Every Christmas for the last few years, I’ve enjoyed posting online one of my favorite contemporary works of art, “José y Maria,” by Everett Patterson. It is a modern retelling of the Nativity story, featuring a young man and woman looking for lodgings in our time.
The artist has filled his image with creative nods to the original Nativity story. Maria, clearly pregnant, wears a sweatshirt from “Nazareth High School.” while sitting on a children’s donkey ride. Waiting outside a grocery or liquor store, José and Maria are surrounded by halos made from the circular signs in the window. Also in the window are advertisements for “Weisman” cigarettes, “Good News” candy bars and a cleverly placed neon sign for “Starr Beer,” a stand-in for the Star of Bethlehem. Across the street, in front of “Dave’s City Motel” (City of David, in case you missed that) is a “No Vacancy” sign. A notice for the motel’s new manager is missing an “A” so the sign reads “New Manger.”
In the past, I delighted in finding the clues and almost every year spied something new. But there is more to his drawing than that. The deeper meaning is that Joseph and Mary were, like so many people today, struggling and desperate during their journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, as recorded in the Infancy Narratives in Luke’s Gospel.
Now, there is some question among scholars over whether Joseph was poor. The Gospels tell us that Mary’s husband worked as a tektōn, which is often rendered as “carpenter,” but could also be translated as a “construction worker,” “handyman,” “builder” or even “day laborer.”
But given the demographics of Nazareth, a poor, backwater town of only 200 to 400 people (“Can anything good come from Nazareth?” asks Nathanael in his famous put-down), we can be fairly sure that Joseph wasn’t rich. Neither was Jesus, another tektōn. When Jesus first proclaims his identity as the Messiah, the earliest Gospel, Mark, has the crowd in Nazareth saying, “Is this not the carpenter?” Later Gospels seem to soften this, saying, in Matthew, “Is this not the son of the carpenter?” and in Luke, “Is this not the son of Joseph,” as if distancing Jesus from his profession.
There is also some debate over whether or not Joseph and Mary, as well as Jesus, who would later flee their home out of fear of Herod’s murderous designs on infants in Bethlehem, qualify as refugees or migrants. The classic definition of a refugee comes from the United Nations: “A refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war, or violence. A refugee has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.” That certainly seems to describe the Holy Family.
Joseph and Mary were, like so many people today, struggling and desperate during their journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem.
Nonetheless, some people argue that since they are not technically leaving the boundaries of the Roman Empire, they are not really fleeing their “country.” But, as I wrote a few years ago, since they were journeying from Judea to Egypt, it’s hard to imagine Joseph and Mary not feeling that they were leaving their homeland for fear of persecution. This is one reason that so many of the Masses “For Refugees and Exiles” use the story of the “Flight into Egypt” as the Gospel reading.
Even after 2,000 years the Christmas story can, and should, still shock us. Joseph and Mary came from a marginal town. “All archeological evidence from the Roman period,” say the authors of Excavating Jesus, a book on the archeological finds from Jesus’s time, “point to a simple peasant existence in Nazareth.” These are people living on the edge: on the move, frightened and worried. And when they finally reach their destination, Jesus is born into a dirty, messy, chaotic place—a stable. The Son of God comes to us in the most vulnerable way possible—as an infant, totally reliant on Mary and Joseph. He is then laid in a manger, where farm animals have just had their noses and mouths.
These days many people can identify with Joseph and Mary. A few weeks ago, I was speaking with a business executive who said that in his company was a man who had fled from anti-LGBTQ persecution in his home country. A priest-friend recently told me that he estimated that some 60 percent of his parishioners were undocumented migrants. Both of these groups, along with many others, in different places and for different reasons, feel hunted.
Yet God is with them, on their side, as God was with Joseph and Mary. And God would enter their lives, enter our lives, in the most profound way possible: as Jesus. For the rest of his earthly life, the Son of God would always take the side of those who were marginalized, forgotten, hunted, persecuted, abandoned.
My prayer for all those people at Christmas is that they know that Jesus came into the world among this hunted family, took the side of the marginalized and is with you. He is Emmanuel, God with us. He is God with you.
