Many people take trips during Advent. Most are to visit family, sometimes close friends for the holidays. Families coming together renew the bonds of their connections to one another. Many people stay home and family comes to them; but then again, there are many who load up the car, or hop on a plane, or train, and go to their family. It was a trip that happened in Luke’s Gospel that made the way for the Nativity or birth of Jesus to take place. The Scripture:
In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered.
This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria.
All went to their own towns to be registered.
Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David.
He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child.
Months have passed since the announcements (annunciations)
to both Mary and Joseph by the Angel Gabriel.
As we can see both of them made the adjustment that came upon them. Mary was greatly pregnant, so in fact it must
have been eight months later. It was
family that forced Joseph to take his very pregnant wife from their home in
Nazareth south to Joseph’s family’s ancestral home of Bethlehem.
Bethlehem means “house of bread” and it was the
ancestral home of King David, whose Joseph and Mary’s family lines had come from. The opening of the Nativity is a trip, forced
upon Joseph and Mary, regardless of concerns for the baby that might come at
any moment. The trip is forced by two
mighty political rulers – Caesar Augustus and Quirinius the governor of
Syria. Caesar Augustus was born Gaius
Octavius and was the nephew of the great Julius Caesar, who claimed the empire’s
rule through military conquest. Julius
Caesar was assassinated in 44 B.C. Julius
Caesar had named his nephew Gaius in his will as his successor. It took a few years for Gaius Octavius to
eliminate his enemies, but in 27 b.c. he came to power as the Roman Emperor’s
new Caesar. The Senate through pressure
from Octavius, elected him Caesar for life and gave him the name Augustus – meaning
venerable, the great, the majestic. He
developed his own cult of worship claiming that the Caesars, Julius before, he
now, and all that would follow were gods.
Luke is setting the story of the trip in the context of the
providence of God who uses the power and domination of the empire to cause Joseph
and Mary to move some 90 miles to the south, which in all likelihood, given
Mary’s condition, might have taken them a week to make. The significance of the trip is that God
moves through a political power to have a prophecy fulfilled. Some 600 years earlier, the Old Testament Prophet,
Micah, had spoken these words:
“But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of
Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose
origin is from of old, from ancient days,” (Micah 5:2). Of course, Caesar, and his governor Quirinius,
whose main goal is to collect taxes, have no idea they are working for
God. They were tools in the hands of a
Sovereign God.
Luke 2:6-7
While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And
she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid
him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.
C.S. Lewis had remarked: “Jesus entered the world so anonymously
and clandestinely – as a baby born to insignificant parents in an out-of-the-way
corner of the Roman Empire – because he was a warrior compelled to slip quietly
behind enemy lines…the universe that God entered in Christ was not alien to
God, but it was, by the same token, hardly friendly to its Creator; rather, it
was ‘enemy occupied territory’”.
“There was no place for them in the inn”. Pope Benedict XVI connected those words to the
Gospel of John’s introduction of Jesus: “He
came to what was his own, and his own people did not receive him” (John 1:11).
The Savior of the world, for him in whom all things were created (Col. 1:16)
there was no room…He who was crucified outside of the city (Heb. 13:12) also
came into the world outside of the city.”
The trip of the Nativity reminds us that the values of the
world are not the values of God. Jesus
came into a world humbly, without fanfare, without anyone (except his parents)
knowing who he was or what he was going to do.
“From the moment of his birth, he belongs outside of the realm of
what is important and powerful in worldly terms. Yet, it is this unimportant and powerless child
who proves to be truly the powerful one, the one on whom ultimately everything
depends. So one aspect of becoming a
Christian is having to leave behind what everyone else thinks and wants, i.e.,
the prevailing standards, in order to enter the light of the truth of our
being, and aided by that light to find the right path” – [1]
a.k.a., the trip for our life here and how.
Peace
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