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Are you ready for Christmas? During the season of Advent – which annually begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas and leads up to December 25 – followers of Jesus traditionally look for ways to prepare themselves for the coming of God’s own Son into the world. Throughout December we’ll ponder ways that we can ready ourselves to receive Jesus, once again, into our own hearts.
At 7:51 am on January 12, 2007 – a chilly Friday morning – a young man wearing a baseball cap stepped into Washington D.C.’s L’Enfant Plaza subway station.
It was the middle of the morning rush hour. He appeared to be just another busker – an amateur musician who plays for tips in public places.
This particular musician, however, was Joshua Bell – widely regarded as the world’s most accomplished violinist.
His parents had suspected he might have a future in music when at age four he stretched rubber bands to his dresser drawers and played classical tunes on them, adjusting the pitch by pulling the drawers in and out.
The Washington Post, aware of Bell’s plans to offer an incognito concert, asked symphony conductor Leonard Slatkin to predict the response of the commuters who would be shuffling by.
“Out of 1,000 people,” he said, “my guess is there might be 35 or 40 who will recognize the quality for what it is. Maybe 75 to 100 will stop and spend some time listening.” Slatkin predicted that Bell might receive something in the neighborhood of $150 in donations.
Bell set up shop alongside a subway station wall. That’s him in the picture above. He took his violin – a 1713 Stradivarius valued at millions of dollars – and played six classical pieces over a period of 43 minutes. The composers included Bach, Massenet, and Schubert.
As one commentator put it, this was “the world’s greatest violinist playing the world’s greatest music on the world’s greatest instrument.”
But no crowd gathered.
People were in a hurry – so preoccupied with their schedules, their worries, and the next items on their lists of things to do that they hustled right past the musical chance of a lifetime.
By examining security camera footage, the Post confirmed that 1,097 people spent at least a few minutes in the general vicinity of the “concert.” Twenty-seven dropped money into Bell’s violin case. Only seven actually stopped and listened to the music for a while.
The donations added up to $52.17, including a $20 bill from a single person who did a double take and realized, “Oh my gosh, that’s Joshua Bell!”
The results of the experiment quickly went viral and were shared around the world. Many asked, “How could so many people fail to see who was right before their eyes?”
But that’s an old, old story – one that we find in the Bible’s original accounts of the birth of Jesus. It’s easy to say that if we lived in the first century, we would have immediately dropped everything and given our attention to the child in Bethlehem.
In the moment, however, it’s a great deal more challenging to know what – and who – happens to be right in front of us.
The apostle John writes: “[Jesus] was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him” (John 1:10-11).
Even though the fulfillment of our deepest hopes has arrived in the person of Jesus, people both then and now rarely see him for who he really is.
In the midst of this Christmas week, with its overwhelming details, how can we ever pay attention?
We must surrender to the wisdom of the words we hear every year in “O, Holy Night.”
Fall on your knees.
O, hear the angel voices.