Our little God of little things — a Christmas reflection.
The donkey that carried Mary and our Lord. (Image by Dall-E.)
When I am not dealing with the data processing needs of my place of work, I spend the rest of my spare time volunteering as a high school speech and debate coach for my alma mater. Honestly, it is the thing that I do that brings me the greatest sense of meaning and purpose. There is something deeply moving about being involved in the lives of children; watching the large amounts of growth that occurs in them just over the span of a year, or even four, is something that reminds me even in my darkest times that there needs to be a god.
One of the boys I coach, Louis, is eager to win, and a hard-working orator. The category he competes in is called “Oral Interpretation of Literature.” Every year, he gets one piece of prose and one piece of poetry and his job is to deliver a reading of each piece such that it is convincing to several judges that he has masterfully delivered his interpretation. As anyone who teaches young people knows, one of the difficulties of teaching kids how to act is to strike an emotive balance between the explicit themes and the subtle ones in their acting. Kids almost always straightforwardly want to do a “sad” piece by being overtly and exaggeratedly sad, or dramatic pieces by screaming for five minutes straight.
One of the things that coaches have to often drive home for our kids is to learn to pay attention to the little details, and to find ways to highlight them amidst everything else that is going on. It is amazing what a slight pause, a shrug, or glance can do to improve the quality of the delivery of a poem, or what the drop of intonation at the end of just one sentence can do for a piece of prose. It is the little details that tell us so much about the characters and stories that these stories are trying to tell.
This year, Louis is reading a piece that was actually originally published on Tumblr called, “God of Arepo.” [1] As his introduction to the piece says, it is about the friendship that is built between Arepo, a sower, and the God that comes to live in the temple he builds; a little god, of little things. It is a beautiful piece about how Arepo the sower is devoted to his friend, a god who isn’t really a god of anything particularly useful. In the god’s own words, he is the god “of the fallen leaves, The worms that churn beneath the earth. The boundary of forest and of field.” The God summarily says of himself, “I am the god of a dozen different nothings.”
Yet, at the end of many trials and tribulations, we find that this god of the little nothings in life turns out to have been the god of something immensely beautiful: the God of Arepo, his devoted friend.
Now, you may be wondering: “Kevin, what does any of this have to do with Christmas?” I think it has quite a lot. You see, we too have a God whom I think we often imagine to be a big God of big things. After all, Jesus is king, and kings are mighty to rule. In fact this king of ours conquered death itself. Rightly so, we praise Jesus for his victories, his might, and his strength. But let us remember something else about our Jesus: he had a preference for the small, the overlooked, and the neglected.
Of course, we all know well when in Matthew 19:14, Jesus said, ““Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.” [2] We also know well the sermon on the mount when, speaking of the unclothed, the unfed, and the jailed, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” [3]
We are well acquainted with Jesus, then: the God who not only belittled himself to be one like us, but who came to be among even the least of us. Just like the god of Arepo, our God, too, is a devoted god; he too is a god of little things. But lest we risk centering ourselves in this narrative – and also to get back to the Christmas thing – let’s return to the story of our Lord, Jesus’ birth.
Turning away from the canonical Gospels, I point to the Proto-Gospel of James, an ancient text of early Christianity that remains widely influential in Mariology. It is from this text that early church traditions such as the perpetual virginity of Mary are asserted. Another such tradition is the name Anne given to Mary’s mother. Similarly, though maybe somewhat conspicuously in the popular Christmas imagination, this text is the source of the explicit image of Mary and Joseph heading to Bethlehem on a donkey. While this gospel is not advanced as canonical and has even been condemned by the church in the past, it goes without saying that so fixed in the imagination of the church’s tradition regarding the birth of Christ that Mary rode a donkey into Jerusalem, it may as well be gospel truth. (To be sure, it likely was the case that Mary and Joseph made use of a donkey to travel to Bethlehem for the census, so this evidence in this apocryphal text may indeed be legitimate.)
It is this donkey that I wish to dwell on tonight. Donkeys, interestingly enough, play something of a small recurring role in the canon of the bible. Even as early as the book of Numbers, God seems to take favor and even show mercy to donkeys, as is the case with Balaam and his own [4]. Even in the canonical gospels, we find that Jesus chooses to enter Jerusalem on a donkey [5] which itself was foretold by the prophet Zechariah! [6]
Clearly, even in all of creation, God’s eyes are not only on the sparrow, but even on the humble donkey. Not more than a beast of labor, it holds the attention of God’s eyes. God indeed raises up the lowly in this way, even the beasts. So it is unsurprising that God chooses to make his way into the world on the back of a donkey as well. What an honor it must have been for that animal to have borne on its back the king of all creation!
This Christmas, in a time of turmoil like the world has not seen before – when we are all somewhat connected by the anger we share, and burdens we harbor – let us be mindful that as Christians who are to model ourselves after Christ, we too are to pay attention to the small, the hidden, and burdened among us. Through our hands, Christ will magnify them as well. In our words, and in our actions, by choosing the least among us again and again, we choose “the little ones” that Jesus favors so dearly, and in doing so, share in his divine work just much as He takes part in our mundane labors. This is what it means to be a friend of Jesus.
What I want to reflect on this Christmas, with you all, is the profound humility that we find par exemplar in the life of Jesus; that the same God who rode into Jerusalem as the Messiah on the back of a donkey is the very same God who came into the world carried to his throne of hay by one as well. God has magnified even the lowliest of beasts, and so he does the same with us, creatures he has chosen himself to bear his witness throughout the world. What ecstatic joy it brings to be chosen by God to hold him in our hearts, and to carry him wherever we go! Yet at the same time, how humbling it is to know that we have been chosen because of our smallness.
This Christmas, like I remind Louis and the rest of the boys on the team, when we contemplate the Gospel, and when we imitate what we find in it, let us be sure to focus our attention to the small things where miracles most certainly are borne. Amen.
Notes
Tumblr user sadoeuphemist et al. “God of Arepo,” on Tumblr.com (2018). https://www.tumblr.com/writing-prompt-s/172811507450/threefeline-corancoranthemagicalman
Matthew 19:14, New Standard Revised Version Catholic Edition (NSRVCE)
Matt. 25:40
Num. 22:21-39
Matt. 21:1-8
Zech. 9:9