12/29/2024 - Holy Family
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FAMILY - WONDER AND MYSTERY
No room at the inn.
No room anywhere.
They gave him the only place they could spare and the promised Messiah was born that night on the floor of a stable without any light where they cut the cord and cleaned up the mess and wrapped him in somebody's workaday dress and while Mary slept there, exhausted and cold, Joseph sat by feeling helpless and old.
This wasn't the way he had thought it would be when the angel had told him that destiny chose them to look after the Holy One.
No, this was a farce.
What God had done was to trust the care of the Savior instead to a man who could not even find him a bed.
If only he'd planned it more carefully then.
If he only could go back and do it again.
He turned round in his mind the ways he had blundered— then he looked at the infant and suddenly wondered if it all was a lie, if he was a fool
and the object of everyone's ridicule, if the dreams of the angels were tricks and not what they promised to be, and his anger grew hot when the shepherds burst in all breathless and wild and stopped in their tracks when they saw the child.
They shifted their gaze from the baby's bed and their eyes met his, and he nodded his head, standing awkwardly, not knowing quite what to do now they all knew for certain the story was true.
They stayed there for minutes. It might have been years.
Not one of them spoke. Their hopes and their fears were gathered around this helpless God as their minds tried to grasp what it meant.
Where he stood Joseph was silent as finally he saw this was how it was planned to be, that the smell and the dark and the dirt and the pain were not Joseph's mistake but God's choice once again: past midnight in Bethlehem, Joseph knew that men would be saved despite all they might do.
He could not control it.
He did not understand.
He felt like a baby himself in God’s hand.
He thought of his anger and flushed now with shame.
He remembered the angel had said that his name would be Jesus, God saves.