By Jim Nichols

As the American Christmas season nears, positive images are beginning to surround us. Memorable music, aromas, colorful lights, perfectly prepared special foods—we each have our favorite aspects. In many ways, it is a wonderful time.

A friend once proposed to me that he thought the incarnation, not the resurrection, was the fundamental activity of Christianity. He defended his stance not by minimizing the resurrection (in which he believes), but by identifying the once-for-all-time event of God becoming a human. 

We each have a knowledge of some of the aspects of the incarnation. We have heard about the Kings on a journey following a star, about a vicious and murderous ruler, about sheep and shepherds, angels, and hay. It is great and glorious stuff, and it is a blessing to be able to consider it. 

There is, however, another set of reality that is instructive to us in a different, perhaps more troubling manner. Joseph is breaking the law and there are several additional less beautiful aspects to the situation that we need to incorporate into our faith. 

Joseph is to marry a pregnant woman; common belief would consider her to be adulterous. The penalty by law for this was harsh, even deadly. Although an angel in a dream tells Joseph to forsake divorce but to continue, instead, with the marriage, one wonders what questions might continue in his mind. Scripture tells us that Mary, upon hearing these words, “. . . pondered them in her heart.” I suspect Joseph did some “pondering” in the future too.

Soon after the birth, of course, the new family of three flees to Egypt to avoid the threat posed by Herod’s call for death of young boys. As that scene fades, we see the man who breaks the law defying the emperor as he protects the dignity of the woman he loves and the boy; they are homeless and refugees, soon to be immigrants.

As beautiful as the traditional American Christmas story is, we should not miss the other facts. God did not reveal himself in human form into a “safe” world. Frankly, Jesus enters the world at the bottom, certainly among people and places where we would not at all expect God to show up. People then and now would not look there and at those circumstances as the logical ones for the coming of a Savior.

In our lives, we are guilty of shaping Christianity in a much different manner. We are law-abiding, nice people who are just trying to do our best in our middle-class lives. In fact, the Gospels never describe Jesus, Mary, and Joseph with those adjectives. We sense that we are looking for our status and dignity in the wrong places.

It would be an understatement to suggest that Joseph, Mary, and Jesus appear on the “margin” of what we would expect for God’s messengers. At that time God was already present and was being worshiped by his followers. There was a quite clear “center” where the religious laws were identified and followed. During his ministry, Jesus had little patience with those stuck in the center. There was an “edge” around this center, people on the margin who were clearly suspect in terms of their lifestyles and lives in general; scripture repeatedly notes that it was on these edges that Jesus ministered best. He approached the sick, disabled people, the blind, the wondering.

Santa Claus making his list and checking it twice is a fun song, but it is poor at drawing people toward God.

It is not easy to remember that Christ is present in the ordinary stranger. John in Revelation 12:1 describes Mary as being clothed with the sun and with the moon under her feet; on her head is a crown of twelve stars. If Mary had appeared in Bethlehem like that, people would have fought to make room for her.

That is not the way God wanted to introduce her (or her husband and baby). In physical and spiritual ways that first family came in disguise. They were disguised as real humans, just like those people around us. You know, the ones at the edges of our lives.

Jim Nichols is a retired Abilene Christian University biology professor and current hospital chaplain