O Bethlehem

When I was in Bethlehem the week before Advent I was given two beautiful icons. I was also given two other "souvenirs"—a spent tear gas canister and a used rubber bullet. Jesus was born in Bethlehem—at the intersection of beauty and pain, on the fault line of our most intractable conflicts. This is where salvation comes into the world. O little town of Bethlehem—where the beauty of Orthodox icons and olive wood carvings collides with the brutality of tear gas and rubber bullets. This is the birthplace of Jesus. To speak only of the icons is too sentimental. To speak only of the tear gas is too cynical. When we read of Bethlehem in the Bible we find both the adoration of the magi and the slaughter of the innocents. Hope and horror, beauty and brutality. The Incarnation is the matrix of salvation, and thus we commemorate it in the beauty of art. But Jesus was not born into the beatific scene of a Nativity icon—Jesus was born into a war torn world where paranoid despots dispatch death squads and where tear gas and rubber bullets litter the streets. Or to say it another way, "The Light shines in the darkness, but the darkness did not overcome it" (John 1:5).