thoughts on the nativity
I received an email today which made me laugh out loud. This picture was attached.... a typical nativity set with one minor alteration, courtesy of four year old Ryan (whom you may remember from here). Do you see it?
Apparently, when the nativity was first set up, Ryan's question was, "Where's the witch?" He is a fan of the musical Wicked, which I have not seen, so can offer no commentary. Jason (my friend and Ryan's dad) explained that the witch isn't actually part of the story of Jesus' birth and left it at that. However, Ryan took matters into his own hands and Jason found the revised nativity set up like this today.
I think it's hilarious. I begged (yes, begged) Jason to let me share the picture and story with you. Although he is concerned that either I or Ryan will be blasted for blasphemy for it, he gave his consent, for which I am grateful. And I wanted to share the story because I think Ryan, little though he may know it, has a real point about what is missing from our standard nativity sets: the presence of evil.
I touched on it last year when our LA pastor preached on Herod's murder of the innocents. Evil did not stand idly by when God started his invasion. We sing songs like "Away in a Manger", which paint a painfully sweet picture of Jesus' birth. We slide right past the fact that Joseph and Mary are alone, in a barn (probably a cave), without any family nearby (probably ostracized), far from home, with no hospital, doctor, or midwife. When Herod began his massacre, Joseph and Mary fled to Egypt, even farther from family, and waited to come home until Herod's wrath was spent on the children of their friends, little boys that Jesus should have played with all his life. Revelation gives us the imagery of Satan as a red dragon, crouched at Mary's feet: "His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment it was born." (Revelation 12:4) People, Christmas is a story fraught with tension, danger, and evil. Our nativity sets are pretty, but they miss the story.
Jason, I would leave the witch right where she is. Our nativity sets can remind us that Jesus' birth is both a joyous time--peace on earth and good will to men--and a perilous time--the beginning of the Great Invasion. It's a crazy tactic for Jesus to surrender his power, to embrace humanity completely, to enter the world as a poor and defenseless infant, in order to storm the gates and reunite us with God. Unheard of. Of course Satan was there, lurking in the shadows. I'd leave the witch in.
I don't have a Wicked Witch at my house. I wonder if I can borrow one of Michael's dragons for our Little People nativity set?
tags:
holiday,
what i think
1 comment:
Hey Robin! Thanks for these great thoughts. It reminds me of Chesterton's observation from The Everlasting Man below. So sad to miss you this Christmas. I hope we can get down your way soon!
But there was a third element that must not be ignored and one which that religion for ever refuses to ignore, in any revel or reconciliation. There was present in the primary scenes of the drama that Enemy that had rotted the legends with lust and frozen the theories into atheism, but which answered the direct challenge with something of that more direct method which we have seen in the conscious cult of the demons. In the description of that demon-worship, of the devouring detestation of innocence shown in the works of its witchcraft and the most inhuman of its human sacrifice, I have said less of its indirect and secret penetration of the saner paganism; the soaking of mythological imagination with sex; the rise of imperial pride into insanity. But both the indirect and the direct influence make themselves felt in the drama of Bethlehem. A ruler under the Roman suzerainty, probably equipped and surrounded with the Roman ornament and order though himself of eastern blood, seems in that hour to have felt stirring within him the spirit of strange things. We all know the story of how Herod, alarmed at some rumour of a mysterious rival, remembered the wild gesture of the capricious despots of Asia and ordered a massacre of suspects of the new generation of the populace. Everyone knows the story; but not everyone has perhaps noted its place in the story of the strange religions of men. Not everybody has seen the significance even of its very contrast with the Corinthian columns and Roman pavement of that conquered and superficially civilised world. Only, as the purpose in this dark spirit began to show and shine in the eyes of the Idumean, a seer might perhaps have seen something like a great grey ghost that looked over his shoulder; have seen behind him filling the dome of night and hovering for the last time over history, that vast and fearful fact that was Moloch of the Carthaginians; awaiting his last tribute from a ruler of the races of Shem. The demons in that first festival of Christmas, feasted also in their own fashion.
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