When was Jesus born?

 

I was asked that question once by an old and valued (and much missed) friend and teacher, Morrie Lord.

If I asked that today, since it's almost Christmas, it's easy to go with tradition and say December 25.

But anyone who has studied history knows that the historical Jesus was probably not born on that day we designate December 25, and probably not even in the year we designate as either 1 AD or 1 BC (most calendars do not have a year Zero).

So, when was Jesus born?

It’s one of those “trick” questions, isn’t it?

For example, I was once asked “How many stories are there in the Bible?” When I’ve asked that question, I usually get these looks from people who know there is some sort of trick answers, but can’t figure out what it might be. After all, there are 66 books that make up most of our Bibles.

But to say that means there are 66 stories discounts all the stories contained within those books. Somewhere along the way, monks or scribes or publishers decided the Bible could be more easily read if divided into chapters, and there are (by a quick search) 1,189 chapters in the Bible. Does that mean there are 1,189 stories? No, because some chapters are continuation of stories, particularly in the historical books.

Even to say each story – take the story of King David, for instance – is made up of individual stories: David as the shepherd boy; Davis slaying Goliath; David as the renegade running from King Saul; David as King …

But The answer – what might seem like the ‘trick’ answer – is that there is only one story in the Bible: the story of God. Christians believe the Bible is there to tell us about God and God’s relationship with mankind. If you should ever be asked “how many stories are there in the Bible,” you can smugly answer “One.”

That brings me back to the original question, “When was Jesus born?”

When asked, my mind went into historical overdrive. I knew the answer wasn’t December 25, 1 AD or 1 BC. That date was first made official by Pope Julius I in 350 AD, and codified, for lack of a better word, in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII as a reform of the Julian calendar.

I had read, somewhere along the way, of historians analyzing references to known historical events mentioned in the nativity accounts in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, and working backward from the estimation of the start of the ministry of Jesus; of studying astrological or astronomical alignments having to do with the “star” that the Gospels say led the Wise Men to see Jesus; or even using the idea of time of the year based on when shepherds might actually in the field “keeping watch over their flock by night.”

Historical accounts of the figures mentioned in the Gospels suggest the actual date might be been between what we now would call either 6-7 AD (based on the Census account, which the non-Biblical historian Josephus describes), or between 4-6 BC, which is when Herod – another prominent figure in the Biblical story – died.

There are other theories as well, based on other historical events.

As for the actual day, there is a lot of theorizing about December 25 based primarily on the winter solstice because of its symbolic theological significance. The theory is that because the solstice is when the “short” winter days (in terms of daylight) begin to lengthen with longer hours of sunlight, which represents the Light of Christ entering the world. (The Feast of St. John is June 24^th, the point in which the length of daylight begins to lessen, a reference to John saying of the “Light of the World,” “I must decrease, that He may increase.” See the significance?)

Other scholars suggest September; still others – including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) - say the birth took place in early to mid-April.

As I tried to come up with an answer to “When was Jesus born?”, my mind was racing with thoughts of AD and BC and December and September and April.

Yet the Apostle Paul, in the book of Galatians, gives this answer: “But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law …”

When was Jesus born? In the fullness of time.

It’s another of those “clever” answers that some of us might call a word game, like “how many stories are there in the Bible” and “who reigns in Hell?”

The "fullness of time" - when, according to His Sovereign plan, everything was in place for Jesus to become a babe, and set in motion the events that would change the world. 

But what struck me about the question was how often I, as a human of middling intelligence, so easily get caught up in minutia. Ask me a question, and I will analyze the answer to death, taking a very literal approach to every word of query.

Yet it occurs to me that God sees a bigger picture. We see the unfolding of history on a timeline, occurring sequentially because that’s how we live. God is timeless. Even the name He gives Himself to Moses, “I AM,” is present tense, suggesting to me that God has neither past nor future and all of eternity is one big “present tense” to Him. We humans measure time; to God, it simply “is.”

Which, as we approach another New Year, brings me to another phrase I find myself repeating more frequently in these days when things around us seem more disturbing, more disruptive to old-fashioned norms, more deadly even. You often hear people shake their heads and say, “The world is falling apart.”

To which I remind myself that, as a Christian, the Bible tells me the world is not falling apart; God’s plan is coming together.

When, you ask? 

In the fullness of time.

Disconnected

                 I was at the perfectly named “UBreakIFix” store, getting the screen on my cell phone repaired. They told me it would take a couple of hours, so I naturally asked, “Can you text me when it’s ready?”

                Uh, no. They were taking my cell phone.

                “Do you have another cell phone we can text?” I was asked.

                No. I used to have two – one for personal use, one for work – but since leaving that position, I no longer carried a second cell phone. I admit carrying two cell phones made me feel rather pretentious, but it was necessary.

                In the end, they said they’d email me when the phone was ready. The only problem with that, of course, was that I generally check my email on my phone. Checking it now would require being at home, on my laptop.

                No problem. As I walked out, I actually felt kind of free. No one could get in touch with me for the next few hours. Not only was I immune to phone calls, but no texts, either. If there was a disaster waiting to befall me, it would have to wait.

It felt good ... for a minute.

                Then I remembered I had no way to let my wife – the most important person to stay in touch with – know that I wouldn’t have my cell phone for a few hours. I should have texted her before I left, but didn’t think about it. Then I began to worry. What if she needed me? What if something happened and she couldn’t get me? Would she worry that something happened to me when I didn’t respond or answer her?

                It’s not exactly earth-shaking news to realize we’re so connected to those little "mini-me" computers we start to feel untethered from the real world without one.

There was a study done at Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson, Ca. called “Out of sight is not out of mind: The impact of restricting wireless mobile device use on anxiety levels among low, moderate and high users” published in the academic journal Computers in Human Behavior.

Half the students’ cell phones were taken away. The other half could keep their phones, but had to turn them off and set them out of sight. Each group was told to sit quietly during the study.

                According to the study, college students grew more anxious during the 75-minute experiment, where they were forced to sit with no distractions, even when they knew the phones would be returned. The effect was stronger on heavy and moderate users, whether their phones were in their possession or not.

                Another similar study took college students and divided them three groups and given a test. One group had their phones screen-down on their desks; the second had their phones in their pockets; the third were not allowed to have their phones at all.

Although very few students said they were distracted by their phones, the test scores followed an inverse relationship to how close the phone were to each student: on average, the closer the phone, the lower the grade.

These are just two of many such studies that show how our cell phones affect us, not just by the way we use them but by their mere presence. Even when we’re not using them, they have an effect on us because, consciously or unconsciously, we know they are there. As one writer said, we’re pulled into the orbit of our cell phones even when we can’t see them, when they aren’t even in use.

I wrote previously about sitting in a doctors’ waiting room, and how instead of the old-fashioned magazines scattered about, the room was devoid of reading material because everyone was on their phone and probably would not have looked at a hard-copy magazine anyway.

There is a verse in Romans (12:2) that Christians like to quote: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” Generally, we use it to remind us not to be seduced by what we call “the world;” that is, not to get caught up in materialism or let our morality conform to what seems to be generally accepted or as an encouragement to “think” on “higher things,” the things of God.

And while true, I wonder if we shouldn’t apply it to the way we’re so addicted to our cell phones, too.

I am not a Luddite, a person opposed to new technology or ways of working. As I pointed out, I am as dependent on my cell phone as anyone. And cell phones are just tools; there is nothing inherently bad about them. Like so many other tools, they are only as good or evil as the intent – and perhaps frequency - with which we use them.

Still, I can’t help but wonder if we haven’t made the cell phone another appendage. When I see studies suggesting college students become anxious and can’t focus just because they don’t have their cell phones within easy reach, or when students actually concentrate better when the cell phone has been physically taken away from them, it makes me wonder how unwittingly our cell phones have become the controlling factor of our lives.

That’s not to say I’m suggesting we do away with our cell phones. They are wonderful tools, both for staying in touch, keeping track of family members, and finding out whatever happened to the cast of “Leave it to Beaver.” Look around your church and chances are you’ll see people reading their scripture from their cell phone rather than an old-fashioned book; you may even start your day with a devotional that comes via an app on your cell phone.

But maybe we should consider taking a cell phone Sabbath.

In the Old Testament, the command to ‘remember the Sabbath’ was not so much about going to church (they didn’t ‘go to church’ in those days) as, I believe, it was a way of God saying, “Take a day off. Trust me to take care of your field and flock for one day while you rest and recharge.” After all, even God worked six days and then, it says in Genesis, on the seventh day He rested.

When I worked for a daily newspaper, it was too easy to work every day – and I did, more than I’d like to admit. But I always tried to take a “Sabbath;” take one day and get away from work. It was never a Saturday because I was a sportswriter. Most often it was a Thursday. I know preachers who take their “day of rest” on Monday. Traditionally that day has always been what we call "Saturday," our seventh day of the week. Generally that’s still the case.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think the command is day specific, but rather about the intent – take a day and trust God to handle things while we relax and recharge or take care of other things. (After all, did the Israelites even have “Saturday”?)

Can we do that? Can I actually do that?

To be honest, probably not. But those few hours when my phone was in the shop, and I knew no one could contact me and I could not contact anyone, were like a mini-vacation.

In this technological age, I admit I’m an old man who doesn’t know how to take advantage of half (or more) of the technology readily available to me. I still have my music albums and CDs that I listen to rather than going to Spotify or downloading songs. I’m not against technological advances, but perhaps I’m the old dog who just isn't sure he wants to learn new tricks.

Still, I can’t help but wonder if by putting down my cell phone for a few hours (I don’t think I’m ready to leave it for a full day) I may not find myself, like the Israelites of old, trusting God to take care of everything and everyone else while maybe I focus more on Him.

And come to think of it, “UBreakIFix” might also be a good name for a church.

Going outside to play

 “I’m going outside to play.”

When I was a kid, that’s all we needed to say. Mom didn’t ask “where are you going” or “what are you going to do” or even “who are you going to play with.” We just said we were going “outside,” and she knew what that meant.

Essentially every day, we couldn’t wait to “go outside and play.” Sometimes we knew what we were going to do; generally, in my neighborhood, it meant we were going to play football or basketball or even some kind of baseball. Maybe we were going to play “army.”

Mostly we were just trying to get outside, away from the house, where we could be free for a few hours.

Our moms didn’t much care about the particulars. Oh, they did, but I think they knew we were only going to go so far, and generally we’d be with the same neighborhood kids every day, and above all they knew we’d “be back by dark” or “back by supper.” That’s how – especially in the summer – we kept track of time.

It was incredibly freeing.

And it taught us lessons that carried over for life.

For example, we learned how to play with others. A group of guys would gather to do whatever, and a set of unspoken boundaries were created around whatever we were playing. That road was the river of molten lava we could not cross; that tree was the giant we had to attack and bring down. Or we created variations of the games we knew, of football and baseball and basketball, that we could play in the limited space of a typical backyard or with tennis balls instead of basketballs or having “ghost runners” or calling right field “dead” – any hit to right field was an out, because we didn’t have enough guys to cover the entire outfield.

I can’t remember any prolonged discussion about these rules, they just seemed to happen and reach some level of consensus. And if you didn’t like a rule, you could argue, but eventually you either played by them or went home.

And nobody wanted to go home.

Guys would get hurt – fall out of a tree, or trip over rock or run into the garage door when driving to the basket that hung on the garage or take an especially vicious forearm by someone trying to be Jack Lambert in a backyard football game.

Did we cry and go home to mom? No.

First, we knew better than to let the other guys see us cry. And second, going home to mom meant we were no longer ‘outside;’ it was a loss of those few hours of freedom. Most of us would figure a way to keep playing with blood running down a shin or an arm we could barely lift over our shoulder rather than go home. Worst case, maybe you sat out a few minutes. But the site of the rest of the guys playing was usually enough to cause one to “rub some dirt on it” and get back to playing.

We would explore woods and hillsides and streams. We snuck around neighbors’ houses not to do anything other than simply see if we could indeed “sneak” without being caught. We were horses and wolves, we were major league pitchers and all-pro quarterbacks and big-game hunters tracking an elusive lion (who looked remarkably like the neighborhood stray cat).

And sometimes we just sat – on a wall, on a hill, on a rock, in a tree – and talked.

At home, inside, we were seven-year-old boys; outside, we were men. No – we were heroes. We won World Wars and made the West safe for settlers; we were Super Bowl and World Series' champions; we found treasures in streams and hid those treasures in the “forts” and treehouses that we built from scrap wood we picked up while roaming around.

It made us tough; it made us adaptable. We had to be brave when we didn't feel like it because the other kids didn't seem to be scared. And we learned to be resilient; if the neighbor told us to stay out of his yard, we changed the rules so that yard was no longer in play. It made us realize that sometimes you learn to get along with someone you don't like (later, we'd talk about those guys as "he's a friend of mine I didn't like very much") just to be able to keep doing what you really wanted to do. 

We learned delayed gratification. We usually had to build something - a tree house, a fort, a baseball field in the backyard - and that time spent building taught us to plan and work together, and that sense of accomplishment only made the game that much more fun for us all. 

We learned a little rain (sometimes a lot of rain) never hurt anybody, and never understood why any baseball game had to be called on account of weather. We found out drinking from a clear stream was better than from the kitchen sink and eating a little dirt didn't kill anybody (that we knew of). A can of Vienna sausage and some saltine crackers were as good a lunch as anything mom made, and we learned how to divide it up to share with the kids that didn't have any.

We also learned our limits. Some kids were just faster and stronger and the rest of us had to figure out ways to adapt and slow them down.   

We learned to weight options, the most basic of which was play or go home. 

I look around these days and sometimes wonder if we don't all need to remember how to "go outside and play."