They made a nine months' pregnant lady do what now?

Maybe it's (past) time to get mad at the Christmas story

When my mom went into labor with me―in mid-December, thirty-mumble-mumble years ago―the hospital’s labor & delivery unit was full. “There’s no room at the inn; it’s almost Christmas!” the doctor joked. (Did my mom find it funny? I’m not sure I would, in that moment!)

I feel like the story of Mary and Joseph finding no room in the inn for Jesus’ birth (see Luke 2:6-7) is often told as a cute one. They laid him in a manger, surrounded by sweet, soft, pettable farm animals. Omg, isn’t that totes adorbs?

Aww the cute sheep, so soft, so sweet! / Photo by Dan Kiefer on Unsplash

Okay, maybe it’s not always told quite like that. Maybe sometimes it’s more like: Omg, can you imagine how stressful that would be? How unfortunate that they couldn’t find room at the inn. How unlucky that all the rooms were full. But it just goes to show how our God came into this world humbly, doesn’t it? Again: How nice. How sweet.

I think there’s something to be said for God entering our world in humble circumstances, for sure. But this year, as I read these stories, I also find myself asking this: Did the circumstances have to be as they were?

Any given town tends to have enough inns (or hotels, Airbnbs, etc.) for a normal number of travelers at any given time. It’s only during unusually crazy times―say, if a city hosts the Super Bowl or the Olympics―that lodging is overrun and visitors can’t find a place to stay.

So, what’s up with Bethlehem in the Christmas story? Why weren’t there more inns, or more rooms in these inns? It feels unlikely that they lacked room to welcome travelers with a warm bed and a roof over their heads the vast majority of the time.

But this was no ordinary time.

The Roman government had ordered a census (see Luke 2:1-5). Everyone was forced to return to their ancestral hometowns and be counted. Or else…what, exactly? I’m not sure. But when we’re dealing with the Roman Empire, I’m not sure I want to know. (See, I really do think about the Roman Empire all the time.)

There were likely no exceptions; otherwise, I imagine Mary and Joseph would have taken one. She was close to full-term pregnant. And, as my good friend had to gently remind me a couple years ago when I suggested a few possible dates for a Zoom baby shower, ranging up to a couple weeks before her due date―it’s not at all uncommon for babies to arrive up to a month early.

Mary could have easily gone into labor on that week-long-ish journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem. And that’s not to mention the difficulties of traveling―by foot or donkey, not by Tesla―ninety miles while carrying a whole little human in your body, even if everything goes completely smoothly. So uncomfortable, to put it ridiculously mildly.

The standard justification for all of this, at least in the evangelical circles I’ve been a part of, is that Jesus had to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the messianic prophecies. And that’s all fine and good. But it isn’t the immediate reason that Mary and Joseph made the journey, at least as Luke tells the story.

Mary and Joseph made this brutal journey―one that no nine months’ pregnant woman should ever have to make―simply because the government ordered them to.

It was this guy (Caesar Augustus)’s fault that Mary had to go through what she did / Photo by Clemens van Lay on Unsplash

The empire had its own agenda, which had nothing at all to do with the health and safety of a woman. It didn’t care about her experience, how miserable she might have been. It didn’t care, as gender studies professor Susan M. Shaw notes in this thoughtful recent Advent reflection, that Mary wouldn’t be surrounded with the comfort and support of her familiar community at home. It didn’t even care if she died because labor happened on the road between towns with no doctors or midwives to care for her.

I don’t know about you, but I’m mad about this.

It was an arbitrary government order that didn’t even try to take Mary’s most basic and crucial needs into account. Things didn’t have to be this way.

So, sure, we can learn something from the humbleness of Jesus’ birth, and maybe by connecting it with messianic prophecy centered in a particular place. But I think we can also just get angry about parts of the story.

We can feel for Mary. We can imagine her real, embodied, lived experience―not just the nice shiny ethereal thought of baby God appearing in our world magically, as if a woman’s body had nothing to do with it.

I’m mad that she had to travel all that way, against her own best interests and the best interests of her baby. I’m mad that the government put her at such high risk so callously.

I’m mad about so many things. And I imagine I don’t need to spell out some of the parallels to our post-Roe world today.

What I appreciate about Luke’s Christmas story in the midst of this, then, is that he doesn’t gloss over any of it. Census? Yes, I’ll mention that. Arbitrary government orders? Uncomfortable and dangerous forced travel? No room in any of the city’s places of rest for travelers because the government told everyone to go back to their ancestral towns and now literally everyone and their sister is there and the infrastructure can’t handle it? Feels worth talking about.

He doesn’t directly rail against the Roman emperor. But I don’t think it would have been safe for him to do so. As with many places in the Christian scriptures, political references are perhaps a bit coded. They’ve giving a bit of a vibe of I don’t really need to get into trouble any more than I have to, here.

Luke says enough. We can read between the lines.

And as we do, we might ponder: Maybe our Christmas stories are meant not so much to give the impression that God perfectly orchestrated all of this to fulfill prophecy, but, rather, to show that even when governments give brutal orders, even when laws don’t care about women, even when authorities create unnecessary urgency and chaos and confusion and lack―even then, even then, even then, the Divine one shows up.

I wonder if this might give us some hope. We have so many things to be angry about, and we’ll likely have so many more things to be angry about in the coming months and years.

And yet, it is into this kind of world―our kind of world―that the Divine one is born. It is in this kind of world that God still shows up―wherever love is, wherever community is, wherever change is happening and goodness has not been stamped out completely.

All the Christmassy peace in the world to you all,

Liz