The Christmas Story – taken from Jesus Christ – The Truth
Familiarity may not breed contempt but it certainly can breed complacency, and it’s a pity that one of the few points of contact in the modern West between the post-Christian world and the Bible is the Christmas stories. They are loved: often depicted in primary colours, they have walk-on parts for animals and are rated safe for children. Besides, who can object to the birth of a baby? Yet when we give the Christmas stories the attention they deserve we find that, hiding beneath any glitter and sentimentality, are profound and significant truths.
In neither Matthew or Luke is there any sense that these are fairytale, once-upon-a-time stories. There are pointers in both to a time and place in the real world. But when exactly was the time? There’s been a great deal of discussion of the dating of Jesus’ life and ministry and there are some excellent summaries available. It seems clear that Jesus was born during the last years of the life of Herod the Great who is normally assumed to have died in 4 BC. (As already mentioned, the reason why Jesus wasn’t born in Year Zero ad was because the calculations were wrongly done when the BC/AD system was set up.) The oldest possible date is 6 BC because Luke says that Jesus was about thirty when he began his ministry and that is dated around ad 27 or 28. So a date of 6–4 BC seems most likely. Matthew’s reference to ‘the star’ at the birth of Christ doesn’t really help: what exactly it was in astronomical terms remains elusive. And, as we don’t know the year, we are even less certain about the month and the day. The celebration of the nativity on 25th December goes back to Emperor Constantine in ad 336 and was chosen to replace an existing pagan midwinter festival. The key point is that even if we don’t know Jesus’ exact date of birth, we know that it did happen in the real world that we live in.
Both Matthew and Luke state that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, a small town about 8 km (5 miles) to the south-west of Jerusalem. Although Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth (110 km or 70 miles to the north), their presence in Bethlehem is explained as being due to a census organised by Caesar Augustus that required registration at an ancestral town. One possible scenario is that this was not just simply ‘head counting’ but an attempt to sort out who owned what land for tax purposes and that Joseph had an historical right to land in the area. The significance of Bethlehem is that it is the town of David and as such crops up in a prophecy of the Messiah in Micah 5:2.
Luke tells us that Jesus’ birthplace was humble. Although tradition shows Mary and Joseph turned away from an inn, modern translations suggest that the word ‘inn’ is better translated as ‘guestroom’. This suggests a situation where the couple went to the home of Joseph’s nearest relatives only to find that the only space available was in the lower part of the building, normally occupied by animals.
One of the problems with Christmas is that we follow the story but miss the significance. The Lord of all, the King of creation, humbles himself not simply to become part of humanity, but its lowest depths. The cradle in the stable foreshadows the cross outside the city.
In this most basic of settings, Mary and Joseph are visited by shepherds who have been summoned there by angels. Shepherds were close to the bottom of the social ladder at the time, and the fact that it is they and not the social and religious elite of Jerusalem who were called by the angels is significant. Jesus is to be good news for the poor and those on the margins of society.
Although three kings – exotically dressed – are an essential of any nativity play, Matthew’s account simply tells us that these other visitors were ‘Magi’ – wise men or astrologers – and makes no mention of them either being kings or representing different races. It does not even tell us when they visited the baby; although from the fact that they visited ‘a child’ in ‘a house’ their visit may have been some months later. The idea that such people should travel for months (possibly from what is now modern Iraq or Iran) to find a Messiah may seem unlikely. Yet intriguingly, the two Roman authors we have already mentioned, Suetonius and Tacitus, claim that there was a widespread belief that a world ruler would come from the Jewish people, so a Jewish king could have been seen as having more than local significance.
The attitude of the Magi stands in stark contrast with that of Herod and the priests. While the strangers from afar, who presumably knew very little about the Messiah, chose to travel vast distances to show him honour, those close by – who should have recognised what was going on – failed to note what was happening just a few miles away. (And in the case of Herod, when they did, they reacted with hostility.)
Here, too, another New Testament theme is announced; while God’s promised deliverer comes to his own people and is rejected by them, those who are outside the faith accept him.
In a postscript that is often omitted from children’s nativity plays as being ‘unsuitable for infants’, Matthew tells us that after the visit of the Magi, Herod ordered the massacre of all infants of two and under in Bethlehem. Its mention is a reminder that, for all its sentimentalised and sanitised retelling, the Christmas story is about a world as mad, bad and sad as our own.
In John’s Gospel we find no account of the birth but instead a profound prologue reflecting on the meaning of his coming John says that the whole creation was made by ‘the Word’, someone who was ‘with God’ and ‘was God’. This ‘Word’, says John, is not just the maker of all things; he is also ‘light’ and ‘life’, the source of everything that is essential for existence. Then in one of the most awesome statements ever written, John says, ‘So the Word became human and made his home among us.’ In Jesus, the eternal, infinite awesomeness of God became flesh and blood.
John then says this about Jesus: ‘He came into the very world he created, but the world didn’t recognise him. He came to his own people, and even they rejected him. But to all who believed him and accepted him, he gave the right to become children of God.’ Here in the story of Jesus’ birth is the heart of the matter. Jesus’ coming was not an automatic blessing on all humanity. After all, many people have found it an easy matter to ignore or reject him. Yet to recognise Jesus for who he is, to accept him as the Word in the form of human flesh is, as John says, to gain the wonderful privilege of being a child of God and knowing God as your loving heavenly Father.
