But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son,  born of woman, born under the law.” (Galatians 4:4)

                      But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son,
born of woman, born under the law.” (Galatians 4:4)

We are approaching the celebration of the birth of  Jesus Christ. It is a great occasion in which God’s love was demonstrated through His coming into our world and His incarnation among us. At the same time, the Christmas story is full of pain. It narrates the journey of a simple family from a marginalized village that was forced to travel to another city according to the orders of the Roman occupation authority, not by the will of Joseph or Mary; to be registered in a population census. It is also the story of a young woman who gave birth to a child away from her family and did not find a suitable place to give birth to her newborn. In most cases, a romantic image of Christmas roams our imagination, while we lose sight of the amount of suffering that Joseph and Mary experienced. This has a theological depth. It shows that the incarnated God experienced the pain of humanity from Mary’s womb, even before his birth. The womb of the Virgin Mary thus became the shelter incubating the divine presence. God accompanies a young woman and her husband on a journey of misery under the bitter reality of occupation.

The Christmas story imitates our Palestinian reality under occupation. Palestinians are required to travel to other cities to be registered and given a magnetic identity card. How many Palestinian women were forced to give birth at the military occupation checkpoints or far from their families? How many Palestinian fetuses and their mothers experienced the stress and fear of waiting at a military checkpoint, or were born in an ambulance that was prevented from reaching a hospital? While God may seem far from our reality, the mystery of the incarnation expresses that God dwells and supports the suffering men and women, as He also does so amidst the eulogy of His people. The beauty of the Nativity story lies in this great secret, that God was not conceived during a period of peace and comfort, but rather under the power of occupationو so that He, like man, could experience all forms of suffering in Mary’s womb, and in his life, so that he could redeem humanity and the universe from all injustice and darkness with his wondrous light.