This Thing That has Happened
by Rev. Ricky Hoyt
December 19, 2004

Luke doesn’t make a big deal of Mary’s pregnancy and if you hadn’t also read the gospel of Matthew you’d be forgiven for assuming the father was Joseph, and Jesus merely a child born before they could be married.  It happens all the time.  There is no star or wise men in Luke.

Instead Luke gives us the story of shepherds visited by angels and rushing to Bethlehem to see “this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”  Actually it was an angel that told them, not the Lord, but anyway.  Neither the shepherds nor the angels call, “This thing that has happened,” a miracle, and in Luke’s story it isn’t a miracle:  the angels are miraculous, perhaps, but not the birth.  Jesus is merely a baby, born suddenly and inconveniently, to a poor couple, a family from out-of-town stuck with no place to spend the night.  The shepherds rush to see a baby, but also, “a savior,” promises the angel.  The angel calls him Christ using the English translation of the Greek word for anointed, which in Hebrew would be Messiah.

The idea of the Messiah in Jewish thought is simply that a person will rise to lead the people to the creation of God’s kingdom. But there are many interpretations of what exactly that means.  Will the Messiah be a person, or a divinity or somehow both?  Is there one Messiah or many, or are we all, “the Messiah” in some way?  Will the creation of the kingdom require a physical battle, or is battle a metaphor for spiritual work?  Is God’s Kingdom like David’s kingdom with Jerusalem the capital, or is God’s Kingdom a realm in which God’s ideals of love, peace, and justice are fully realized?  Is God’s promised kingdom available just for some people or for all people, and will it come on Earth or only in another world?  Is it here now, perhaps, or will it only come at the end of time?  And meanwhile should we work for it, or wait?

The shepherds, I imagine, were untroubled by those questions.  I imagine they rushed to see a baby they assumed to be human, who would grow up to be a warrior, who would lead the people of Israel in a battle against Rome, restore the nation of Israel, and rule it as their king.

And of course in that task Jesus failed completely.  He failed miserably.  I wonder what the shepherds, if they were still alive 33 years later, thought of Jesus?  Did they dismiss him, as many must have, as some kind of kook?  Were they swept up as many were in the excitement of his mission only to feel crushed when instead of the glorious holy war they expected he was quickly arrested and crucified?  Did they see only the miserable failure of the Messiah job description they had learned in Hebrew school, or did they see something else?  Remember these were shepherds who had heard an angel tell them this was a savior.  Remember these were the guys who 33 years earlier had gone to Bethlehem and been convinced.  They had, “returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.”  They wouldn’t have given up that kind of a vision lightly.  So perhaps even then, after his death, there may have been some willingness to reconcile the angel’s message with the tragic facts. 

Perhaps the elderly shepherds huddled together out in the field, telling over the recent news from Jerusalem, trying to make sense of their long ago experience.  “Hadn’t the angel told us he would be the Messiah?” one asks.  “Yes, that’s right,” answers another.  And a third says, “I’ve got it right here.”  He reaches into the pocket of his robe and pulls out a worn slip of paper where he wrote down the exact words the angel had spoke.  He reads the angel’s message to his friends,  “Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.” 

“Wait a second,” one of his friend’s remarks, excited, hearing something new.  “Read that again.”

His friend clears his throat and reads the holy words.  “Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.”

“Don’t you see,” says the old shepherd, coming close to dancing on his arthritic legs.  “That’s not a prophecy of the future. The angel told us what had already happened in Bethlehem.  The angel didn’t say a baby had been born who would grow up to be a savior, the angel said, ‘Today…, a Savior has been born.’  The angel didn’t say, ‘The baby will eventually be Christ, the Messiah.’  The angel said the baby ‘is Christ the Lord.’  That baby we saw already was a savior, and not ‘the’ savior, according to the angel, but ‘a’ savior, even as a baby, just lying there, remember, in the manger, he already was a savior.”

The other shepherds are unconvinced. “How can a baby, sleeping in a cradle, be a savior?” they ask.

And their friend, thinking he’s really on to something, gives them an answer something like this.

A baby is a savior, because a child, every child, represents something new, new creation, a new idea, a new skill, a new perspective, breaking into a world which is worn out with all the old ways and needs a new possibility.  Every child represents hope, and hope saves immediately even before transformation comes.  Hope saves us even if actual transformation is a long time away.  The angel said that baby was a savior, not the only savior.  The angel said of the baby that, “He is Christ,” but Christ only means anointed.  We thought he was special, unique, and now we despair because he’s gone or we try to figure out some way he can still be with us and still do what he died without doing.  But the angel didn’t say he was unique.  The angel only said he was anointed.  Maybe God could anoint others.  Maybe God anoints every baby.

Every baby is Immanuel, the Hebrew name meaning “God with us.”  God’s ideals of creativity, beauty and joy, comes to us in every child.  And God enters the world not only through babies, but every time there is newness and creation:  art, inventions, flashes of inspiration, a paradigm shift, a change of heart, the opening of a closed mind.  God is with us every day, every moment, with every new idea, new plan, new vision. 

We’ve looked for God only in the fulfillment of our dreams and missed God in the dreaming.  The Messiah doesn’t appear when the Kingdom is finished, but comes early, before anyone else is even thinking about the Kingdom, The Messiah is the one who opens the door, turns on the lights, sets up the chairs, makes the phone calls, walks the precincts, does the work of creating the Kingdom.  Perhaps after all it’s creating that is the Kingdom.

Christmas, the Mass of the anointed of God celebrates all the anointed ones, in every age and shape, fired up by God’s ideals of justice, peace, and love.  The birth we celebrate on Christmas Day is the birth of all that is new:  the mother pregnant with the child, the child pregnant with its future, the mature men and women pregnant with all manner of possibilities.  Christmas celebrates the human potential at every age:  new muscles to work, new voices to speak or sing, new minds to teach or imagine or new thoughts in old minds; new hands to hold, to carry, to reach out, to draw in, new feet to march or walk or pedal.  

Jesus may have been Joseph’s son with Mary, or God’s son, or perhaps it’s better to say that Jesus like every child is both a child of human parents and a child of God.  “This thing that has happened,” may be no miracle but merely the birth of a child, or that may be a kind of miracle in itself. 

Let us return to the work of our lives, as, “the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen.”  And remember that they saw in Bethlehem 2000 years ago no more than what we see in Santa Clarita every day: God in the world, new creation in the lowliest of circumstances, a baby, a hope, a savior.