The Biblical scholar Christine Hayes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo-YL-lv3RY&list=PLh9mgdi4rNeyuvTEbD-Ei0JdMUujXfyWi remarks that the origin story of the God of Israel is in marked contrast to the origin stories of the other religious traditions contemporary with it in the ancient near east: In the other origin stories Gods are often shown to be fighting or quarrelling, stars are created by bodily fluids of one sort or another leaking across the skies, or perhaps they are jewels spilt from a great store… but the origin story of the ancient Hebrew people starts from nothing.
There is absolutely nothing, as far as nothing can be described:
darkness and void –
and out of this only a voice
that speaks with the mildest command imaginable:
let be …

The motif of nothing being the most hopeful source is continued very frequently if you care to look for it in the scriptures: an obvious example being Moses whose mother, fearing the baby will be slaughtered by the dictatorship of the day, hides him in a basket in the rushes where he is found by the Pharaoh’s daughter.

Moses is an Egyptian name meaning ‘the Son’ or Son of. Rameses means son of Ra. The son of …

So the Gospel writers Mathew and Luke – the only two who write birth narratives, have a tradition to write from when they insert their nativity stories, and good reason to emphasise the lowliness of Jesus origin. Quite apart, that is, from the birth narrative of Isaiah who writes of the holy ‘Messiah’ or chosen one, a persecuted outsider who will be ‘the baby of a girl’, and a representative of God in human form – the embodiment of God. Emmanuel – God with us – (that we sang about in Veni Emmanuel in our first advent service).

There are so many clues to the ongoing story to come in these birth narratives: the farm animals; Donkeys and asses, that keep reappearing in the narrative of Jesus life, pregnant Mary is carried on one and rebellious Jesus rides one into his destiny.
The Shepherds who adore him, are representatives of outsider culture but also representatives of the displaced, the herders overtaken by agriculturalism.

Of course a donkey also does something else for the story – introduces an element that is not only lowly but slightly bathetic, slightly absurd.
Jesus uses the unbroken colt to ride into Jerusalem as an act of political satire: Roman Emperors would triumphantly ride in on great white chargers, hauling captive slaves, so in the account of Matthew Jesus overturns this with a different, scriptural tradition: “Tell the city of Zion, Look, your king is coming to you! He is humble and rides on a donkey and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” Zecharia 9:9

Throughout the Gospel accounts, Jesus’ default mode is to confound expectation – he finds ways of slipping between extremes that are presented to him in every instance – evading the traps set for him by the literalists and fundamentalist academics of his time by ambiguous fuzzy and equivocal turns to wrong foot his persecutors time after time, ‘render unto caesar’, ‘turn the other cheek’, ‘go the extra mile’, ‘give up your coat’, ‘throw the first stone’ – all deftly parodying the expectations of his interlocutors, resisting resistance itself and resisting the rigidity and egoistic pompousness inherent in all violence … remidning us that humility is, or can be, a superpower too, a reminder for us perhaps, right now as ‘culture wars’ goad us into picking inflexible sides on every available issue you can name: wearing a mask? Remainer or remoaner? taking your vaccine? inherently racist? or a bigot?
As the culture becomes increasingly obsessed with these tribal distraction techniques to navigate chaos these issues present themselves evermore forcefully, I ‘ve written about this tendency prevalent in religious culture now to unconsciously mimic the self righteousness of our puritanical past , but it hadn’t really occurred to me before that this is in its self replay of the gospel stories of Jesus’ ways of defusing the puritanical literalism of religion where it existed in his own context: he subtly mocks and evades instead of feeding confrontation:

Walter Wink writes:

Jesus in effect is sponsoring clowning. In so doing he shows himself to be thoroughly Jewish. A later saying of the Talmud runs, “If your neighbor calls you an ass, put a saddle on your back.”

Song: Send in the Clowns Stephen Sondheim
The Powers That Be literally stand on their dignity. Nothing takes away their potency faster than deft lampooning. By refusing to be awed by their power, the powerless are emboldened to seize the initiative, even where structural change is not possible. This message, far from being a counsel of perfection unattainable in this life, is a practical, strategic measure for empowering the oppressed. It provides a hint of how to take on the entire system in a way that unmasks its essential cruelty and to burlesque its pretensions to justice, law, and order.
To risk confronting the Powers with such clown-like vulnerability, to affirm at the same time our own humanity and that of those we oppose, to dare to draw the sting of evil by absorbing it—such behavior is unlikely to attract the faint of heart. But to people dispirited by the enormity of the injustices that crush us and the intractability of those in positions of power, Jesus’ words beam hope across the centuries. We need not be afraid. We can assert our human dignity. We can lay claim to the creative possibilities that are still ours, burlesque the injustice of unfair laws, and force evil out of hiding from behind the facade of legitimacy.

Jesus instinctive tactics are tactics of powerlessness, he “collapses the narrative”, confounds everyone’s expectations by doing something radically spontaneous and unsettling.

Now advent is underway, and in our culture the deep advent fasting of the medieval church is pretty much forgotten, but there is something surprisingly joyous that can remind us that all is yet well with the world that refuses to take itself tooo seriously, santa’s on park runs, remind us that our way has refused the temptation of puritanism, and evades, God willing, the temptation of self righteousness.