Where are you from?

The question, Where are you from?, has become one of the most charged and controversial questions of our time.

In some ways, this is quite surprising. I suspect that most of us have pulled this question out of our back pockets more times than we can count. It’s on the same small talk prompt sheet as other questions like, What do you do for a living?, and Have you seen any good box sets lately? In other words, it’s the kind of question you might throw out there in the anxious hope of finding something interesting to talk about.

And it rarely succeeds. My own answer (‘A small city called Winchester’) usually elicits a vague, ‘Oh’, and then a blank stare as my inquisitor desperately tries to find some kind of follow-up comment to a place they’ve barely heard of and never visited.

But sometimes the question is not small talk. Sometimes it has an edge. It may be a tool to quickly assess and judge a stranger, to help decide if they are friend or foe. It may be a way of finding out if they belong around here.

The question only appears a few times in the Bible, and one of those times is on the lips of the fearful figure of Pontius Pilate as Jesus stands before him on trial (John 19.9). Pilate is not interested in engaging Jesus in small talk. He’s really asking something more profound with potentially world altering implications: Are you somehow more than just a man?

When Jesus was born to Mary, he entered our world as an alien, as other. That’s not to say that he didn’t belong here – it’s his world after all. But he’s the only human ever born of woman who was not really from around here in any sense whatsoever. His entry into this world forces us all to ask the question, Where are you from? That is the line of inquiry that Christmas provokes.

And therefore, far from this being a wrong or insensitive question when directed at Jesus, it is instead the only question that really matters. Jesus, where are you from?

As we approach this holy season marking the incarnation – the enfleshment of the Son of God – you must hear the striking demand that Christ’s entry into the world makes upon you. He forces you to decide whether or not you believe his origins story. And for those who do, he sets you apart and turns you into an alien and a sojourner; he makes you ‘other’ also. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world (John 17.14).

So, let me now ask you the same question: Where are you from?