Reflecting Verses: Luke 2:1-20
COVID-19 has become a major tool to muzzle dissent and disrupt sites of protest. The threat of contraction makes people hesitant to organize and agitate. Despite this, India is witnessing a humungous farmer’s protest against laws which are considered oppressive for the farming community. Farm stress is no hidden truth in India. In such a situation, who could have imagined that such a protest could take place? Men, women and children sleeping on hay, inside tractors and on roadside have explicated that protests often arise from social locations that are considered to be weak and unfit. The resistive power of such locations is also evident in Jesus’ birth.
Jesus’s birth narratives are often interpreted from the perspective of power. The role of wise men and Herod is often overstated. They represent two contraries, while the former adores, the latter hates Jesus’ birth. These are men of power and often the significance of Jesus’ birth is located in their contradicting views. Therefore, it is not surprising to see Christmas processions being led by the three wise men. ‘Neatness’ and ‘purity’ are perceived to accompany them and are usually extended to the settings of the manger. Consequently, the ‘manger’ is fast becoming a ‘crib’ today.
A manger is a cattle’s feeding place. Such places are dirty and unhygienic. It’s the least of places to keep a new born child. However, Jesus was to be found here. Manger was significantly un-messianic. While power and privilege defined Jewish expectation of the messiah, the first announcement of Jesus’ birth came to the shepherds who were considered ceremoniously unclean (polluted) and dirty.
During Jesus’ time, the lower sections of the society suffered extreme forms of deprivation with no hope for improvement. In such a context, Luke connects Jesus’ birth to the shepherds and questions the legitimacy of oppressive social stratification. For, shepherds to stay in the fields during nights, points out that their accesses to common commercial and residential places were restricted. Purity and pollution were major grounds for their discrimination. Shepherds were the so-called dirty people but God chose them as the first hearers of Jesus’ birth.
Even Jesus came from a place which was considered to be unworthy. The question posed by Nathaniel, can anything good from Nazareth? (John: 1:46) is significant. Nazareth was a province of Galilee. Herod’s heavy taxation had brought about oppression of the agrarian society. In Palestine during Jesus’s time the minority rich took advantage of the peasant families. In such hopeless context, nothing good was expected of Nazareth. However, Jesus came from here.
The manger, shepherds and the city of Nazareth represented locations that were un-messianic and unworthy of any significant outcome. However, it is in such places that God chooses to reveal and locate itself. Jesus choose to identify himself with the dirt and the messiness of life that resulted from oppression. It is from this messiness that Jesus preached God’s Kingdom. His birth settings were resistive to power and his ministry upheld and blessed the worthless and the weak. Therefore, in our acts of Justice, we are intervening of behalf of Jesus to realize God’s kingdom here on this earth. The un-messianic settings were concretely messianic.
Prayer
Help us Dear God to walk on the ways that your Son Jesus walked. As we prepare to celebrate you birth, inspire us through the power of your spirit so that we can stand in solidarity with those who are oppressed and weak. Amen.
Author: Rev. Samuel Mall
About the Author: Samuel mall hails from Punjab. He is an ordained presbyter from the diocese of Chandigarh, Church of North India. He is currently pursuing his doctoral research in the department of Christian Theology at United Theological College, Bangalore.
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