Accomplished for us....
The 4th Sunday of Advent Year A
There are so many people in the Christmas story.
Matthew 1:18-25
There are so many people in the Christmas story.
The combined tea towels and pillow cases of several families
would scarcely cover all the shepherds and angels needed to complete the cast
of a Christmas Pageant. Nor is it all
nineteenth century invention either, like so many of our Christmas
traditions. There are, in fact, a lot of
characters in the stories from Luke's and Matthew's Gospels. Some of them are mere bystanders, only
incidental to the main action. Others
play a central role, enabling (or perhaps even trying to impede) the main
action of God becoming flesh and dwelling among us.
When Tony Jordan, a writer of popular British television, was
tasked with writing the screenplay for the BBC's take on the Nativity in 2010
he struggled with the tradition which dressed all these extra characters in
"big square beards with sackcloth wrapped around them". Early television and movie renditions of the
Nativity story merely fitted them in where there was space - like we might
arrange a set of crib figures, shepherds and Wise Men on a too-small coffee
table.
Looking for "the story within the story" he struggled
with the characters of "the others" for weeks.
Late one night, bleary-eyed and with an overflowing ashtray, he
came to the realization that the other characters, major and minor roles, were
important *exactly because* the son of God came for them - "for you"
says one of the angels to a shepherd on a hillside in Jordan's screenplay -
this all happened for you.
And so, as we do every year, we take our place in the
tableau. We read somebody else's words
and recount deeds and events which took place during this or that Census in the
eastern end of the Roman Empire a long time ago. We may play the role of one of the major or
minor characters in the story, or read the words of the Prophet Isaiah or St
John the Evangelist from the lectern, but that's not who we are. We live here and now, caught up in the lives
and relationships we know so well.
We are us. All these
things took place and were accomplished for us and for others like us.
