In our Advent series we are 12 days in and halfway through the countdown to Christmas.
So there are 12 days left until Christmas day and after that we start the “12 days of Christmas”.
Hopefully that’s not too confusing!

In keeping with the fascination of today’s peculiar date I’ve been reflecting on the number 12 as it appears many times in the Bible, and especially in relation to people.

Jacob, later Israel, had 12 sons who became the 12 heads and names of the 12 tribes of Israel (Ephraim and Manasseh were 1/2 tribes each of what would have been Joseph’s tribe).
Jesus chose 12 men to be his disciples and he their Rabbi. 1 of these betrayed Jesus and killed himself and was replaced by Matthias to make 12 again. These 12 became the first leaders of the Church and were quickly joined by others, including Paul who wrote most of the New Testament letters.
In John’s Revelation we read a description of the new Jerusalem which has 12 foundations representing the 12 apostles and 12 gates representing the 12 tribes of Israel. The gates of this great city are always open and never shut!
And there are lots more…

But I’ve also been reflecting on how 12 features in our day-to-day lives.
Our lives are lived with the number 12 playing an essential role, especially when it comes to time and days. As creatures who are within time – and limited by it – the regularity of ‘12’ day in, day out becomes a part of the rhythm of our lives and in turn a part of us.
It’s so easy for this rhythm, this pace, to so shape our lives that we forget how to stop and be still. The relentless ticking of the clock acts as a constant pressure to keep going, to keep moving and to never just stop.

It’s interesting that it’s often only in the quiet stillness of a room that a ticking clock can be heard. To perceive the presence of ticking time you have to suspend it and be still.

One of the most beautiful Christmas carols is Silent Night.
The words and music work together like a lullaby to gently calm you into a restful state.

Silent night, Holy night
All is calm, all is bright
Round yon Virgin Mother and Child
Holy Infant so tender and mild
Sleep in Heavenly peace
Sleep in Heavenly peace

This image of a newborn Jesus in peaceful sleep is a gift to us in this busy, relentless Christmas season. God could have proclaimed peace from heaven and we would know it, yet there’s something much more powerful and tangible about the God of the universe resting in peaceful sleep as a newborn baby which brings it right home for us.
Jesus has come to bring us peace – his “shalom”.
In his final hours with his disciples he said these words:
“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” (John 14:27 ESV)

This advent may you find time to stop so you can hear time and know that you don’t have to be bound by it.
May you rest in the peace of Jesus which surpasses all understanding and may your troubled hearts be stilled.
May you receive His shalom and be still to know that He is God.

As a parent of 3 young children Christmas Eve is all about ‘getting ready’ for Christmas day. Our children love it and enter into the excitement of going to sleep with an empty stocking and a bare space at the foot of the Christmas tree in the hope that they’ll wake up to a stocking full of treats like chocolates, socks, bubbles, and… a tangerine! (every year they have the same puzzled look when it comes to the tangerine).
They wake up early and come into our room patiently waiting until we’ve given them ‘permission’ to eat their weight in chocolate before breakfast, which we obligingly do!
Then it’s downstairs to discover a pile of wrapped presents at the bottom of the tree and pleading with us to open at least some before breakfast. Again we obligingly consent.

It’s tricky being a Christian parent at Christmas time. It should be one of the main focal points of the year of our faith and why we believe what we believe, but I can’t help but think that we’ve absorbed the surrounding culture into the meaning of Christmas, and that the spirit of Christmas has become more like the spirit of the age, rather than God’s Spirit.

We have our nativity scene on display in the house and always respond positively to the Christmas cards that have a Christmas theme, and not just a winter theme, but if you walked into our house on Christmas Eve you’d struggle to see the difference between our house and the house of someone who approaches Christmas in an entirely secular way.

Is Christmas really that much different for Christians as it is for those who are indifferent to Jesus and why he came into the world?

As I reflect on the original Christmas story there is much about it which would have been quite ordinary and unremarkable. If you lived in Bethlehem at the time and walked past the house you wouldn’t have noticed anything remarkably different about that family scene or any other.
In other words, it would have been very easy to miss the point of Christmas 2,000 years ago even if you’d seen baby Jesus and Mary as you walked past, just as it is easy to miss the point today.

From reading the stories it seems to me that the difference in meaning lies in those who were looking for Jesus. The shepherds ‘searched’ and the magi ‘followed the star of the new king’. They were both looking for Jesus whether they knew precisely whom they were looking for or not. And so Christmas ‘happened’ for them and in both cases the outcome was the real joy of Christmas.
In that first Christmas there were big celebrations and amazing presents, so we’re not missing the mark if we make a big deal out of our Christmas celebrations, but unless we are searching for Jesus at Christmas then we’ll never get the point of it, whatever we do or don’t do with stockings, presents and trees.

This advent may you know that Jesus has come so He might be found.
May you discover the true meaning and purpose of Christmas FOR YOU as you search for Jesus in your own experience of it.
May the true Christmas Spirit be the coming of God’s Spirit into your home and heart.

Here’s a great question for a quiz night:
“How many kings are there in the Christmas story, and what were their names?”
Typical answer:
“3 kings – Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar.”

That would of course be the wrong answer because, like the missing donkey, the ‘3 kings’ were actually referred to in Matthew as “wise men” or “magi” (from the Greek Magos) and not kings at all (Matt 2:1). Also there is no mention of 3 people, only 3 gifts (Matt 2:11).
At some point they became ‘kings’ and were given names.
In Spain, the country of my own birth story, the big celebration and party isn’t so much at Christmas, but on 6th January where they celebrate “La Fiesta de los Reyes Magos” (The Feast of the Magi Kings).
In Spain you have to wait until 6th January to get your Christmas presents, and Santa has no part to play! If, like me, you have a British mum then you get two Christmases 🙂

But just because the magi weren’t kings (perhaps controversially, they were magicians and/or astrologers) doesn’t mean that this story isn’t about kings. It absolutely is.

Here’s that great question for a quiz night again:
“How many kings are there in the Christmas story, and what were their names?”
Right answer:
“2 kings – Herod and Jesus.”

It’s really important that we see that this is a story about two kings; two very different kings.
Herod was a tyrannical ruler and regarded by the Jews as not actually being Jewish at all! He was a vassal king of the Roman Empire who had gifted the emperor Caesar Augustus with huge amounts of high quality Jewish gold which he had sourced dubiously through theft and taxation. He had bought his crown and he ruled extravagantly and wastefully at the expense of his poor ‘subjects’. It was this Herod who rebuilt the temple which was later destroyed in AD 70 by the Romans and which Jesus predicted would not have one stone left standing atop another (Matt 24:1-2).
His successor was the Herod who had John the Baptist’s head cut off and to whom Jesus was sent just prior to his crucifixion and who died of worms.
The whole kingship of the Herods was a polluted line of paganism which was about as far as you could get from the idea of a Godly King of the Jews.
This Herod kept the people enslaved by supporting the Romans and living his lavish lifestyle at their expense.

In Jesus we see the complete opposite.
This ‘king’ was born into poverty and didn’t even have a proper crib to be laid in when he was born. And yet it was clear that he was indeed a king.
The magi were astronomers and astrologers and they’d seen a new star and immediately knew what it meant; a king had been born, and so important and significant was this king that they travelled halfway around the known world to find him, and more than that to worship him (Matt 2:2).
They went to the most obvious place, the palace in Jerusalem and Herod was naturally perplexed and troubled before becoming violently envious and destructively vengeful. The magi must have been surprised when they finally arrived in Bethlehem and the humble ‘palace’ of this king, but Matthew says that when they found Jesus, the king, they “rejoiced exceedingly with great joy.” (Matt 2:10)

Joy upon joy! This is the response that this king brings out in people.
This is the king of joy; the king who is in Himself ‘good news’; the king who dwells amongst the poor and the humble; the king who sets people free to be extravagant worshippers of the Divine; the king whom people pursue because something inside them draws and drives them to seek him out and find him; the king of the unexpected.
He may not be a typical king, yet he is nonetheless a king, and in fact the King of all kings.

This advent may you know that your King has been born and has come to reign.
May you know that He has come to set you free to be extravagant in your joy and your giving and your worship.
May you know Him as the servant King, humble and gentle, yet above all other kings, presidents, prime ministers and political leaders.

Last week in our household we celebrated the 8th birthday of our first child. This prompted a flood of memories from the first day when she was born and the joy that she brought into our lives.

One of the things I remember most about that day is that we’d decided that we would only allow family to visit on that first day, but my best friend was desperate to come and visit and meet our new daughter.
I can’t remember whether I eventually gave him permission or if he just turned up anyway, but to make sure he was welcome at this deeply personal family event he brought a gift – a box of expensive chocolates. For some reason he thought that the chocolates would move him from ‘friend’ (albeit best friend) to ‘family’, or maybe he thought that the chocolates would distract us from the fact that he wasn’t really supposed to be there.

When he arrived, for us the gift wasn’t the chocolates at all; it was him. We had rightly decided that it should be just family, but in doing so we hadn’t realised just how happy we would be to share that incredibly special day with him. When he arrived we realised this and thankfully, because he came, we were able to experience that joy.

This is what it’s like with God and us.
That first Christmas day when Joseph and especially Mary would have been overjoyed at Jesus’ birth, it probably wasn’t on their mind that the angels would spread the news and then some random shepherds would turn up. But they did and it says that Mary ‘treasured’ that they came (Luke 2:19).

There is something intrinsic in Mary’s and our experience that tells us that the gift of a baby is in itself God’s message to us that He has come so that we might all share in His joy, and share each other’s joy.
The story in Luke doesn’t mention any specific gift from the shepherds, yet Mary treasured their gift; the gift of themselves coming to share in Mary’s and Joseph’s joy.

I can’t even remember what happened to the chocolates, I’m sure they were very good, but I vividly remember the joy of my best friend holding and loving my first child.
What a profound and precious gift!

This advent may you know that Jesus has come so you might share in His joy.
May you know that His birth is itself a gift to you and all you have to do is receive it.
May you know that your gift to Him is you, and that you would come and see and choose to share in the joy of His birth.

We all know that the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary and told her that she would conceive by the Holy Spirit and give birth to a son and she would call him “Jesus” (Luke 1:31).

We also know that an angel of the LORD appeared to Joseph in a dream and told him that the child would be a son and that he should call him “Jesus” (Matt 1:21).

So why does Matthew include a prophecy from Isaiah that clearly says that the name of the virgin’s child will be “Immanuel”? (Matt 1:23)
Matthew tells us that Mary conceiving as a virgin is proof that this child is the fulfilment of the prophecy given c.600yrs earlier. Fine.
Except the prophecy is explicit that the child would have a very specific name and that name is “Immanuel”, not “Jesus”. And Matthew is trying to persuade us that this child being called “Jesus” is the same child referred to as “Immanuel” by Isaiah.

So what is Matthew up to?
Is he clutching at straws or is he doing something incredibly clever?
I think he’s doing something incredibly clever… AND subversive.

Matthew makes it clear to us that Immanuel means “God with us”. This is added by Matthew for our benefit as in Isaiah it just says “Immanuel”.
So on the one hand Matthew is saying that this child, whose birth from a virgin was prophesied by Isaiah, is none other than GOD WITH US.
This is massive. To the mainly Jewish audience of Matthew’s gospel the significance of this cannot be overstated. But with it comes certain immediate expectations and associations of what ‘God with us’ means.
Front of mind would be all the times where God made an appearance to their forefathers in the scriptures.
Abraham’s deep sleep and the thick darkness.
The burning bush, the quaking mountain and fire and the passing presence as He showed His back (not face) to Moses.
The thin silence that followed the wind, earthquake and fire with Elijah.
And so on…

To Matthew’s original audience ‘God with us’ evokes something very unlike a vulnerable baby born into poverty in some back-quarter of the Roman Empire.

Which is why on the other hand Matthew emphasises that this child would be called “Jesus”. “Jesus” comes from the Greek “Iesous” (pronounced Yaysoos). Being born into a Hebraic/Aramaic family his name was actually “Yeshua”, which to us would be “Joshua”.
Yeshua was a common name in Jesus’ (or Yeshua’s) day, as it is today. The reason it was popular was probably because of its associations with the Yeshua (Joshua) who succeeded Moses. Joshua was the indomitable military leader of the people of Israel who led them into the promised land. He was a man of faith, courage, valour who set out his stall in the famous words, “As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD” (Josh 24:15)

And so Matthew starts his gospel by bringing two bits of great news in one announcement.
This child is ‘God with us’ AND this child is a ‘Joshua’. To a people under the yolk of the Roman Empire this is amazing news! For 600 years God had been silent and ‘messiahs’ had come and gone, and Rome was a cruel master if you stepped out of line.
To hear that the promised Messiah has arrived AND is God with us AND is a Joshua would mean an end to Roman rule and an unstoppable military saviour.

Matthew sets up his gospel this way because it’s absolutely true that Jesus is God with us, and it’s absolutely true that He is the saviour. But Matthew also shows how God subverts our expectations and refuses to be a put in a box.
In 3 short words, tagged on the end of the sentence, Matthew subverts the idea that Jesus will be a military saviour from the Romans. The 3 words are “from their sins”.
“She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:21 ESV)

Matthew starts his gospel with this vital distinction. He reveals to us that our enslavement is not to an external military power or empire, but to our sins. And so it’s not that we need a saviour from ‘those out there’, but from what is in our own hearts. We lack the power to be free from sin unless God comes to be with us and saves us from our sin.
And the good news is that he has come, and God is with us, and he will save us.

This advent may you know that God is with you and that He has come to save you from your sins.
May He subvert your expectations and challenge you to address the root problem.
May you know that “if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed”. (John 8:36)

A mainstay of any nativity play is the ‘little donkey’ which carried the heavily pregnant Mary to Bethlehem from Nazareth. It’s even had a Christmas carol written after it which is sung every year, that’s how significant this little donkey is to the Christmas story.

Except there’s absolutely no mention of a donkey in the gospel accounts.
None. Zip. Nada.

So what?
It may seem like an unimportant detail to us that a donkey has found its way into the story, but the implications of this are significant.

To us in our 21C mindset a donkey isn’t considered an important animal, and not one of the ‘top trumps’ of the animal kingdom. The donkey is considered a humble beast and synonymous with stubbornness and stupidity.
But 2,000+ years ago the reverse was true. The donkey was a ‘royal’ animal, ridden by kings and dignitaries. A king travelling with peaceful intentions would ride a donkey and one intent on war would ride a horse. Both creatures were seen as important animals.
When Jesus rebukes the Pharisees for criticising him for healing a man on the Sabbath, his retort refers to rescuing a donkey out of a pit. Jesus’ observation is that they value the donkey more than the crippled man, as a donkey had financial value. He was highlighting that they had conveniently applied Mosaic law in relation to donkeys in pits because it suited their wallets to do so, whereas a helpless crippled beggar offered them no financial incentive. Perhaps the greatest tribute to the donkey is Jesus riding into Jerusalem in his ‘triumphal entry’ on one as the Prince of Peace and the son of David, Israel’s all-time favourite king. The image of the donkey was not lost on the crowds!

So it’s highly unlikely that Mary rode a donkey to Bethlehem, even though she was pregnant. Joseph was a carpenter and wouldn’t earn a lot of money as Nazareth wasn’t exactly a bustling hub of commerce – quite the opposite. He and Mary were ‘betrothed’ which meant any money he was earning was to prove to his father-in-law-to-be that he could pay the ‘bride price’ for Mary. It’s unlikely he had spare cash for expensive donkeys. In Luke’s gospel, an animal which is mentioned both in the gospels and in a Christmas song is the turtle dove. A pair of these was offered for sacrifice at Jesus’ presentation at the temple in Jerusalem “according to what is said in the law” (Luke 2:22-24). These animals were reserved in sacrifices for very poor people who couldn’t afford a calf, a lamb or a goat. To offer a turtle dove meant you were the poorest of the poor.

So although it may not seem significant, adding a donkey changes an important dynamic of the Christmas story; that Jesus was born into a humble and poor family who could barely scratch together money for a sacrifice. The God of the universe – the Logos – humbled Himself to become the lowest of the low. He not only associated with humanity in the broadest sense, He associated with the ‘least’ of humanity.
For us the donkey may still create that association, but to others around the world even today this would not be the case.

This Advent as you read the stories of Jesus’ birth again may you see the real details of the story and what they teach us about the Logos taking on ‘skin and fat’ (Greek – sarx).
May we be challenged to examine centuries of tradition so that we don’t lose the truth in tradition and miss the important things.
May you know that Jesus came to show us – in person – that God associates closely with the poor and chose to become ‘one of the least of these my brothers’ (Matt 25:40&45).

In the well known Christmas carol, Away in a Manger, there’s this curious line which is added to the second verse which goes like this:
“The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes. But little Lord Jesus no crying he makes.”

Either the writer of this carol has never heard a cow lowing or has never been close to a newborn baby!
The sound of a cow lowing is a hideous sound to the human ear. In some contexts it can evoke a positive response, like when you visit the countryside and it reaffirms the great escape you’ve just made from the bustling town or city. But when it’s within three feet of you, and you’re fast asleep, that is not a sound you want to hear.

Which brings us to baby Jesus waking up. If you’ve never experienced this firsthand then it’s difficult to describe what it’s like to be woken night after night, every few hours by the sound of your baby crying. Experts say that the frequency of your baby’s cry resonates perfectly with something within the mother’s brain so that she will always hear it and respond, and so she can pick out her own baby’s cry from other babies or sounds.
And to give you a sense of what it might feel like for a mother, consider that one of the interrogation techniques most used by the CIA is sleep deprivation whilst blaring out the sounds of babies crying at high volume into your holding cell. It is a truly unpleasant experience for a mother when her baby is crying for the 50th night in a row, when you’ve only managed to string together 3hrs sleep at a time.

If we accept the premise of this Christmas carol then we are accepting that somehow Jesus wasn’t a ‘normal’ baby. If any of my children hadn’t cried as a normal response, I would have been concerned in case they were ill, or that there might be something else going on.
Jesus was in every way a normal baby. Mary would have breastfed him, changed him when he was wet or had pooped, burped him when he was windy, cuddled him, sang to him, shushed him… whatever it would take to get him to settle to sleep.

This shows us some measure of Mary’s commitment when she said ‘yes’ to the Holy Spirit. We often talk about Mary’s risk in saying yes because she was a virgin and would become pregnant. Dealing with the risks and social stigma of being unmarried and pregnant were significant sacrifices that Mary was willing to make, but we rarely consider the more significant sacrifice that all mothers make with a newborn baby.
To sacrifice sleep night after night. To put your life on hold to prioritise your baby’s needs. To worry as much as delight over such a fragile looking bundle. To endure searing pain whilst breastfeeding because your child must be fed (no bottle feeding 2,000 years ago).

The tragedy which is often unseen is that many mothers suffer greatly with a newborn, especially their first, and they tend to suffer alone. Even as a caring, supportive, helping husband, it is not enough to reach the place where the mother suffers and so in some way it is always destined to be a solitary suffering.
But the suffering is not in vain and there is no human bond quite like that of a mother and child. God knows this which is why part of His gospel message to this world – part of His saving plan – was to model this relationship in Himself; becoming a child in the womb and being nursed and cared for by a mother.

This Advent may we all be thankful for our mothers.
May we know that God entrusted Himself to a mother for our sake and for our salvation.
May we suffer with those who suffer and bless all mothers everywhere, like Mary herself proclaimed in her Magnificat:
“For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed” (Luke 1:48 ESV)

When we read the gospels through our 21st Century lenses our focus tends to be on the content of the message as we consider the Christmas story. We often overlook the small details because we see them as scene-setters for the main performance. In certain respects this is true, but primarily this is not the case.

The gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus were written in a time and context were a birth narrative was an actual literary genre. Today you might find ‘romance’, or ‘murder mystery’ in a bookshop but 2,000 years ago you would have found different categories including one called ‘birth of the heroes’.
In ancient culture, both Jewish and non-Jewish (which was mostly Greek, or Hellenic), these stories were essential if someone was to be considered a person of importance. The Bible itself contains many birth stories and genealogies, especially for some of its most important characters. Outside of the Bible you will find many Greek stories of gods and heroes and they would almost certainly include the story of the birth, and some important detail which would say something about the god or hero.
It was into this culture that the birth narrative of Jesus was presented and this is helpful to know when reading the stories, because it means that every detail is intentional and carries meaning.

Once you discover this and re-read the gospel accounts of the birth narratives, found in Matthew and Luke, you start to see amazing depth, colour, detail and patterns which you may not have seen before because you simply skipped over them.

This Advent may you read the stories of Jesus’ birth with fresh eyes and through a new lens of meaning.
May you see new things and discover amazing truths that take you deeper into the knowledge of Christ and God’s redemptive plan for the world.
May you know that the ‘small details’ of your own life are as essential to your story as the content and the big scenes.

One of the images of Advent which is often bypassed is that of the pregnancy itself. Often in the Advent narrative the pregnancy features only in its final stages as Mary gives birth to Jesus in Bethlehem, having travelled a great distance fully pregnant.

Overlooking the pregnancy is to overlook one of the most wonderful and beautiful parts of the story – that of the womb. In Luke’s gospel we discover an amazing story where Mary, having consented to the Holy Spirit conceiving Jesus in her womb, goes to visit her aunt Elizabeth who is also pregnant through a miraculous gift. The stand out part of this story is what happens in the womb. In a world without ultrasound scans we get an insight into what is going on inside two wombs.
“41 And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, 42 and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! 43 And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? 44 For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.” (Luke 1:41-44 ESV)

There is a mysterious communication which takes place so that John, in Elizabeth’s womb, is aware of Jesus in Mary’s womb and leaps for joy!
That joyful leaping in the womb also causes the Holy Spirit to fill Elizabeth so she can speak those beautiful, poetic, prophetic words.
Elizabeth’s awareness of the unexpected miracle of Mary, a girl, being pregnant with the Messiah comes from her womb through one of the most natural acts during a pregnancy, a baby leaping in the womb.

Not all of us have wombs (I checked with a Dr to verify this!) and not all of those who have wombs have experienced pregnancy, but there is in all of us a kind of ‘womb’ in our souls which is a place of nurturing, a space for growth, where God comes to inhabit as a new life within us. Like Elizabeth, when Jesus comes near to us we experience a kind of ‘leaping’ in our ‘wombs’ of exciting expectation that Jesus is coming.

This Advent may we be like Elizabeth and experience the overwhelming response in our ‘womb’ of Jesus coming near.
May we be filled by the Holy Spirit and hear Elizabeth’s words speaking to us as we reflect that Christ is in us, the hope of glory – “blessed is the fruit of your ‘womb'”.
May our souls be a welcoming place for the indwelling of God and may we be enlarged in the waiting this Advent.