The Gospel -- A Scandal from the First

He was conceived by an unwed mother in a comparatively poor family.  The scandal in her small town probably shamed her entire clan.  Her fiance nearly broke off their engagement in shame.  She didn't get a baby shower, because all her well-behaved friends deserted her.  When the time came to deliver her baby, there was no midwife, no adoring friends to fight over who got to hold the new baby first, nobody to bring in meals for the new mother.  Jesus' first look at our world took in the inside of a barn, which might even have been a cave hollowed out in the soft limestone, thick with cobwebs, dust and lamp smoke -- even worse than the kind of place Bob Vila sees on "This Old House."  

Angels told people about this newborn king.  But they didn't give their good news to the city fathers, or the local judges or priests or teachers, whose reputations could have generated welcome and notoriety for the newborn.  Instead, the heavenly messengers gave the word to shepherds, who were not only smelly, but generally seen by the good townfolk as just barely on the right side of the law, not to be trusted.  So even the first witnesses to the Messiah's birth were outcasts.  What a scandal!

So it shouldn't have been any surprise, when Jesus started preaching, that he spent time with prostitutes, tax collectors, fishermen, and other disreputable types.  When Jesus told the parable of the wedding banquet in Matthew 22, all the 'good and bad' of the town were invited to the party, because all people need the Father's love.  He took heat from the religious establishment for getting too close to sinners.  They accused him of the same kind of sins as those he was around, but they had it wrong.  He was there to show all of them -- the religious posers and the honest sinners -- that Father God loved them, and the best way to do that was to spend time with them so they'd see as well as hear his message.  And he said, plainly, in Luke 19:10 that he came "to seek and to save the lost."  That was a scandal to the religious leaders, who assumed that good religious people should only be around other good religious people. 

Why all this?  Because if Jesus, the Son of God, had been born to a princess in a king's palace with royal attendants and gifts from Nordstrom's, and a scholarship to the best rabbinical school, then we could assume that he came only for the powerful and religious.  But grace, by nature, is scandalous!  God has adopted -- given complete forgiveness and acceptance into his own circle of love, without reservation -- to everyday sinners and losers like me and like you, through Jesus, freely.  If you don't understand that scandalous grace, can we talk?

God's scandal of grace was made plain in Jesus.  Now, most people don't believe God could possibly love somebody as messed up as them.  I was in the front of the line on that one.  But Jesus proved God loves us, by a humble birth in uncomfortable circumstances, and by scandalously accepting with open arms all the broken, messed-up people he could find.  He already loves you, right where you are. 

And that's the real meaning of Christmas.