The Nativity of the Lord Christmas
Joy, joy, joy!! Christ is born today!!
Sometimes, I think, we are so taken with the utter beauty of the nativity scene and the infancy narratives in Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels to meditate on the extremity of the situation, indeed the poverty of it all. Having a two and half year-old, I’m always deeply skeptical of the serenity of the manger scene as we see it on Christmas. How exhausted must Mary and Joseph have been after their journey from Galilee all the way to Bethlehem (about 90 miles, or about a week’s journey) only to find nowhere suitable to sleep? How much pain must Mary have been in after giving birth? How about trying to rest with a crying baby (surely He cried!), surrounded by a slew of animals?
These are the images we are confronted with in Luke’s gospel. More than a serene setting, this first Christmas must have been as chaotic and uncomfortable as poverty is. And if we take a cure from Matthew’s gospel, King Herod, out of fear, was slaughtering all the young boys in Bethlehem as the holy family was leaving town. The attempts on Jesus’ life had already begun.
When I reflect upon these struggles and challenges of the first Christmas, however, the scene becomes more, not less, beautiful. The magnificence and joy of the Incarnation—God becoming human in Jesus—is that the real beauty exists in and because of the poverty and strife of the situation, not in spite of it. As the opening of John’s gospel reminds us, through God’s Word, made flesh in Jesus, “all things came to be” (Jn 1:3). This Word stands at the origin of all of us and yet humbles Himself to become one of us. Not just anyone of us, but a poor boy who is laid in a manger.
Setting the grandeur of John’s prologue next to the humility of the manger scene cannot but make the distance between God and us clear. God’s greatness is displayed is what is most humble. And the beauty of the Incarnation is that God bridges it. Surely God could have brought about our salvation another way, but God esteems humanity, poor humanity, such that he became one of us. To save us. And that is beautiful.
Tim Gabrielli