When God Turned The World Upside

When God Turned the World Upside-Down Luke 1:1-12 United Christmas Eve Service First Church of Christ & Cascades Fellowship Christian Reformed Church Dec. 24th, 2004 It’s no secret that God seems a little on the extravagant side. Some would say he is down, right crazy. The things he does just do not make sense. Paul sensed this when he wrote to the Corinthian church, “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.” Take the Incarnation.

It is like God went out of his way to be utterly

unpredictable. Unconventional is one thing, fulfilling prophecy is another, but the Christmas story? You could study the Old Testament prophecies for a lifetime and not come up with the story Jesus’ birth. Oh, you could get some of the details right, but even your wildest guesses would never put Jesus lying in the feed trough of a cattle stall. The way God took on flesh and entered our world defies all logic, resists all reason. We are left with our mouths agape and our heads shaking, singing the refrain from a popular Christmas song, “This is such a strange way to save the world.” Phillip Yancey, in his book The Jesus I Never Knew, writes about when he began to notice the strangeness of the Christmas story. The realization came one year as the Christmas cards began pouring in. He was stunned to see how we have sanitized the Incarnation. Beautiful, snow-covered landscapes, warm

intimate regards of peace and good will, idyllic scenes of the holy family, scalps aglow with the glory of the Christ-child and faces serene. Yet, he said, “...when I turn to the Gospel accounts of the first Christmas, I hear a very different tone and sense mainly disruption at work.”i Yancey’s insight captivated me. Why do we work so hard to filter the Christmas story? Why not pictures of a dark, foul smelling animal shelter with a worried Joseph attending a terrified Mary and bawling baby boy? Or a picture of the Magi, laying low on the necks of their camels casting furtive glances behind them for any sign of pursuit? Why do we feel the need to make the story more palatable? I think the answer lay in the inner conflict the real story induces. We have trouble reconciling the image of an infinitely wise God acting in such a bizarre way. The problem isn’t with the story – it’s with us. It just isn’t the way we would do things. And so, we clean up the story to make it fit into our worldview. What we fail to realize is that God isn’t interested in fitting into our worldview. He wants us to conform to his. And so he infuses the Incarnation with spiritual truth – with a worldview in keeping with his holiness. It begins with the announcement to Mary and Joseph; two distant cousins of Israel’s greatest King in an obscure village noted more for its impiety than anything else. Can anything good come out of Nazareth? What an odd choice.

But the odd choices didn’t end there. It’s fascinating to see who ends up being pawns in this divine drama and who ends up in the inner-circle of divine favor – the ones God lets in on his covert operation. If we were to diagram a sure-fire plan that would ensure the maximum impact of a single birth, we would look at the powerful.

We would screen candidates based on spheres of

influence, genetic profiles, and on the ability to “Go shout it from the mountains.” We would focus on what the party brought to the table that increased the chances of success. God on the other hand chooses two young Hebrews, confused and frightened, but willing to do what God asks of them. Now, that’s no surprise. History reveals that God looks for availability rather than ability. But what is surprising is that God takes the most powerful man in the world, Caesar Augustus, and moves him like a pawn upon a chessboard. Augustus decrees the census that forces Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem, the prophesied place of the Messiah’s birth. Coincidence? I think not. Caesar must have thought he was being wise – profoundly so – calling for this headcount. In reality, he was a living example of the Proverbs 21:1, “The king’s heart is in the hand of the LORD; he directs it like a watercourse wherever he pleases.” Augustus, world ruler with power of life or death within his grasp was easily molded in the hands of God to fulfill his purposes.

But the surprises don’t end there. We have already discussed the manger – the feed trough in a foul-smelling cattle stall – but it bears a little more reflection. Think about the sanitation requirements today for bearing children. Even the most uninformed knows to call for clean sheets and hot water when a baby is about to be birthed. Yet, the best Joseph and Mary could hope for was clean straw – and we can’t even be sure about that. A normal birth in those days included a pack of midwives to encourage and protect. In what was likely a gated cave or hollow in a cliff, all Mary had was the rough hands of Joseph – the discharge of birth defiling them both. No wonder the Scriptures record Mary as “treasuring these things up in her heart.” Surely she must have wondered what God was up to. As if that were not enough, whom did God send as witnesses? Shepherds. Considered riff-raff by proper society, God proclaimed the news of the Savior’s birth to these men who lived in fields and smelled like sheep! Why?! And when kings did come, was it the kings of Israel or the high priest to anoint the future King? No. It was Gentile kings, men from far away. Was there even a prophet present to declare what God had done? No. It was if God were holding the silencing finger to his lips and saying, “Shhhh. This is our little secret.” The king of the known world reduced to a pawn, lowlifes elevated to royal courtiers; gentile kings enlightened to the birth of the Christ-child while Israel is left in the darkness of ignorance. Everything is upside-down in this story – not the way we would write it at all. What could we possibly gain from such a story?

I have wondered if Jesus ever reflected on the details of his birth. Nowhere is the truth “If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all” more aptly portrayed.

I have a feeling that the

shepherds who trembled in terror before the angelic hosts had a much better grasp than we do on Paul’s exhortation in Philippians 2:4-8, “Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others. Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death— even death on a cross! Shepherds, shunned by those they served. Who better to understand the significance of such an ignoble birth? How profound it must have been to realize that the birth of God in human flesh came in circumstances even lower than their own. How much easier it must have been for them later to hear the message that God came to be the Servant of all – even the Servant of the servants. We like to sing about the birth of the King. We focus on images of royalty and downplay the rude and filthy circumstances of the Savior’s birth. And rightly so – he is, after all the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. One day every knee shall bow and every tongue confess Jesus Christ is Lord. But let’s not forget that God turned the world upside down on that day. And with the Incarnation, the King of Glory was born the Servant of All.

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Phillip Yancey The Jesus I Never Knew “Chapter 2 – Birth: the Visited Planet” Zondervan Publishing House Grand Rapids, MI 1995 p. 29