Christmas -- the Rest of the Story (part 1)

My last posting, Christmas Story, was a prose-poem outlining the basic elements –the persons and places—of the Christmas story as the gospel writers Matthew and Luke recorded it.  A little more background adds meaning to this great event. 

 

Foremost is the doctrine taught by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that there is a ‘pre-existence,’ or better, a pre-mortal existence (a heaven, if you will) –a place of our spirits who reside in the presence of God, our Father.  That would explain where the angel (a spirit person with divine authority) in the person of Gabriel came from and from where came the angelic host who appeared to the ‘shepherds, abiding in their fields by night’ . . . ‘praising God and saying Glory to God in the highest , and on earth peace, good will toward men.’

The superlative message of Gabriel to Mary and Joseph and Elizabeth and Zacharias, as well as to the angelic choir came by way of assignment from God the Father.

The timing of the birth event, as the Latter-day Saints believe, occurred  in the springtime, not in the cold of winter. (Celebration of Christ’s birth in the winter is a vestige of an earlier pagan worship of Mithra, ‘god’ of light, and later by the Romans of Sol, their sun ‘god.’)  That is why the shepherds were so attentive to their sheep—even at night.  It was birthing time.  They were watching for the firstborn of each pair of twins (the sheep frequently had twins), and if it was an unblemished male it would be chosen for the Passover sacrifice which was also at that time of year.  It was, indeed, Jesus, the unblemished male, of whom the lambs were but symbols, who would be the real sacrifice for Israel and all mankind thirty-three years later.

Crowds of faithful Jews came to the Holy City of Jerusalem, in the purlieu of the temple, to celebrate the Passover at this time of year.  Bethlehem, the ancient City of David, the king from long before, was only six miles from Jerusalem and so tried to accommodate the overflow crowds.  And Bethlehem (house of bread—from which would come Jesus, the ‘bread of life’) was the place of ancestry of both Mary and Joseph (who were both of the royal Davidic line) to which they would travel to register for their census taking.

And the wise men from the east?  They came months later in response to the star they followed and the ancient prophesies that they had read and believed in.  Prophets of much earlier times, on both hemispheres, had prophesied of the birth of the Messiah in Bethlehem of Judea.  The costly gifts they brought the new-born king probably supplied means for the little family to escape jealous Herod’s wrath by a sojourn in Egypt until they could safely return to Nazareth, in the north, from which Mary and Joseph had come. 

 

But all the drama and pathos of this story of nativity is only prelude to the transcendent  reason the babe of Bethlehem came to this earth a little over 2000 years ago.  This story of Jesus thirty-three years later eclipses even the miracles surrounding  His birth, the first Christmas.

We will speak of this on my next posting; we will pick up yet more golden threads of the tapestry of ‘the rest of the story.’

May Christmas have more meaning to you this year than ever before as Christ is restored to the center of your celebration.