The Gray Monk

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December 25, 2006

A Merry and Blessed Christmas to all!

May I take this opportunity to wish everyone visiting my Blog today to wish you all a very blessed Christmas wherever you are. As you would expect I shall be busy at the Abbey for much of it - and will be taking a short break with Mausi in Germany from Boxing Day onward.

Much is made in recent years of the fact that Christmas is an adaptation of the Pagan Feast of Beltane. Actually, it is the Roman Feast of Saturnalia and it is also the Nordic feast of Mid Winter and, and and ... It was chosen as the date to celebrate the birth of Christ by the early Church becasue the idea of the Mid winter Saturnalia actually sends the same message that the Birth of the Christ Child represents. The Feast is about renewal and the hope of the return the sun, the spring and the season of food cycles. Let's cut away all the sentimentality and garabage about His having been a model baby, no crying, no stress and Mary able to get up and nurse him immediately after giving birth. Strip away all the mythology and we have a baby born of a young bride in a stable in Bethlehem, a special baby because the babe in that stable was the promised Messiah.

If we really look at the whole of that story - removing the Western interpretations and replacing them with the way the inhabitants of first century Judea would have interpretted it. To begin with lets ask about the idea of this family being 'poor'. They owned an ass. Now that in those days, was the equivalent of owning a top of the range luxury car. To travel anywhere was expensive because you had to pay for protection from robbers and you had to pay a tax on entering and leaving each town along the way. And the ability to up stakes and dissappear into Egypt says this family were a bit above the ordinary as well. It certainly speaks of some powerful or wealthy connections able to grease the appropriate palms. Secondly, the term in Aramaic that we have interpretted as "Carpenter" is actually better interpretted as "Major Building Contractors Inc". Carpentry would certainly have been one of the services he provided, but it would have been alongside the entire building thing.

Then there is the issue of the "Stable birth". This may well have taken place in the Caravan Serrai - our "Inn" - and in the stables, but such "Inns" in the first century were far from the nice comfy "room with bath" that we expect today. At best there was one large communal room where you found yourself a clear space and settled down with your possessions for the night. These rooms were usually on the first floor - with the stables beneath them. This served two purposes, one the warmth from the animals (and probably the smells as well) filtered up through the floor and warmed the room above in cold weather, and secondly, as the owner usually stood or slept next to the entrance he was in a position where he could control entry and exit and extract the appropriate payment. The stable may well have been the only place a wonman in labour could get a little privacy for the birth!

Does any of this change the event? No, it may put into perspective a few of the issues we commonly misrepresent - or which the writers of some of our favourite carols misrepresent - but it doesn't change the fact that the baby whose birth we mark at this time represented the dawn of a new relationship for all humaity with the God that Created us, for in this baby the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

As St John wrote: "The Word was made Flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth."

Posted by The Gray Monk at December 25, 2006 09:53 PM

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Comments

Posted by: Gorse Fox at December 25, 2006 11:05 AM

Posted by: The Gray Monk at December 25, 2006 09:27 PM