Advent Reader: An Ordinary Start

Luke 2:1-7

For roughly 600 years, the Roman census had been a ritual.

When people returned to their birth city, they would declare their family members and ages, as well as the value of all their assets.

Anything that they declared could be taken from them in taxes or tribute, and their own young men might be faced with conscription. The punishment for not declaring everyone and everything was confiscation and slavery.

The population surge in Jerusalem every 5 years must have been greater than ours during the August festival season!

Rooms were hard to find. People living nearby could reach Jerusalem sooner than Joseph and Mary, who moved more slowly because of her pregnancy.This was doubtless true for many hundreds of other couples.

It is both a very ordinary and inconvenient way for a baby to come into the world, in makeshift accommodation in an overcrowded town, serving a routine bureaucratic process.

It's hardly the miraculous start we might have expected, neither joyous and glorious, nor any harder than it was for a great many young families at the time.

Don't let the ordinariness and familiarity of the approaching season be a cause for distress or disappointment. The greatest thing that ever happened had a mundane and inconvenient start.

It gets much better!