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The time came
Christmas morning reflections
While they were there, the time came for her to be delivered.
What time did you get up this morning? I suspect that the answer to that question very much depends upon your age. On Christmas morning, the time came means one thing to children and quite a different thing to parents. It also means another quite different thing to ministers who celebrated Midnight Communion on Christmas Eve and didn't get to bed much before two o'clock in the morning.
I have a very dim memory from when I was about six years old, waking my mother and father up at four o'clock in the morning with the question, "Has he been yet?" to be told, "No, go back to bed." But, of course, he had been, because there was a lumpy pillow-case by my bedside. "Well, go back to bed, anyway!" Hey-ho… Still, I had my revenge for their economy with the truth and got them out of bed about six o'clock. These days, I struggle to manage eight-thirty on Christmas morning, and even then I spend the first quarter of an hour bumping into the furniture and wondering where I am.
For mothers, the time came means a very specific thing. It is the beginning of the experience that you knew would come at the end of the nine months, but now, remarkably, overwhelmingly, it is here, and the line in the marriage service that nobody interprets fully is about to come to pass: "The two shall become one"… or, in the case of twins, two… more! During the course of my ministry, several people have expressed surprise that I knew precisely that the Feast of the Annunciation is always celebrated on March 25th. Well, count on nine months, and what day do you arrive at? Indeed, the time came.
Where does the time come? Well, that depends entirely upon where you happen to be when the time does come. Mary just happened to be in that unimportant, little-regarded town of Bethlehem – little regarded save for the fact that the prophet Micah had said: "But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth for me that is to be the ruler in Israel." My wife gave birth in the town where they make Shredded Wheat, Polyfilla wallpaper paste, and the anti-anxiety drug Vallium. There, the time came for her to be delivered.
Our text is only one verse of scripture from the whole of the bible, but when you hear it read, you know exactly to whom it refers: While they were there, the time came for her to be delivered. It does not refer to my wife, nor to your wife, nor to any other mother in human history, although by their very motherhood they are all one with Mary and with Eve. It does, however, refer to one young woman, sixteen years of age, who gave birth in a far away, insignificant town, to which she had been obliged to travel, for taxation purposes, with the man to whom she was betrothed to be married. We remember her, and celebrate that birth and the coming into the world of her child… It happened long ago, but we still celebrate it today. It was a birth of a child amongst millions, when measured against the whole tapestry of human history, but what made it unique was that it was the birth of a child for millions. It happened in Bethlehem, precisely when the time came for God's plan of reconciliation to be put into action.
You can picture the scene. Saint Luke tells it for us simply, no doubt drawing on what Mary herself, as an old lady revered in the early Christian community, shared with them about the beginnings of the story. Like all mothers, she would hold her new born baby in her arms, the child whom she and Joseph knew they must call Jesus, and wondered, "What shall my child be?" But his name revealed what he would be, for Jesus means, "God saves". About thirty-three years later, on a hill outside a city wall, the time came when he was to live up to his name…
That, however, is a story for another time, but it is not unconnected with the story that we tell today.