be-musings

I always wanted to play Mary in the Sunday School plays, but never was chosen. I wasn't the Mary type, if there is such thing as one. I didn't have smooth dark hair or rosy cheeks. My roles were as shepherd, angel (don't laugh at that one), sometimes soloist. My years of being young enough to be Mary are long past, so I'll have to let that go.
The picture of the manger scene is always so beautifully portrayed at church and in nativity scenes. And why not? His birth is so miraculous and beautiful. But in the real life raw environment, I think it was anything but lovely.
I haven't been around alot of stables, but the farms I have been on have smelled like a pungent mixture of sweet, fermented hay, animal sweat, and dung. To the real farm lover that might be a wonderful smell, but not to most of us. We know he was of lowly birth and the story about being no room in the inn. We picture a simple stable in a cave, where the animals were quieted and calmed by his birth while harps played. In reality, if Bethlehem was overcrowded it stands to reason that so was the stable. Too many horses and donkeys from the travellers. Lots of cows and sheep for food and clothing. After all, there would be a financial glut to be gained from all the foreigners coming home. Perhaps "no room" almost applied to the stable as well.
So, I picture this baby being born to an unwed couple, the "father" of a common profession that wouldn't earn much money. The couple young in age and relationship. Tired. Painful, sweaty childbirth with all the mucous and blood and afterbirth that accompanies it. Not a pretty picture, but miraculous in that God chose such "normalcy" through which to bring redemption.
Fast forward to Jesus' death. Betrayal, a scathing trial, disfiguring beatings, torture to the cessation of life, while between two low lifes. Killed with a method used for society's cast-outs. No money for a proper tomb - someone looked after that for him.
It seems he died the way he was born. Immersed in the muck and mire of earth and His creation. Not as pretty as we imagine it to be. But we make things to fit the season and our inability to handle that kind of life. We lose some of the significance but we can't deal with the full reality. It's too far removed from what we experience in our country and generation.
There is beauty too in his birth and death. But it wasn't in physicality. It was in love and redemption. The ugliness of His earthly reality has made deeper the beauty of the sacrifice, from beginning to end.