Word for the Week: Going Home for Christmas
Going home! Back to those who recall our first words, back to those who reduce all our achievements to a family trait – ‘You talk just like your Uncle Jack!’
The day comes, however, when we are the ones who host the incoming wanderers, who see the familiar family features in the newest toddler, who tell stories to children’s children about the past, when they come home.
Luke in his gospel gives us the fullest version of Jesus’ birth. Then, in the third chapter, before he tells us what Jesus said and did, he stops the story and gives us a very long genealogy showing where Jesus belonged in the family history, taking his ancestors right back to Genesis. He explains why Joseph goes back to Bethlehem. This narrative pattern comes over and over again in the Bible, recalling fathers and grandfathers, and occasionally grandmothers, setting down the limits of home, where people belonged.
Everyone went to their own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child.
Luke 2:3-5
In a sense, Joseph went home for Christmas!
The confusion of hundreds of years of population growth, mobility and migration mean that whatever small kin-based ancestral homesteads there once were are mostly lost. Many of us do go home – to parents, to brothers and sisters, to other people's noisy children, to close friends. But many of us will be, for one reason or another, home alone this Christmas. And some, far from any kind of home, sleep on the streets of the world’s cold-hearted cities. Jesus left his Father’s ‘home’ at Christmas – chose exile, unknown in his own world, for love of us. For his sake, let’s open our homes to someone who needs a place at a crowded Christmas table and give to the charities that take in the homeless this Christmas.
Margaret Killingray
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