Cedric Mayson
spirit level
Oupa: What are you drawing? Child: It’s a picture of Jesus. Oupa: But no one knows what Jesus looked like.
Child: They will do when I’ve finished.
The marvellous Christmas pictures drawn by Luke and Matthew are full of meaning and to dismiss them as myths is to miss the point. They lift us to the spirit level of humanity and reveal eternal truths to our swiftly passing secular, political and physical understanding.
The word “myth” is a technical term to describe a story which conveys meaning. Myths like Adam and Eve, Krishna and Arjuna, or our African ancestors are as necessary as science and history. The importance of myth can be lost by insisting that the words are taken literally, and also by dismissing them as a religious fraud. Myth needs to be pondered deeply, like an expression of love, the depths of the sky, or the notes of a Beethoven symphony, until the hidden wonder lays hold of us. History attempts to record the facts of a specific event in the past, but myth can be interpreted in a present context as each age draws its own picture.
The frenzy of the jingle bells Christmas indulges our need for periodic celebrations, but lumps together a hodgepodge of vivid scriptural stories complete with moving stars and singing angels, the Victorian Father Christmas (refurbished by Charles Dickens), Santa Claus (reinvented by the Dutch in New York), the snow and fir trees of the northern hemisphere, and religious experience, all presented with commercial acumen in the credit card culture. But what are we really celebrating underneath?
Artists and authors of nativity plays have indulged their imaginations for centuries with the story of the birth, but the Bible says nothing about a stable.
Jesus’s birth was not announced in the newspaper, nor to the rulers, the priests, the academics, the wealthy, nor the military. Power, arms, money, position, self-importance were unimportant. The story was given to workers in the fields. It did not happen in a palace, a mansion, a maternity unit, or even in the family home, but in transit, in a pub which had no room and no cot so they borrowed a manger. Presumably they gave it a good scrub first themselves.
Millions who have suffered persecution, deportation, or exile identify with this small oppressed harassed family being hounded from place to place to satisfy the edicts of oppressors. Jesus came to one of them.
Matthew records the fascinating story of the wise men from the East. In the imperialistic age these were seen as the “three kings of Orient” who came to do homage to the Victorian concept of the blue-eyed golden-curled infant monarch of “Christendom”. Today, we know that Jesus was a Mediterranean Jew with nothing of the imperialist about him, and in these inter-faith days are intrigued by the hint of a connection between Jesus and the wisdom of the East.
Dear old Matthew constantly tried to reassure the Jews by finding references to Jesus in the Old Testament, and quotes Isaiah 7.14 which tells of the birth of a child called Immanuel (“God-with-us”). But Matthew over-reached himself by saying the mother was a virgin. Isaiah used a Hebrew word meaning a “young woman”. The Greek translators turned it into “virgin”, removing Jesus from the ranks of the wholly human like the virgin birth traditions which arose around the Buddha, Zarathustra and others. But the genealogies of Jesus in both Matthew and Luke go through the line of Joseph back to Abraham and Adam and anchor Jesus solidly in ordinary flesh and blood.
There are few experiences more profoundly moving than the public reading of the opening to John’s gospel. He speaks to the sense in all of us that within the mystery of the human community there is a life force of spiritual power which transcends all else. Most people call that transcendent reality God, and John says it was expressed in Jesus, the Word become flesh, for God is to be found in and through flesh and blood.
It is ordinary flesh and blood of ordinary people. Jesus does not look like a god, a king, an industrialist, a general, an archbishop, or a movie star but like a baby whom a girl lays in a manger.
It is the stories about Mary that grab our attention most of all. She was young, almost certainly a teenager as it was her first child. She was a woman in a world dominated by men, a youth in a world dominated by age, yet it was to her that the message of God came, and then the child.
There is in every birth a sense of an outside power taking charge of the situation, initiating the process whose time has come. There is a creative force which works in and through us, and requires our cooperation, but it is driven from outside.
Luke’s story shows this young girl Mary being immensely happy because she believed that the Lord’s message to her about this child would come true. She celebrated that she had been promised a role to play in the world. She celebrated that her child would fulfil God’s plan which was social, political and economic revolution: “To scatter the proud with all their plans, to bring down the mighty kings from their thrones and lift up the lowly, to fill the hungry with good things and send the rich away with empty hands.”
Within the myths of Christmas time we celebrate the truth that there is hope for the world and the country because there is more to us than flesh and blood or as the religious say, God is with us.