Three Journeys

‘A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year for a journey, and such a long journey ...’

The opening lines of T S Eliot’s famous Christmas poem about the Magi, but words that I’m sure must have been echoed by thousands of travellers this day as they have peered through windscreen wipers at mile after mile of wet roads, before finally clambering from their cars, lugging suitcases indoors through the rain, and shaking themselves dry in some welcoming hallway. ‘Just the worst time of the year for a journey, and such a long journey ...’

Nick, my brother in law there, and Carla have travelled here all the way from Greenwich; and for all I know there may be others here tonight who have had equally difficult and arduous journeys.

But however difficult and arduous some of today’s journeys might have been, I would suggest they have not been half as difficult or half as arduous as the one we’ve just heard about in the gospel when ‘Joseph ... and Mary ... went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem.’

The ‘up’ in that sentence might suggest that Joseph and Mary travelled north from Nazareth to Bethlehem, but if you know your Holy Land you will know that the opposite was the case. ‘Up’ is used there in the way we use it when we talk of going ‘up’ to London. Bethlehem was only five miles from Jerusalem, the capital city of Judea, so you went ‘up’ there from Nazareth even though you were heading south.

That journey is, of course, a famous one and I have no doubt you have all received several cards this Christmas depicting it in its familiar form. Here is one that Yvonne and I received. It shows Joseph striding out purposefully along a presumably moonlit road. He is leading a donkey on which there sits his betrothed wife, Mary, and he is wearing a sumptuously-embroidered scarlet cloak over a robe of green and dazzling gold. For once, he’s carrying a stave rather than the shepherd’s crook the artist usually gives him. And there’s Mary, dressed, as always, in blue and, as always, showing no sign whatsoever of her pregnancy, even though she’s supposedly in her ninth month. And, oh yes, they don’t have a scrap of luggage between them, not even food or water for their journey.

So much for the fiction, what of the reality? Well, for a start, let’s look a little more closely at the couple themselves. Mary and Joseph were both Jews, and Mary had fallen pregnant during her betrothal to Joseph, but we know that in those days a Jewish girl was betrothed as soon as possible after her twelfth birthday and that betrothal lasted for only about a year ... So Mary was almost certainly no more than 13 years-old when she made this journey to Bethlehem. But we also know that if Joseph was established as a carpenter and about to marry, he is likely to have been at least thirty, and possibly quite a bit older.

Furthermore, if Joseph did indeed possess a donkey — by no means a certainty for a couple of as impoverished as we know these two to be — he, Joseph, would have been the person riding it, not Mary. I quote from Ralph Gower’s authoritative Manners and Customs of Bible Times: ‘If Joseph had taken the position ascribed to him by many artists, of walking beside a donkey that was carrying Mary, he would have been the laughing-stock of his contemporaries.’

Jewish men loved and respected their wives more than most men in those days, but nevertheless the wife was subservient in all things — certainly in matters such as who should sit on a donkey ... And Mary’s pregnancy, despite being so far advanced, would not alter that. There were no ‘new men’ in those days.

So imagine, if you will, a 13 year-old Mary, heavy with child, walking beside a donkey laden with Joseph’s tools of trade and all their meagre possessions, Joseph sitting atop, both of them dressed in plain homespun brownish garments. See them leaving Nazareth to the sniggering of neighbours who saw only a girl in disgrace and deserving of death by stoning; and see them heading first of all towards the east, to drop down from the hill country into the Jordan valley where they would cross the river before heading south.

The journey was one of ninety miles and would take a minimum of three days; and it would be fraught with dangers as well as discomforts. There were bandits to be avoided as well as the lions, bears and jackals that roamed the Jordan valley. Mary and Joseph would almost certainly sleep rough, shivering under the stars, for there were few inns to speak of, and they were places of ill-repute where you stood a better chance of being robbed and getting your throat cut than if you stayed out in the open. And all they would have to eat until their journey’s end would be the bread, parched grain and dried fruit that they had set off with from Nazareth.

Journey’s end! In many ways, this particular journey’s end was the worst part of the whole journey. For, after crossing back to the west bank of the Jordan by way of the fords near Jericho, the two travellers had to make a tortuous, winding ascent of just over 4,000 feet to reach the hill-top village of Bethlehem.

That’s an ascent greater than Scafell, Helvellyn, Gable or any of the great peaks of the Lake District. No wonder that having achieved it ... on foot ... in the ninth month of her pregnancy, the time came for Mary to be delivered. ‘Just the worst time ... for a journey, and such a long journey ...’

But that night, as the moon looked down on the young woman frantically dragging herself into a cattle cave to give birth to her child, another long journey was drawing to its close too. And without that other journey, the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem and the birth at the end of it would have been of no significance or consequence whatsoever.

It is true that Joseph and Mary went up from Nazareth. But it is equally true — and this is the second journey I am referring to — it is equally true that Jesus came down from heaven. As we shall say together in a few minutes: ‘For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven; by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate of the virgin Mary and was made man ...’ Or as we sang it in our gradual hymn: ‘He came down to earth from heaven, who is God and Lord of all, and his shelter was a stable and his cradle was a stall.’

Without the coming down of God from heaven, the going up of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem means nothing. But with that coming down, the going up becomes the prelude to the most significant event in the history of the world.

I can, and I think I just have, described with some accuracy the ‘going up’ of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem; but that ‘coming down’ of Jesus from heaven ... that great descent ... is quite beyond my power to describe.

I can only borrow the language of St Paul who tells how Jesus, though he was in very nature God, did not regard equality with God something to cling onto, but emptied himself, made himself nothing, took the very nature of a slave, the lowest form of humankind, and was born in human likeness.

The picture is one of a laying-aside of majesty. ‘See within a manger lies, he who made the starry skies.’ It is a picture of the creator of the universe divesting himself of his power, his knowledge, his greatness and his glory, and stepping into his own creation, becoming embodied, incarnated, in those few warm ounces of flesh and blood and bones and hair that turned in Mary’s womb as she sank distraught and helpless onto the straw of that Bethlehem cave.

Why would God do such a thing? Midnight is not a time for carefully argued theology, so let a verse of that familiar carol with which we started our service tonight say it all: ‘Mild he lays his glory by, born that man no more may die; born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth.’ He came down that we, like Mary and Joseph, might go up ... not to the heights of Bethlehem but to the heights of highest heaven.

Two journeys. A journey from Nazareth and a journey from heaven. Ah, yes, but we are forgetting — there is a third journey. Remember the shepherds? ‘The shepherds said to one another, “Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.” And they went with haste, and found Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.’

A journey up, a journey down ... and now a journey to the meeting point of the two. A journey of faith.

A journey that takes place only if there is a willingness to believe that ‘unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour who is Christ the Lord.’ Without that belief, the shepherds would have stayed put on their hillside. But they did not stay there. They journeyed to the cave in Bethlehem. And that is the journey we are each invited to make this night, no matter how long or short the physical distance might be that we’ve already travelled to get here.

This third journey is a journey of the heart and mind and will. A journey which, if we are prepared to leave the hillsides of our souls to make it, will take us, in an instant and for ever, from death to life, from darkness to light, from this world that is passing away into the kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, born of Mary, born in Bethlehem, at the end of a long and difficult journey, this very night, 2000 years ago.