Advent with Luke #11 – A Girl was in Labor
The day before the day before. I envision Mary and Joseph on the last leg of their travels. The final day’s journey southward toward Bethlehem is very hilly and rocky. They would pass the glorious holy city of Jerusalem. They had, of course, been there with thousands of other pilgrims for the high holy days – like Passover. Its gleaming pavements and towering marble and brick structures filled them with – awe? Any disappointment (as Herod, the terrifying megalomaniac ruled there)? Did they feel small, not among a caravan of pilgrims? Or were others, maybe kinfolk making their way with them, as Augustus’s “decree” that “went out” forced them to travel too.
Kinfolk. What would they make of Mary’s pregnancy? I doubt any praised God and treated Mary the way Elizabeth had earlier. What a terrible journey, arduous, with others on the road averting their gazes and whispering.
Was she having early stabs of labor pain? How many women had she known in her lifetime who’d died in childbirth? Was this what the angel had asked of her? To bear this Christ child but not live to see his childhood and growing up?
The tiny village of Bethlehem was jammed with more people than ever due to the decree. No room in the inn – whatever the “inn” might actually have been. Probably a big shelter for travelers with troughs to feed and water the beasts of burden. Frederick Buechner imagined that innkeeper looking back years later on that fateful night, detailing how hard it is to run an inn, how there are a million little things to attend to – and how he wasn’t lying, there really was no room in his inn, and how he wasn’t there when the baby was born. “But this I do know. All your life long, you wait for your own true love to come – we all of us do – our destiny, our joy, our heart’s desire. When he came, I missed him. Pray for me.”
And finally, no one thinks much about Mary in the agonies of labor. We make her sweet and pretty. St. Augustine believed she was shielded from labor pains. But if God became fully human in Jesus, his mother was fully human. I am moved deeply by the way Rachel Marie Stone narrates Mary’s labor, and then the birth:
“A girl was in labor with God. She groaned and sweated and arched her back, crying out for her deliverance and finally delivering God, God’s head pressing on her cervix, emerging from her vagina, perhaps tearing her flesh a little; God the Son, her Son, covered in vernix and blood, the infant God’s first breath the close air of crowded quarters… God the Son, her Son, pressed to her bare breast… God the Son, her Son, drank deeply from his mother. Drink, my beloved. This is my body, broken for you.”
Friends, I wish I could raise a toast to each one of you face to face, and embrace you as we celebrate Christmas – not the cultural trappings, but the startling, marvelous, challenging and so very hopeful good news that God has come among us, and is with us still. His nickname? Immanuel, “God with us.” And that is enough. Friends, thank you for reading. I pray for you a blessed Christmas.