. If God would go to such great lengths to be among us, to touch lepers and heal them physically; we dare not be so spiritual that we push him beyond the reach of drunks and fools.
His contemporary critics called him a “glutton and a drunkard” because he was always eating and drinking with sinners like me. When he came here he picked up physical children and blessed them and told us the Kingdom belonged to them. When he taught his followers to dwell on the mind-blowing cosmic ramifications of his death, (what Christians call the Lord’s Supper or Communion), he did not bid us to endlessly pray and naval gaze; he commanded us to eat and drink. After the resurrection he met a handful of fishermen by the Sea of Galilee. They had fished all night and caught nothing, in the morning they found him cooking fish and bread on the shore for them. What kind of God raises from the dead only to cook breakfast on the beach for his friends? A physical God; my kind of God. Preachers, stop trying to be more spiritual than God.
Near the end of the Bible God says “Behold, I am making all THINGS new.” Things. Things you can see. Things you can touch and eat and drink and feel. Things we have missed and longed for. Things we have lost. Things we have wanted and were afraid to ask for. Things that are real and physical and true. Things that are beautiful and will only become more beautiful as they are remade, like us.
So, today, do not shy away from God because you do not feel spiritual enough. Do not separate Heaven from Earth; the goal of Christmas was to bring the two together again. Our bodies are no less sacred to him than our souls, that’s why he cares what we do with them. To miss the blood, sweat and tears of Bethlehem is to miss the whole point of Christmas. God sent a baby on a rescue mission, who does that? Someone who wants to save babies, and the people they grow into. We spend our lives chasing after meaning, causes, the next thing. We stare at screens as we cut ourselves off from the physicalness of creation. We stuff ourselves with distractions as we long for transcendence. But what if transcendence has already come down to us?
Swaddling cloths and blood may not sound very spiritual to you, but because of them humanity now has a big brother, because of them one day you will be able to reach out your hand and, physically, touch the face of God. Now every night is holy.
Merry Christmas.
“Once in our world, a stable had something in it that was bigger than our whole world.” C.S. Lewis
“I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” Jesus