Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Holy Cross, Seend
Readings – Titus 2.11-14; Luke 2.1-20
“Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.”
Nativity (c. 1515-20), Lucas Cranach the Elder; in the collection of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden.
You couldn’t make it up, could you?
Let’s just say there was a young woman who was pregnant, and she was in the Brewery Inn, or The Raven, and she told everybody at the bar, “An angel appeared to me the other week, and he said I would get pregnant by being overshadowed by the Holy Spirit. Actually, I’m still a virgin.”
I think the reaction might be best encapsulated in a phrase much used where I come from: “Aye, yo-ho, love!”
You couldn’t make it up, could you?
A conceit developed in the 20th Century that people used to believe in concepts like the Virgin Birth because they were uneducated and superstitious; it was now time to abandon these silly religious ideas, the story went, because we were too clever and scientifically educated for mumbo-jumbo like that.
But people in the ancient world weren’t stupid. The Roman Empire, where these stories took place, was a sophisticated society, full of clever, well-educated, philosophers. It also had plenty of cynics who enjoyed picking apart supernatural stories as thoroughly as Derren Brown or Penn and Teller do today on their shows.
And even simple people knew where babies come from.
This wasn’t a story you’d invent if you wanted people to take you seriously. It’s not just that you couldn’t make it up, you wonder why anyone would make it up, in this way—unless it actually happened.
Now the shepherds were rough types. They weren’t respectable; they lived in the mountains for months on end, which meant they were never in a position to fulfil their religious or civic duties. They weren’t the sort of witnesses you’d want to have to call in your defence at a court case, with their rough accents and rough manners. You definitely wouldn’t invite them to a dinner party at your villa, because they stank of sheep. If you wanted to make up a story about a boy born to be king, you wouldn’t make shepherds the first witnesses to the birth, not if you wanted people to believe it. That would be even less the case if your story said this baby boy was actually God in human form—but we’ll come to that in a few minutes.
Now, they might not have been respectable, these shepherds, but they had seen it all up on those mountains. They weren’t naïve superstitious simpletons. They were tough, smart, people who knew how to deal – without any help at all – with a storm, an injured animal, or a marauding wolf. But when an angel of the Lord appeared to them “they were terrified”. This was something completely out of the experience even of tough guys who’d lived hard lives. These angels weren’t Disney figures—they made grown men, of the type who never like to show fear, quake with terror.
Now, you might decide you can believe Jesus was a good man, perhaps even the greatest human being ever to live, and also that our society should be formed around his teachings—but you can’t believe stories about angels and multitudes of heavenly hosts, let alone virgin births. I’m not going to try to change your mind, not this morning anyway, but just remember this: this story wasn’t spun to sound as plausible as possible to convince as many people as it could; it wasn’t even written to make the people in it look good.
Similarly with the circumstances of Jesus’ birth. This wasn’t a society where young men and women from good families put on the accents and mannerisms of the lower classes so they could pretend to be more cool than they actually were. It’s only very recently that humble origins became so valued that people started to fake them. In the ancient world, a great king definitely needed to come from the right sort of family; and if an actual deity was being born in human form—and those stories were definitely part of ancient mythology—they needed at least to have a royal parent on one side and ideally an actual god or goddess on the other. Achilles, Aeneas, Helen, and Hercules? All those lads and lasses had divine parentage.
None of them were born in a stable to a carpenter Dad after a shotgun marriage. If you were going to make up a story about a god in human form, you definitely weren’t going to have him the son of poverty-stricken craftsman.
Think of it in modern, marketing, terms. We all know it helps to have the right endorsements if you want people to buy your product. Sportspeople are very useful for that sort of thing today, as they seem to have been in the ancient world also. These days, you also want to get some music and acting celebrities to back your product, and maybe a few of the type of social media influencers who are famous mostly for being famous.
Luke having Jesus born in the way He was, to the people He was, first witnessed by… shepherds, is the ancient world’s equivalent getting your TikTok and Instagram endorsements done by a bloke who temped for a while as the office junior where you used to work and who has a website about his hobby of collecting snails.
You wouldn’t make it up. You couldn’t make it up.
Our first reading came from St Paul’s letter to a younger man called Titus, written towards the end of his life. When Paul had been a young man, he’d been a very successful religious entrepreneur — definitely the sort who’d have active TikTok and YouTube channels if he were around today. He was a clever lad who knew his holy books back-to-front, was known to high priests by name, and was capable of summoning mobs through his gifts with words and his connections. Yet he’d given it all up because of a strange encounter he’d had on the road to Damascus, when a flash of light and a strange disembodied voice convinced him to follow the risen Jesus, whose followers he had recently been encouraging his mobs to attack.
You’d say the bit about the blinding light and disembodied voice was a likely story, except for this. It didn’t do Paul any practical good. For the next twenty-five or thirty years, following Jesus brought Paul repeated imprisonments, kickings by mobs who ran him out of town—I mean, he’d lived through it all. Soon after writing this letter, following Jesus would see Paul executed in public. Yet he wasn’t resentful or bitter about all this; he didn’t regret following Jesus Christ or complain that he wished he’d lived his life differently. He was full of joy, encouraging his younger friend to live a self-controlled and upright life while he waited patiently for Jesus Christ to return in glory.
If it was all made up, surely they would have got something more out of it?—riches, fame, something positive? Successful modern invented religions like Scientology usually make money for their leaders; Christ’s early followers got gaolings and beatings even though they were trying to live lives of absolute respectability.
Here’s where it all comes together for me—two thousand years later we still gather to hear these familiar stories of the Christ-child in the stable, and the shepherds and the angels. Even when we dismiss it as the ancient equivalent of a Disney story, even when we strip all the hard bits out of it “because Christmas is for the kids” and reduce it to a Disney story, something draws us back to hear it, time after time. It’s almost as if it touches something in the depths of us, at the very ground of our being. It’s as if it’s a story that tells us things about the human nature and the nature of reality that we know to be true by instinct rather than intellect.
It’s almost as if there might be something in it after all. The fine details might be a bit ropey, and vary a little from one Gospel to the other, but it’s as if these things actually happened, more or less in the manner we heard this morning. Because you couldn’t make it up, and you wouldn’t make it up like this.
And now to our wonderful counsellor, mighty God, everlasting Father, to Jesus Christ the Prince of Peace, and to the Holy Spirit who overshadowed Mary, be glory in the highest, until the end of all ages. Amen.
Top image – Cranach, Anbetung Christi (1545); now hangs in a private collection.
