The World Turned Upside Down

The Babe lying in a manger, the lowing cattle and wooly sheep, the rustic shepherds, the radiant Mother and the protective father—it’s the Christmas scene of countless cards and nativity displays—the stock icon of the season.

We know the story behind the Christmas card—the journey of the Holy Family to Bethlehem, the Virgin “great with child” and the inn with no vacancies. Over the centuries, that story has been so embellished it’s sometimes hard to tell fact from fancy.

The common elements of the familiar story, though, have something more to tell us. The quaint manger, the huddled livestock and awestruck shepherds point beyond themselves to something we don’t think much about if we can avoid it, because it’s scary. The Christmas story is set, not just in Bethlehem, but in the midst of poverty. It’s a story of the poor, told to the poor and with special meaning for the poor. Scripture testifies that our Lord lived a life of poverty but St Paul is explicit about it: “…for your sake He became poor.” The Creator of the stars of night chose to be poor and if we overlook the meaning of that choice, we overlook much of why we celebrate this feast.

Nowadays, words like “poverty” and “the poor” have mostly a political and sociological meaning. They roll easily off the tongues of politicians, who use them to garner votes or media attention. But when the Lord Christ chose to be born in a cave rather than a palace, it wasn’t to make a political point: His message and the “meaning” of the cave in Bethlehem was—is—an eternal one.

In Jesus, God reveals Who He is. What does a phrase like that mean? We can’t know God, and to imagine we can is to make more of ourselves than we are. To compare ourselves to God, even using the old analogy of God as the ocean and ourselves as a drop of water in it is to make far too much of the drop. The Gospel story in a nutshell is, in the words of St Cyril of Alexandria, “the Creator of Heaven and earth wore diapers for our sakes.” God became one of us, a human being. In doing so, He showed us Who God is, something we otherwise could never have known. What the Christmas story tells us is that, in the most fundamental ways, we’ve got it all backwards. The world is hard at work, chugging along, but in the wrong direction and with the wrong purpose. St Thomas Aquinas says, left to ourselves, four things drive you and me: an unquenchable desire for power, money, pleasure or fame (the “or” isn’t meant to be exclusive).

Gospel poverty isn’t romantic but realistic. Jesus was poor—that means, in the eyes of the powerful, the rich, the famous, the wise, in the eyes of all who “matter,” He was weak and unimportant, not worth noticing. The poor are invisible—and I speak as one who overlooks them. In choosing to be weak and unimportant, the Lord was telling us something very basic about God. The powerful, the wealthy, the famous—these are accustomed to attention, to getting their own way. Whenever you and I get a taste of power or wealth or attention, we relish it. Our fallen souls sing. The Lord Jesus wants to free us from the delusion that those snares are worth singing about. God comes in quietness, in humility, in poverty, because that’s Who He is. He isn’t the Great and Powerful Oz, but the One Who takes up a human life, lives it perfectly, and lays it down willingly so that all other human beings—every man and woman, boy and girl—can follow Him. “Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me,” He says, “for I am meek and lowly of Heart—any you shall find rest for your souls.”

This is the message of peace the angels sang to the shepherds that first Christmas night. It’s the promise of peace—a scary promise to be sure, because we’ve all been convinced of something different—but it’s a promise that I hope finds an echo in our lives—and it will, if we’re willing to embrace the poverty of God and make it our own.

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