Being overseas, in a country with no tradition of Christmas, my family has had to invent its own. One tradition we have adopted is the substitution of lamb for turkey. Lamb is a real delicacy for our family, and so it is incumbent upon me to prepare the Christmas feast around this succulent meat- I am not quite sure how the tradition arose that I spend all afternoon in the kitchen on Christmas Day cooking- maybe some traditions need to be examined regularly to assess their worth!
The issue with roasting lamb is that there is a definite lingering after-aroma that infuses the entire house with its aromatic scent. Waking up on 26th and opening the bedroom door, my nostrils immediately caught the scent of the roast offerings from the night before. My spirit caught something else- a hunger for lamb! A remembrance of the pleasure of the meal the night before, celebrating with family and good friends, laughter and appreciation of time together to rest and enjoy each other, mingled with satisfying food, all came rushing back. Maybe, just maybe, Christmas wasn't over!
I have been pondering on the lamb ever since that morning, and wondering how it links into the time of year we call Christmas. Really, we all know (don't we?) that Jesus wasn't actually born on December 25th (oh, and by the way, Santa isn't real- although in Thailand many people are convinced that December 25th is Santa's birthday- maybe we should discuss that in another blog!). So why do we focus so exclusively around this time on His birth? And why is His birth often so disconnected from his life, his death, his resurrection and his coming again? Why is the sentimentalized, sanitized, trivialized version of his birth so prevalent around this time? The birth becomes the domain of nursery school plays and schmaltzy carol services, where we sing about "The Little Lord Jesus" who apparently was so non-human that "No crying He makes". Why??
Well, maybe part of the answer is that we have lost the scent of death in the Christmas story. We have skimmed over the massacre of the innocents, we have missed the shame visited upon Mary by the proclamation of "the gift" And we have forgotten the Lamb, slain from the foundation of the world. We also lose the force of the inbreaking kingdom, bringing the kingdoms of this world to their knees, as expressed in the outburst of praise from Mary, the fearful, fevered and ultimately futile scrabbling of Herod to protect his kingdom, the intervention of God with dreams and angels to shelter the seed of His Kingdom, and the tying in of the birth narrative with the Kingdom prophecies of Isaiah and other Old Testament prophets. The birth, life, death, resurrection and return of Jesus is a seamless warfare narrative. The birth of Jesus is not just a nice sentimental starter before we get to the main course of the Gospels!
Which brings me back to the smell of lamb (I haven't forgotten!). In the Old Testament, worship would have been suffused with the smell of sacrifice, as families dragged their lambs etc into the temple courts for the regular sacrifices to take place. The aroma would be a continual reminder to all of the cost of walking away from the reign of God into our own petty kingdoms, where we supposedly ruled, but where in fact we were slaves. The price of freedom would be a high one, namely death. But the stench would also be mixed with the aroma of the incense, the stuff of earth mixing with the stuff of heaven, just as heaven invades earth in the guise of a helpless infant. As the aroma of lamb filled our house this Christmas, so too does the fragrance of Christ linger in our lives, inviting others to recall the lamb who was slain, to share in His death., to feast on Him and to enter His kingdom. Death and life, intertwined, is the way of the Kingdom, the way of Jesus, and is to be our way too! We cannot embrace the Christmas story without embracing death, and therefore entering continually into, and walking in, newness of life.
This blog has taken me a couple of days to complete, and the aroma of lamb in our house has faded. My prayer for 2011 is that the fragrance of Christ, both death and life, would linger wherever my journeying takes me:
"But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of him. For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are the smell of death; to the other, the fragrance of life."
Here's to an aromatic 2011!
