(Exodus 40.34). The reality of camping is rarely as blissful as it seems in prospect or retrospect – I think of a certain sodden field above Morecambe – and the wilderness wanderings of the children of Israel were far from idyllic. Nevertheless those years came to be seen by the people of Israel as the honeymoon period of their relationship with God. That’s how it should be between God and his people, sharing a journey, together under canvas and under the stars. Stephen saw that and said so – ‘The Most High does not dwell in houses made with human hands’ – and he was stoned for his pains (Acts 7.48). So there can be no more glorious a promise than Hosea’s, ‘I will make you live in tents again’ (Hosea 12.9).
‘The Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.’ John’s language invites us to have second thoughts about the familiar Christmas stories. Joseph and Mary ‘great with child’ have to make the arduous journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem. There they must bed down as best they can in the byre, where soon Mary’s child is born. There they are visited by shepherds, whiffy outsiders who are probably no better housed than their sheep. Astrologers from the back of beyond turn up, led on their long safari by a wandering star. While the child is still a toddler they are on the move again, this time to Egypt. As the Victorian matron remarked, ‘How very different from the home life of our dear Queen!’
We speak at Christmas of all that seems bizarre about the birth of Jesus. But if we read these stories again in the light of John’s interpretation of what took place when Christ was born, we find that they say something rather different. The strange circumstances of this child’s birth do not set him apart from those of us who were not born in a cattle trough. On the contrary, they identify him with us. It is precisely our condition that this child is born to share. I am essentially a nomad, even if I have lived for seventy years in the same semi-detached house in Sidcup. Human beings were wandering the earth for tens of thousands of years before they settled in caves and in penthouses costing millions. The security of the roof over our heads is wholly illusory. If God had wanted us to stay in the same place he would have given us roots, not legs.
On Christmas Day we read the first few verses of the letter to the Hebrews. Were there time, we should read the eleventh chapter as well. For the anonymous writer, Christians are those who recognize that they are ‘strangers and foreigners on earth’, that they are Bedouin with no need of buildings. So it was for Abraham who ‘set out not knowing where he was going’. So it was for all those who looked for Christ’s day but who did not live to see it. So it is for us who, surrounded by these witnesses, try to follow their example. Whatever our address, we are a people with no permanent home. That ‘homelessness’, so far from depriving us of our humanity, constitutes it. We may be on the road for a long time yet, so we must ‘lay aside every weight’ (Hebrews 12.1) – surely a text for the day in the year when we put so much more weight on.
When we read that ‘the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head’ (Luke 9.58) we may feel sorry for him. If so, we miss the point. (As does the weepy carol, ‘Thou didst leave thy throne and thy kingly crown when thou camest to earth for me.’) The famous text is not there to arouse our pity. Beneath Luke’s haunting words is the same Christmas truth taught by John, that the boy born in a byre shares the essential vulnerability and insecurity of our human condition, however swanky are the houses we like to think are ours. In two miraculous lines Henry Vaughan goes to the heart of the Christmas story:
He travels to be born, and then
Is born to travel more again.
(‘The Nativity’)
An unnecessary footnote. To recognize that, wherever we live, we have ‘no fixed abode’ is no reason for refusing shelter to the homeless. Nor is it a reason to ignore the plight of those, massed in their thousands in our planet’s countless refugee camps, whose ‘tents’ are plastic sheets on sticks.
2. THE STRANGLED TOWN OF BETHLEHEM
What we make of the Bible depends on where we read or hear it. Take the words with which the Prologue of St John’s Gospel comes to its tremendous climax – ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ (John 1.14). Supposing we hear these words in an English parish church, as the Gospel at Midnight Mass or as the final reading at a service of lessons and carols. The words may well move us deeply yet still say very little. It is not that they are too familiar. It is that they don’t connect. The great text hangs in the air, echoing high in the nave like the last notes of one of the carols we’ve been singing, but without engaging with the world beyond the church walls. But supposing this Christmas – this Christmas – we go to Bethlehem, to that ‘strangled’ little town as it has been called. Supposing we hear those climactic words in a town now encircled by walls and fences which threaten its very survival as a community. If we stop off in Bethlehem to hear John’s account of the conditions under which our gentle Lord consented to be born, we’ll make the necessary connection. (Online assistance is available for such imaginative journeys. Visit www.openbethlehem.org.)
Bethlehem is suffering what Christ suffered. Charles Wesley – his words more often cited than sung these days – talks of ‘Our God contracted to a span’. For George Herbert, the true light coming into the world was ‘glorious yet contracted light’ (‘Christmas’). It’s all about confinement and contractions. The resonances of such imagery when we’re celebrating the birth of a baby are inescapable. But for the poets, as for John, the emphasis is on the constraints of the incarnation in all its aspects. The Word made flesh is the poet Crashaw’s ‘Eternity shut in a span’ (‘In the Holy Nativity of Our Lord’).
Bethlehem too is ‘shut in a span’. Its imprisonment is iniquitous, but grimly apposite to the events over which our writer broods. The Word becomes flesh. Becoming flesh, he becomes all flesh is heir to. Pious tourists used to tut-tut about the tat marketed in Bethlehem’s Manger Square. They objected to the commercialization of a holy place. But that’s flesh for you. And in the likeness of such ‘sinful flesh’ (Romans 8.3) love came down.
Now the tourists and the tat are almost gone and we redirect our anger. We protest rightly that Bethlehem is being throttled, that the life of a once thriving community is being slowly extinguished. But that too – what stranglers inflict and the strangled suffer – is flesh, the flesh our Lord makes his own. Bethlehem struggles to breathe. It was asphyxia, the commentators tell us, that killed Jesus. The beleaguered little town proves a fitting birthplace for the one who bears the worst about us.
The last time I went there was by local bus. We were turned off the bus at gun-point and lined along the side while they checked our papers. That’s flesh too. The space where the Word ‘pitches his tent’, his ‘pad’ as one theologian has recently called it, is a pitifully narrow enclosure. Such are the conditions – those they know about in Bethlehem – which Christ endures. Yet, according to John, it is these most unpropitious conditions which allow his glory to be seen. John delights in such contradictions. The contrasting strands are woven through his Gospel – light and darkness, life and death, truth and falsehood.
Glory suffuses this Gospel. Here a baby’s flesh is bathed in it. But for John that glory will be at its most radiant when, so the other Gospels say, the sky turned black.
‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.’ What we make of the text depends on where we are. For too many of us where we are is in front of a computer screen. ‘The Word’ for us is ‘Word for Windows’. Not the word of wisdom, not the word which addresses us personally and establishes a relationship. Not the word incarnated but the word digitized. An imaginative leap greater than that which takes us to Bethlehem is needed to return to a time when the supreme purpose of words was to let us talk to each other face to face.
The Prologue to John’s Gospel harks back to the account of creation at the start of the Bible. That story too begins with a spoken word. The repeated ‘God
