By Richard Groves
December 22, 2024
Winston-Salem Journal, Greensboro News and Record
Before there was “Silent Night, Holy Night,” before there was “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire,” before there were Christmas trees and nativity scenes on church lawns, there were the stories.
Before there was a Bible with two Testaments, before there were four Gospels, before Matthew and Luke took pen to papyrus, there were the stories.
They were told whenever believers gathered in the great cities of the day, Rome and Athens, and in small towns and villages to remember the birth of the one in whose name they gathered.
Wherever they gathered, they were a tiny, irrelevant minority. If there had been a census in 80 AD, under “Religion” they would have checked “Other.”
The stories they told were vivid, easily accessible to memory and imagination, filled with wonder, suspense, danger, and angels. Lots of angels, messengers from another realm who told secrets that only those to whom they were told were allowed to know.
An angel appeared to a young, soon to be mother, “great with child,” and to her “espoused.”
An angel appeared to poor shepherd boys who were watching someone else’s sheep on the third shift for minimum wage and told them that a baby would be born who was “Christ the Lord,” which said to the gathered believers, huddled before dawn out of fear, “When the Good News came, it came first to people like us.”
When a “multitude of heavenly hosts” sang, “Glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace, goodwill toward men,” the message was clear: The birth of a baby in a barn in a nothing little town in Palestine was, when seen with eyes of faith, a cosmic event.
The arrival of astrologers from “the east” introduced horror into what had been a simple, beautiful story. A wicked king plotted to do away with the newborn baby, but his evil plan was thwarted when the astrologers were warned in a dream.
What happened next is like a fairy tale that we don’t tell anymore. Like Hansel and Gretel, children who were abandoned in a forest and fell into the hands of a witch who had, shall we say, cannibalistic inclinations, but Gretel saved her brother by pushing the witch into her own oven.
We don’t tell that story much anymore, and we do our best to minimize the “slaughter of the innocents,” when the wicked king ordered the deaths of all children under two in Bethlehem. The ancients thought that was part of the story, a part that couldn’t be ignored simply because it offends.
Maybe they were right. Innocents are still being slaughtered, not by the handfuls as in Bethlehem but by the hundreds and thousands in Gaza and in Ukraine.
The stories the earliest Christians told to celebrate the birth of Jesus had a happy ending, as you might expect.
An angel – an angel yet again – warned the baby’s father, well, stepfather, strictly speaking, of the danger in Bethlehem, and the young family traveled to Egypt where they stayed until the wicked king was dead.
For two thousand years, believers have told those old stories.
They embellished them, of course. The Magi became Wise Men, though one questions their wisdom, given the most extravagantly inappropriate gifts in the history of baby showers. My guess is Mary kept the gold and re-gifted the frankincense and myrrh.
They gave them names – Gaspar, Balthasar, and Melchior – and said that they were from the “Orient.”
They told new stories, inspired by the old ones, painted pictures of Madonna and Child, composed carols, and made movies.
But at heart it was always about the old stories.
Christians gather today and will gather again on Christmas Eve in cathedrals and storefronts to tell the stories once again –about shepherd boys “watching o’er their flocks by night,” a wicked king demanding to know “where Christ should be born,” a desperate escape into Egypt, choirs of angels filling the darkened skies with song, and a young mother who “kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.”
Always the stories.
Richard Groves lives and writes in Winston-Salem.
When I Come To Be Old 