Day 19

Luke 2: 4-7

Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem,

because he was descended from the house and family of David. 

He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child.

While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. 

And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth,

and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.

Pitching a Tent

Notice the trajectory of the story. Joseph, an ordinary man (well, he wasn’t seen as special then) – living in a very ordinary backwater far from centres of influence, pushed around by the powerful. The focus narrows on to Mary and her condition, then pans out to Bethlehem, another ordinary place, but with a unique back story – like today’s Middle East. Then back to another ordinary event – a mother giving birth, but here not in a home or hospital, but a place much less hospitable. They’re homeless, perhaps not even welcome (like migrants, even some tourists in foreign places today … in Gaza today?).

However, this short story encapsulates the whole sweep of what’s later described as “the Word becoming flesh and pitching his tent among us”,  that ‘Word’  being the very One and Only, who came from the Father, full of all that’s good, honest and true. Such a very ordinary, even homely (?), scene, but it describes in very everyday terms a cosmic, timeless and history-changing event, God entering our ordinary world, even York, in a very special ‘Person’ to make it better.

And God still ‘pitches his tent’ in ordinary day-to-day and often devastated lives. Welcome our ‘sweete lording’, our dear Lord Jesus to our (my) world!!!

Mark