Christmas Card Mysteries: No 7

It is rehearsed almost to the point of irritation that there was 'no room for them in the inn'.  And I write that as the chair of a charity that helps the homeless and lonely.  The near irritation derives from the patently obvious fact that it is far more significant that Jesus died deserted than that he was born 'not in the inn' though the latter is admittedly a portent of his greater rejection.

Unfortunately most Christmases are darkened by world events and it is also a cliched truth that Jesus's family were forced to flee their country.  Again, it was not general world politics but actual human hatred directed at king Jesus that is reason for the story, but it still reminds us that Christ is more easily seen in the tents than in the palaces.

Anyhow, welcome to my latest Christmas Card Mystery.  Mystery No 6 had disappearing shepherds.  This card catapults Christ beyond the experience of a humble birth and a toddler refugee experience: it makes him an orphan.  It's great news for Barnardos fundraising department.  Less good for the Catholic devotion to BVM*  who it seems, with Joseph, has left the kid in the hay in the open air to be rescued by passing shepherds and wise men.

And you thought parenting in 2016 was bad?

*Blessed Virgin Mary for the non-liturgical reader

Bunched

A disconcerting life-fact is the way that the truth of our thoughts comes out a little more when we are wound-up than when we are calm.  My mother has always sounded more Welsh (occasionally repairing into Welsh words even) when she is more worked up.

Yesterday, in the frenetic atmosphere of Prime Ministers Questions (an atmosphere that he himself has encouraged however) Mr Cameron splurged out his collective noun for migrants trying to reach Britain from their staging post in the Calais area.  A bunch of migrants, he called them.

It was part of an insult thrown at Jeremy Corbyn who is unlikely to be much affected by any more insults.  However, plenty of hearers concluded that it was more of an insult to the people wanting to migrate.  There was added poignancy on Holocaust Memorial Day as no other day of the year more accurately reflects the dehumanising of groups of people than that day.  In Jerusalem great care is taken to record as best as is possible the names of everyone who was killed in the Holocaust precisely because in their death they were simply a bunch of Jews.  Here is the Hall of Names:

I am struck by the story told by the Lord Jesus.  (He, remember, was a Nazarene [i.e. one of the bunch from grotty Nazareth] - oh, and God manifest in the flesh).  There were, his story goes, a bunch of sheep.  Strangely the shepherd - the god-figure - leaves that bunch and goes across hill and valley to find one lost sheep.

So it wasn't the outsider that was God's bunch but those in the fold.  Kind of like Ali (who has a degree in Economics and a masters in Business and who owned a chain of supermarkets in Syria) who is on Calais waiting to join a bunch of Britons, David.