Lo, he abhors not the virgin's womb.

...is an odd lyric, if you think about it. "lo, he abhors not the virgin's womb". I've sung this a million times (probably less than that, in fact, but, you know, quite a lot) - if you can't quite place it its from "O, Come All Ye Faithful, from the second verse. Here it is, in fact:

Look Son! No hands. 

God of God, light of light,
Lo, he abhors not the virgin's womb;
Very God, begotten not created:
O come, let us adore him, Christ the Lord.

Now, looking at it, denuded of context - the context being rosy cheeked, slightly pissed people at Midnight Mass enjoying the repetition of "O come, let us adore him" at mounting volume - and ignoring the bit where the song writers note that the thing about Jesus is that he is VERY God, actually EXCEEDINGLY God - its an unusual lyric. Its the first thing the the song-writers actually say about Jesus (the first line is his credentials): "Look at Jesus - he doesn't hate that virgin womb, does he? I'm not saying he loved it in there, in the virgin womb, but he didn't look to bothered about it, did he? If you asked me if he abhored it I'd have to say no, he seemed quite keen."  

All a bit odd. Imagining God squatting in his mother's guts for months on end, presumably omniscient. What is he thinking in there as he bides his time? He goes full term, too. He's a details guy. And, of course, he doesn't abhor it one little bit. Is he chuckling to himself? "Ha ha. This'll do it. I'll be born spontaneously as a man who is also a God, fulfil a few Biblical Messianic predictions and then wrong-foot everybody by getting nailed to a tree. Couldn't be simpler. You couldn't invent a more lucid and obvious message about the covenant between the heavenly All-father and his children. No wonder I'm God - I'm so good at this!"

And God just quietly grows himself inside a human being he hasn't even bothered to ask! Well, the feast of the annunciation deals with the angel Gabriel telling Mary she's going to have God's baby, she doesn't get a say in it. He doesn't even tell her himself - he gets his mate to do it, like a shy boy at provincial disco!

I'm assuming there's some good old fashioned Christian women hating here: the idea that a lowly female could be the vessel of God (a man). There's some thing of religion's hatred of the body, that Manichean strain that finds the fleshy things of the earth disgusting and sinful, doubly so if they're female things. Women, after all, are all about the dirty sex: Eve betrayed mankind by hooking up with a suspiciously phallic snake (could have been any animal in the garden of Eden but no - it was the one that looked like a cock). This hymn was written after a millennium and a half of demonising women from pulpits and drowning or setting fire to them on village greens, where women were routinely othered to death for their inherent, vagina based iniquity. Why would Jesus want to enter the world through that particular door?    

Still, Jesus wasn't squeamish. He got stuck in. He put in a nine month shift. To the obvious incomprehension of the hymn writer (though the phrase, in Latin predates the song by centuries) Jesus is alright with wombs. Once again he seems like a pretty cool guy glimpsed through the prism of a thousand years of misogyny. And once again Mary seems completely disappeared, simply a means to get the baby into a manger, under a star and able to answer the door for when the Christmas gifts arrive.