'ROOM FOR GOD': A CHRISTMAS NEWSLETTER

 

‘Room for God’: A Christmas newsletter

JD Flynn

December 24, 2024 . 11:08 PM  

 

The Adoration of the Shepherds. Rembrandt, 1646. public domain.

 

Hey everybody,

It’s Christmas Eve, and you’re reading The Tuesday Pillar Post.

We know the story so well. Mary and Joseph traveled from Nazareth to Galilee to be enrolled according to the dictates of a Roman census. There in the Bethlehem, Mary gave birth to the Lord Jesus.

Luke paints the familiar scene: “She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.”

Many biblical scholars, including Sunday School’s Dr. Scott Powell, say that most of us have the wrong idea about all of that. In our nativity scenes, we see Mary and Joseph in a kind of free-standing barn. In the Christmas pageants of our youth, we see the pair going from hotel to hotel, looking for some place to stay, until some innkeeper lets them use his stable.

It wasn’t like that, the scholars say.

Joseph was from Bethlehem. And when he got there, he would have gone to his family home. He would have asked for a place to stay, in the room that gets translated as “inn,” but really should be understood as a place to receive and house guests. He would have expected to be welcomed there.

But Mary and Joseph didn’t get in there. They were relegated to the undercroft of the house, the space where animals lived, and that’s where the baby Jesus was born.

We’re not quite sure why that happened. Maybe it’s because there were relatives from other places staying already in the guest space, who had also come for the census. But consider what that means — those people looked at a relative nine months pregnant, and decided not to give up their place in the house for her.

That only makes sense if Mary and Joseph were being shunned. She was after all pregnant prematurely, in their view, during her betrothal period with Joseph. And maybe his relatives decided not to have that kind of girl in the house.

But whatever was said, or implied, or whatever excuses were made, they weren’t in some barn because of a bureaucratic and logistic snafu — too many visitors and not enough hotel rooms, like they’d gone to the Super Bowl city without prior arrangements.

What happened for them was much more personal — they were down there in some cold space because people they knew, their family, had no space for them.

All of that is how the Son of Man chose to come into the world. In the love of the very first believers — St. Mary and St. Joseph — and outside the embrace of the people closest to them. In the warmth of family love, and the rejection of the world.

“He came to his own people,” St. John’s Gospel wrote, “and his own did not receive him.”

Pope Benedict XVI said this story should be a challenge for all of us.

“Inevitably the question arises,” he wrote, “what would happen if Mary and Joseph were to knock at my door. Would there be room for them?”

“Do we really have room for God when he seeks to enter under our roof? Do we have time and space for him? Do we not actually turn away God himself?” Benedict asked in his Christmas homily of 2012.

Pillar readers: Those questions are for us.

We love the Church. We love her enough to want her holiness, her reform and renewal, her evangelization of the world with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Many of us have dedicated much of our lives to Christ and his Church.

And still, Benedict asks: “Does God actually have a place in our thinking?”

Do we, his believers and disciples, make room for the Lord? Do we want him in our lives? Do we want to be converted to something deeper and more powerful? Do we want what the Lord will do with us if we give ourselves wholly and entirely to him — if we open the door when Mary and Joseph come knocking?

Or, Benedict asks, do we “want ourselves?”

Too often, he says, “we want what we can seize hold of, we want happiness that is within our reach, we want our plans and purposes to succeed.”

Christmas is a choice for us. An invitation for conversion. Do we want him, or do we “want ourselves”?

“The conversion that we need must truly reach into the depths of our relationship with reality,” Benedict taugh. “Let us ask the Lord that we may become vigilant for his presence, that we may hear how softly yet insistently he knocks at the door of our being and willing. Let us ask that we may make room for him within ourselves, that we may recognize him also in those through whom he speaks to us: children, the suffering, the abandoned, those who are excluded and the poor of this world.”

I hope I’ll open the door. I hope that you will too.

https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/room-for-god-a-christmas-newsletter