The small things of Christmas
Two mornings later, I had the bombs in my mind as I made breakfast. I thought of the young men who had been doing nothing more controversial than cheering on a Spanish football match when they had their legs and arms blown off. As people around the world cheered and moaned goals for the Barcelona-Real […]
Two mornings later, I had the bombs in my mind as I made breakfast. I thought of the young men who had been doing nothing more controversial than cheering on a Spanish football match when they had their legs and arms blown off. As people around the world cheered and moaned goals for the Barcelona-Real Madrid game, there was the sound of weeping in Jos.
Outside the kitchen window, I noticed that the tap was running. City water had come. I moved to go outside into the cold to turn the tap off, when I noticed all the birds that had gathered around the tap—little yellow finches fluttering their wings in the puddle the running water had made. They didn’t seem to be bothered by the cold. They flew back and forth, settling on a tree limb and then coming back to bathe. One bird sat on top of the tap, ducking her head down to delicately drink from the flow, flicking her head up and down till she was full.
I thought then of how Christmas is the time Christians celebrate the beauty of small things in a torn up world. Morning sunlight and little birds, a gift of water flowing through a tap to the dry grass. The wonder of a newborn child laid in feeding trough, where donkeys and sheep and goats and cows press around, giving him warmth in the dark silence of the night before the sky explodes with angels’ voices.
Yet the hope and pageantry of Christmas is also mixed up with the horrors of human evil, if you read the story in context. Young Mary, pregnant out of wedlock, and her fiancé Joseph braved the prejudices of a finger-pointing community, the cold inhospitality of a village full of strangers where there was no room in the inn for them to stay. And though later the scholars from the East brought expensive gifts with them after following the star to the young family’s humble house, they also inadvertently brought crisis to Bethlehem when they told King Herod the prophecy of the king to be born there. Mary and Joseph, warned in a dream to escape to Egypt, fled town with the child, only hours before thugs, acting on the orders of a jealous ruler, slaughtered all the baby boys under the age of two in the town.
Where is the sense in such innocent death? There is none. There was no more sense in the slaughter of children in Bethlehem than there had been in the slaughter of young boys in Egypt centuries before, no more sense than there was in the attacks on the village of Kuru Karama in January last year when Muslim families were massacred and thrown into wells, or Dogo Nahawa in March where Christian families were slaughtered under a starry sky, in Damaturu or Maiduguri where churches and mosques alike have been destroyed or in Jos where young boys watching football were blown up in the night. In times of such horrific events, the sun, the stars, the birds, the water on dry grass too can seem to have no meaning. They do not understand, these nonhuman things, how much we suffer.
And yet, the message of Christmas is that the small will transcend the big, that good will grow slowly until it chokes out evil. The baby who survives the massacre will grow up to be the man who brings life to a people. Christians believe that just as Moses survived the slaughter of Jewish babies in Egypt to take Israel to freedom and give them the law, Jesus survived the slaughter of Jewish babies in Bethlehem to show the world the freedom of love behind the law. “Which is the greatest commandment?” Jesus was once asked, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,” he answered. “And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” He demonstrated that love for neighbor not only to his own people, but also to those outcasts and strangers the righteous were taught to shun: corrupt tax collectors and prostitutes, a Roman military commander, an adulteress from the hated Samaritan tribe.
Though Jesus survived the slaughter of his childhood, the great teacher of love and forgiveness was eventually caught in the human cycle of hate and violence. The masses, misled by hypocritical religious leaders, who cared more about their own reputation and security than recognizing the truth of God before them, joined their religious leaders in calling on politicians to execute the man they had called King only a week before.
This is an example, some may say, of why it is better to demonstrate power than humility—of why turning the other cheek when someone hits you does not work, of how hate, ultimately, is more powerful than love, of why it is better to take up your sword and cut off the ear of your enemy as Jesus’ disciple Peter did, than to heal him as Jesus did. “Better to fight, better to kill them before they kill you,” says the man who has lost hope. And yet Jesus’ life could not be contained in death. It echoes out in ever expanding ripples of light.
It is in watching the small things, he taught, that we can learn hope: “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?” asked Jesus. “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
So much of our conflict is based on words, on names, cultural differences—on varying interpretations of the law. We would rather judge that which we do not understand than pay attention to the lessons Jesus demonstrated: to live justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. Yet, if all of us who claim to follow God could put aside theological differences long enough to follow what Jesus taught—to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves, to turn the other cheek, to give our extra cloak to one in need, to be at peace even in times of conflict —then instead of listening in terror for bombs in the night, we could look fearlessly up into the starry sky and sing along to the chorus that still echoes throughout the universe: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”