(UNDATED) The way the Christmas joke goes, Mary and Joseph were hoping for a girl.
Of course, that did not happen. The child that Scripture reports as born somewhere in the Middle East, maybe Bethlehem, was a bouncing baby boy. But you have to wonder what the world would be like if he were born a she.
Mary and Joseph’s story is the story of a million frightened others, huddled against the cold and dark, hoping, praying, that this little boy would secure their future. Little did they know that this precious child would touch so many men and, if truth be told, women.
We know, of course.
As evangelist Luke tells the nativity story, an angel let some shepherds in on the big event: “Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.” The one they’d all been waiting for was near, “wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.”
It was a pretty intense advance party, although we doubt Mary and Joseph heard it above the sounds of the squalling, squirming newborn on that cold night. Luke writes “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, `Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.'”
The parents surely missed the whole thing, so focused were they on the small fragile life before them.
The little one grew, they say, in wisdom, age and grace. He reached adulthood with a message, and he preached it three long years in harsh conditions. They say he even let women help.
That message has been repeated in different ways, but those angels put it well: peace on earth, good will toward men. As we sit upon the perch of history we know it’s been distorted and ignored, for men and more so for women.
Peace. There are no recorded wars in his lifetime. The Romans kept a lid on things. But in the last 100 years, some estimate that 165 million people, each a mother’s child, have died as a result of war and its effects.
Good will. “I care” is too often replaced by “who cares?” A mother’s son-a part-time security guard-trampled to death by marauding Wal-Mart shoppers gives new meaning to the term “rampant consumerism.”
But the angels are still there, still announcing, still suggesting we look up from our own concerns to see a hurting world. Too many mothers cannot feed their children. These countries have more that 50 percent unemployment: Zambia, East Timor, Turkmenistan, Zimbabwe, Liberia and Nauru. Those angels are announcing hope in the face of 20-something thugs on killing sprees, and bureaucratic waste and malaise.
Even so, there is great space for hope, in our hearts and in our heads, as Christmas plays out in cities, villages, and rural towns around the globe. While women in too many cultures are routinely degraded and denied opportunities to live better lives, the most powerful country in the world will send yet another woman as its senior emissary. Is there anything more hope-filled for the women told by church or state they are not full human beings and they do not image Christ?
That was the bottom line of that child’s message, after all. Every person is made in the image and likeness of God. The important thing is not that he was a boy, but that he was in fact a human.
Christmas is upon is. Let’s grab it with both hands and run with it. For unto us a child is born.
(Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of several books in Catholic Studies.)
DEADSB END ZAGANO
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