Getting ready for Christmas is a big deal. For some, it takes weeks, or even months, to complete the decorating, the shopping, the writing of Christmas cards, practicing for plays and choirs, arranging to visit or be visited by family, planning and preparing meals . . . The list goes on and on. Big things take a lot of work, and for many, few things are bigger than Christmas.
For the next three weeks, I am going to be getting ready for Christmas. Not just the busyness of presents and meals and family, but truly preparing to celebrate the most important birth in the history of everything. As part of doing so, I want to take a look at that first Christmas through the eyes of Joseph and Mary. I think, once I understand a little better how they prepared for that most important day, it will hep me to truly get ready for Christmas. I hope you will join me.
Our journey begins with Joseph. Maybe--probably--you know his story. He was betrothed (engaged) to Mary. A Jewish betrothal was different than a modern engagement. It was a legal and binding agreement. They were, you could say, half married. They were committed to one another, but not yet united as husband and wife, and therefore could not live together or engage in marital intimacy.
You can imagine his reaction, then, when he found out Mary was pregnant. I imagine Joseph responded at first as any man would--hurt, angry, jealous, shamed . . . you get the picture. According to Jewish custom and law, he had every right to have Mary taken before the officials and, were she truly found to be pregnant, to have her stoned to death, and that might have crossed his mind. At first.
Joseph, however, is identified in Matthew 1:19 as a righteous man, one who did not want to expose the love of his life, even if she had been unfaithful to him, to public disgrace. His plan, then, once the white hot emotions calmed somewhat, was to quietly divorce Mary. This would possibly allow her to have a future. He still loved her, and while it was his right to seek revenge under law and custom, his righteousness prevailed over his anger.
As he was still considering his options, no doubt tossing and turning, finding sleep hard to come by, he had a dream. An angel appeared to him and said, "Do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit."
Now, I don't know what kind of dream this was, but it must have been a powerful one, because it changed Joseph's mind. Instead of having her stoned, instead of quietly divorcing her, Joseph believed what she no doubt told him, and what an angel in a dream repeated to him: The child in Mary's womb was no ordinary child.
This, then, was what Joseph had to accept to get ready for that first Christmas: The child to be was no ordinary child. Joseph had to accept, believe, and embrace the illogical and seemingly impossible reality that his wife to be was truly a virgin, and yet pregnant. He had to accept a miracle.
For us to truly be ready for Christmas, we must do the same. We celebrate a child in a manger, but we must, if we are to really embrace Christmas for what it is, accept the same miracle as Joseph. We must wrap our minds around, and fully believe, that this child was of, and from, God. More than that, that He was, and is, the Son of God, and in fact God Himself.
If that's not what Christmas is about, then Christmas is about nothing. It's just another reason to get a day off work, put up some pretty decorations, and get together with family and friends. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it's not special. It's not unique. It's not enough.
To truly be ready to celebrate Christmas, we have to start with the miracle of Christ's birth. He is the Son of God, come to earth by supernatural means, in the most humble of ways. For Christmas to have any meaning, we must, as did Joseph, accept the illogical and seemingly impossible. If we don't, or won't, start there, then nothing else about December 25 really matters.
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