Abstract
Home for Christmas
It’s Christmas time, which means that in cafes and at holiday parties across the known universe, the voice of Bing Crosby will be crooning out a particular phrase: ‘I’ll be home for Christmas.’ University students, nervously waiting outside exam rooms, will ask one another: ‘Are you going home for Christmas?’ Families will pack themselves into planes, trains, and automobiles. Vast distances will be crossed, large sums of money will be spent—sometimes happily, sometimes not—all with one specific goal in mind: to be home for Christmas.
It’s a wonderful thing—being home for Christmas. It’s also a little ironic, considering that at the very first Christmas, almost nobody was at home.
To hear St. Luke tell the story, Joseph and Mary aren’t home for Christmas. Luke tells us they’re from Nazareth, but—due to the bureaucratic whim of Caesar Augustus, who decides he wants an accurate headcount of his entire empire—find themselves traveling to Bethlehem. It’s a far cry from home, since the expectant couple has nowhere better to stay than some sort of animal stall.
The shepherds come a little closer, since Luke tells us that they are ‘living in the fields’. What kind of “living” this entails is difficult to say, but the fact that a shepherd would be described as living in the fields, and not, say, in a respectable terraced house in the suburbs, tips us off to their transient situation. They’re nomads, migrating their flocks from one patch of shrubbery to the next. Not quite home either.
Clearly the “heavenly host” of angels, who surprise these itinerant shepherds, are also just passing through. And if we care to glance a synoptic eye to Matthew’s Gospel, we can just as easily conclude that the Magi (who Luke doesn’t mention) are also a long way from home.
Even so, I’ve come to think that the story of Christ’s birth story is about being home for Christmas. It’s just that the Christmas story changes our definition of home.
Consider the word “home”. Home is a noun—and a noun, as the ghosts of English teachers past would remind us, can be a person, a place, or a thing.
Perhaps home is a thing: a physical thing, a structure with four walls and a roof. It’s the particular building that causes us to sigh and say, ‘Home sweet home.’ Of course, one good idiom deserves another. We have another saying: ‘A house is not a home.’ Which implies that something more than a structure is required to bring us ‘home.’
Perhaps home is a place: the place where we grew up, or where we first fell in love. Recently I traveled to the city where I was raised. After many years away, I was thrilled by the feeling of intimate familiarity that I could feel for a place. I knew each street of my old neighborhood; bursts of memory were set off by the parks and rivers and shops. Still, most of my friends and family had long since moved away. My wife and child had never lived there. Is a place still home if it is inhabited only by one’s past? A place isn’t home without people.
Indeed, people are tremendously important to our definition of home. After all, when we ask about someone’s ‘home life’, we don’t mean whether or not they sing in the shower. We’re asking about people; about family; about the bonds of human connection, and the blessed ties that bind. Robert Frost has a line of poetry I love. He says, ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’ 1
Of course, not every family is a happy family. You can fit a lot of strife and suffering under one roof. The first Christmas is fraught with relational tension. Mary and Joseph aren’t married, and Mary is already pregnant. Perhaps you and I and the Gospel of Luke want to insist that she is pregnant by the Holy Spirit—but try explaining that to the neighbors. Matthew’s Gospel tells us that the relationship has already had a near-miss with divorce. Add that to the labour of travel and delivery of a baby in an animal stall, and you’ve got some serious stress. Perhaps it’s a comfort to know that your family isn’t the only one with problems.
So where does that leave us? Where does it leave Mary, Joseph, and child—with nothing much by way of shelter, their connection to the place tenuous at best, an intervening angel the closest thing to a marriage counselor?
It turns out my understanding of nouns was incomplete. A noun isn’t only a person, place, or thing. A noun can also be an idea. Now, just because something is an idea—what English teachers would call an ‘abstract noun’—doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Love, for example, is an idea. So is truth or justice. But you can’t see or touch love. You can only do your best to enact it in the physical world.
Home is like that. Of course home often involves something physical; and a localized sense of place; and the deep bonds of kinship, whether genetic or chosen. But best and highest, home is an idea—the shining star that guides us as we engage the people, places, and things around us.
Of course, I didn’t need my English teachers to tell me that. I could have asked the Virgin Mary.
Luke 2:19 says, ‘But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.’ That’s the truest idea of home, come home in her heart.
What are ‘all these things’ she is pondering? Luke says it’s the report of the shepherds, repeating back what the angels had told them: ‘Good news of great joy for all people’—the news that ‘born this day is... a Savior, who is Christ, the Lord’. It’s the promise of Messiah, so powerful in the collective consciousness of the first-century world, and it’s mingled with an idea which has enraptured Christian thought, ever since a visiting angel spoke the baby’s name to Joseph. The Gospel of Matthew says that child is to be called ‘Emmanuel’, which means “God with us”.
Put it together, and that’s quite an idea. Ponder it like Mary, and you might be willing to say that there is one more person who isn’t home for Christmas: the baby in the manger. This child of flesh and blood is also, in some incomprehensible way, God with us. Which means that when God comes to our human world, even God isn’t home for Christmas.
Christian theologians call it the mystery of the incarnation: God, creator of the universe—the One who brings existence into being—enters into that very creation, and becomes a human being. John Chrysostom, an ancient preacher of the early Christian centuries, says it best: ‘The Ancient of Days has become an infant. He who sits upon the sublime and heavenly Throne, now lies in a manger. And he who cannot be touched... now lies subject to the hands of men. He who has broken the bonds of sinners, is now bound by an infant’s bands.’ 2
Why does that matter, especially for those of us trying to find home this Christmas? If—as all the saints and mystics tell us—God is our true home, then it means that home has come to find us. We don’t need a picturesque building, or a festive place, or a perfect family in order to make it home for Christmas. Home is the place where God dwells, and God dwells with us.
It is not always easy to inhabit that spiritual homeland. It takes pondering, like Mary. If home is an idea, then it is one of those ideas—like love or justice—that has to be believed, and enacted, and made visible in the material world. But the first step is taking it in, allowing it room. ‘May Christ dwell in your hearts through faith’, says St. Paul. God is with us, we remind ourselves. And in God, we find our home.
