Advent reflection: A Saviour who waits in line

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) —Luke 2:1,2

Can you imagine the groans that must have met this announcement? A census of the entire Roman world? What a colossal pain in the neck! This wasn’t a census where a clerk turns up at the door with a questionnaire; this was “going to one’s own town to register,” which surely meant taking time off work and figuring out what to do with your kids or your aged parents. It meant making expensive travel arrangements and staying in crummy, overpriced inns. It meant the low-level anxiety of wondering if you had brought the right documents, or if you’d reach the window before the clerks broke for lunch. Most of all, it meant the dreadful tedium of standing in line.

What is more dreary than a line? In Soviet times here in Ukraine, almost every purchase meant standing in three lines: one to ascertain the price and order an item, one to pay for it at the cashier’s desk, and one to claim the item back at the counter. Life is easier now, but there are still lines for railroad tickets and automobile registration, lines at the bank and at the post office.

There are crowds of edgy people milling about at the Russian consulate in Odessa, hoping to complete all their paperwork before the place closes. There are lines to register a passport. In Ukraine, tickets for through-trains go on sale half an hour before the trains arrive at the station, and late at night incredible three and four-pronged lines – one for each arriving train – form around a single lighted ticket window. One year I read most of Tolstoy’s Resurrection while waiting in line to pay my utility bills. Most organizations here have a special employee whose job it is to pay bills and buy tickets – that is, to stand in line.

The nativity scenes we set out at Christmas depict shepherds and Magi adoring the newborn Jesus. More complicated European layouts might show other visitors – bakers with trays of pastry, girls with garlands of flowers, or musicians. Why has no one ever thought of setting up an Advent scene with figures of tired, crabby people lined up to register for the Roman census? You could inch Mary and Joseph forward a little bit every day until they reached the surly official at the head of the line.

Waiting in line; jostling for position in the boring, anxious, tedious, nerve-wracking line. What wouldn’t I do to avoid standing there!

How sweet, therefore, to think of the King of Kings, still inside Mary, humbly complying with the demands of the bureaucracy, just as we must. The officials who wrote down Joseph’s name had no idea who he was or why it was significant that he and Mary had come to Bethlehem. Caesar assumed that they stood in line at his bidding, but we know that in the providence of God they were there to fulfill a prophecy.

Think of it: Jesus was born while His parents were waiting in line, just as we wait. Jesus was born to live every bit of our boring, anxious life, to bear our grief and carry our sorrow. And in the end, Jesus was born to take our place in a sad, doomed, slow-moving line of captives headed up a hill to a cross.

Mary Raber, of St. Louis, MO, is a Mennonite Central Committee worker in Odessa, Ukraine.