By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, December 24, 2017
It was impossible. Mary may have lived in a time before
science, before the polite and clinical agents of reason had scrubbed the
angels and demons and desert spirits away from all but the dark outer edges of
our minds, but she was a woman—she knew where babies came from and how they got
made. She knew that she was a virgin and that she had not become a wife to the
man to whom she was engaged. She also knew what being pregnant and unmarried
was likely to mean to her—socially, religiously, economically, physically—in
first-century Palestine.
She’d probably witnessed her share of stonings.
Religious people sometimes get a pat on the head from
their non-believing friends, who say things like, “All that stuff must be very
comforting. I wish I could believe it.” But why would Mary have wished to believe it when the angel
Gabriel visited her with that joyous and terrible announcement—“You will
conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus; He will be
great and will be called the Son of the Most High”—when it would have been so
much more comforting to believe that she’d simply had a strange dream? “Mary
was greatly troubled at his words,” Luke’s gospel says.
“Do not be afraid,” the angel said. Easy for you to say,
Gabriel.
Joseph at first took a more conventional understanding of
his situation. Because he “was faithful to the law, and yet did not want to
expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.” (The
quiet divorce is something that many of us have looked to as a solution to our
domestic tribulations.) Another angel, another command attached to an
inconceivable promise: “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home
as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She
will give birth to a Son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because He
will save His people from their sins.”
There had been signs. Maybe that helped. Mary’s cousin,
Elizabeth, had just conceived a child in spite of her advanced age. Still, it
must have been a lot to take, and the unlikely claims kept piling up. When Mary
met Elizabeth, Elizabeth had more astounding news: “Blessed are you among
women, and blessed is the child you will bear! But why am I so favored, that
the mother of my Lord should come to me? As soon as the sound of your greeting
reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.” They’d wanted to call him
“Zachariah” after his father, but his name was “John” and that was that. The
angels were always very specific about names. The encounter between Elizabeth
and Mary happened at Hebron, the place where Abram’s name had been changed to
Abraham.
Like Elizabeth, Abraham’s wife became pregnant in her
later years. Like Mary, Abraham received three holy visitors who brought to him
news about his son. But Mary’s story was in some way’s Abraham’s inverted:
Abraham provided gifts for his visitors, whereas Mary received them on her
Son’s behalf. Those gifts were heavy with symbolism: gold for the child who was
hailed as a king, frankincense in honor of his priestly mission, and myrrh,
which was used in funereal preparations. That last must have startled Mary, who
knew the story of Abraham and his son Isaac, willingly offered up as a human sacrifice
at the demand of a God with a sense of justice that at times seems radically at
odds with our own. Even now, that story commands our attention, and we still
sing songs about it: “You who build these altars now / To sacrifice these
children / You must not do it anymore.”
(“All that stuff must be very comforting. I wish I could
believe it.”)
The news continued coming in from all sides. The magi,
journeying from the east, asking: “Where is the Child who has been born King of
the Jews? For we observed His star at its rising, and have come to pay Him
homage.” The shepherds, having heard strange tales of a newborn king, found
their way to Bethlehem and “made known abroad the saying which was told them
concerning this Child.” Naturally, the lords of this world understood that
their position was threatened: “When King Herod heard this, he was frightened
and all Jerusalem with him.”
Which is to say: Herod, believed, too. He was an early
believer, in his way. Pontius Pilate, too: “What I have written, I have written.”
But step away for a moment from the manger scene at the
Christmas pageant, which surely does not smell like a real barn smells, and
dwell for a moment in the world of real people: the terrified young woman, her
uncertain husband-to-be, the worried politician, the simple shepherds and great
holy men alike wondering in the backs of their minds if they were maybe kidding
themselves, if they might possibly have it all wrong, if they’d misunderstood
something along the way. “Be not afraid.” Maybe they could endure the terror of
the night and the cold, the rigors and dangers of travel, even the threat of
Herod’s sword—but what of that other fear, the fear that they’d made a mistake,
that this was all a bizarre misunderstanding or the work of credulous fanatics?
A manger is a feed-trough for livestock. “Feed my sheep,” He would later say,
to confused and fearful people still not quite getting the point.
“Well, they had faith,” we tell ourselves. “They
believed.” As though these little words put together in that order would be
enough to exorcise doubt, terror, and the unbearable loneliness at the heart of
this story. (“All that stuff must be very comforting. I wish I could believe
it.”) Try to imagine the physical facts of birth in that setting, the rigors of
the long road to Bethlehem and the long road home.
“Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her
heart.” She must have, and even as her mind turned to a thousand other things
related to the difficulties of staying alive in the savage time during which
she lived, the impossibility of it all must have weighed on her and on her
humble little family with the strange precocious boy who did not have any obviously kingly attributes. She must
have thought about Elizabeth and her odd son, John, and about Hebron, and about
Abraham: “He himself carried the fire and the knife.” I imagine Mary and
Joseph, catching one another’s eyes across the room, and remaining resolutely
silent. They “pondered these things in their hearts,” which is another way of
saying: “Let’s not talk about it.” Isaac was spared at the last second. But
this story does not end that way. The manger has to be full because the grave
has to be empty. The gold, frankincense, and myrrh all come together—there’s no
picking and choosing among them.
Some things are easy to believe: Children love presents
and Christmas trees, fresh snow is beautiful, and it is wonderful to sing
carols and to be with our families. It is better to be warm inside than out in
the cold, but the promise of a kindly fire imparts a certain charm to the
winter weather. It is better to be fed than to be hungry, even if the turkey
doesn’t turn out well. It is better to have a home full of misbehaving children
than a silent house. Those things are easy to believe.
Some things are hard to believe. (And harder to know.)
“All that stuff must be very comforting. I wish I could believe it.”
I wonder if that’s really true.
Isaac wonders, too.
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