When I was growing up in Denmark, we had little carol books which we would get out on Christmas Eve to have them ready for the Danish tradition of walking hand-in-hand around the Christmas tree, singing carols. Each person would choose a carol, and we would sing “the two first and the last verse” of it, full as we were of Christmas dinner (normally duck) and thus unable to catch our breath properly. In these booklets, there was also the Christmas reading, Luke’s version, the child-and-dyslexia friendly one which begins:
And it came to pass in those days that Caesar Augustus ordered a census to be taken throughout the Roman Empire. When this first census took place, Quirinius was the governor of Syria. Everyone, then, went to register himself, each to his own hometown. Joseph went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to the town of Bethlehem in Judea, the birthplace of King David.
Plenty there to stumble over! Not that we often did, especially because it wasn’t our custom in my family to read the Gospel. We would be content listening to it in verse and music, about stars, shepherds, angels, the mother, the baby… and the peace which was now possible because of the gift God had given us.
I don’t know if you saw a local news article yesterday – it was on the County Times website at least and described how several local fire brigades had been involved in rescuing a female donkey called Nicky, who had become trapped near a river after slipping down a slope in (wait for it) Abermule. You can read the pun-laden article for yourself in the article at the end of this Thought for the Day, but you may be able to imagine how much fun the reporter had with the facts of the story when they include the name Nick(y) and a sled…
That donkey had become stuck in a slippery position and was held up by circumstances. Around the birth of Jesus, many circumstances too are contributing to people being moved around to their great inconvenience, not least the idea of the emperor, who has declared himself a god, that it would be good to count everyone, not just to keep track of them if they should go missing but so that he knows how much he can demand in taxes and from whom…
Here is this human so called god, orchestrating this mass migration, exerting the type of human power that Jesus so often turned on its head… Mary pregnant, walking or on a donkey, probably most likely the former… And in the midst of the sham god and the money agendas and the ruthless demands of those in power, the plans of God Almighty don’t get stuck for a moment, but rather, in the midst of what seems like power having its way with people, God is at work bringing a vulnerable child into the world to become our Prince of Peace.
It may be hard to pronounce Quirinius. It may be that earthly donkeys get stuck and need rescuing. But the one who has the Name above all names, the one who comes to us in peace, riding on a donkey, the one who comes to save us, well, he came to us anyway, unseen, little, fragile, flying under the radar of all the powerful and mighty human beings and their puny little plans, not simply to move people from one village to another, but to transfer all of us who will willingly go out of the kingdom of darkness and into the kingdom of light and love in Christ.
https://www.countytimes.co.uk/news/24815140.nicky-donkey-rescued-using-sled-christmas-miracle