The Truth Behind the Tradition: The Nativity Story

There is something deeply offensive about the Christmas story not to those who believe it, but to those who would try to make it respectable. For when we strip away the sentimental barnyard paintings and the sanitized nativity scenes, when we peel back the layers of tinsel and tradition that our comfortable age has wrapped around these events like protective cotton wool, we find ourselves face to face with a tale so scandalous, so magnificently improper, that it might have been designed specifically to embarrass every sensible person who ever lived.

Consider first the Annunciation, that moment when Heaven crashed into an ordinary afternoon in Nazareth. Here we have a young girl, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old, going about the mundane business of being herself, when suddenly an angel appears with news that would shatter the foundations of any respectable life. The angel does not arrive with an orchestra or a committee of witnesses or even a scroll bearing official documentation. He simply appears, as if the laws of nature were no more substantial than stage curtains, and makes an announcement that would make any rational person reach for the nearest fainting couch.

"You will conceive and bear a son," Gabriel declares, apparently under the impression that this is the sort of thing one casually mentions to teenage girls. Never mind that Mary is a virgin. Never mind that she is betrothed to Joseph, who presumably has other plans. Never mind that the entire proposal flies in the face of everything biology, society, and common sense have to say on the matter. God has decided that this is how He will enter the world, and if that makes everyone uncomfortable, well, that rather seems to be the point.

And here we stumble upon the first great paradox of the Nativity: that the most natural thing in the world a woman bearing a child becomes the most supernatural thing in history, and that the most supernatural thing in history God becoming man arrives through the most natural of processes. It is as if God looked at all the spectacular ways He might have entered His creation and decided, with divine mischievousness, to choose the one that would require us to believe six impossible things before breakfast.

Mary's response to this cosmic proposition is worth dwelling upon, for it reveals something essential about the economy of salvation. She does not demand credentials from the angel. She does not request a committee meeting or insist on consulting with her spiritual director. She asks one practical question "How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?" and then, upon receiving an answer that explains precisely nothing, responds with words that have echoed through twenty centuries: "Be it unto me according to thy word."

This is not the passive resignation of someone who cannot imagine any alternative. This is the active cooperation of someone who has grasped, however dimly, that she is being offered a starring role in the greatest drama ever staged. Mary's "yes" is not a whimper but a battle cry, the decisive engagement in a war that had been raging since Eden. In consenting to become the Mother of God, she became the first Christian, the first human being to choose Christ fully and freely, and in so choosing, she reversed the first Eve's catastrophic "no."

But then comes Joseph, and with him, another scandal entirely. For here is a man who discovers that his betrothed is pregnant, and this being the ancient world where such things mattered knows with absolute certainty that the child cannot be his. The law would have him expose her. Honor would demand it. Justice, as commonly understood, would insist upon it. Yet Joseph, this unremarkable carpenter in this unremarkable town, does something utterly remarkable: he decides to protect Mary, even if it means bearing the burden of looking like a fool or worse.

One almost suspects that God chose Joseph precisely for this quality, this capacity to value mercy over reputation, love over law. For when the angel appears to Joseph in a dream and note how often God seems to prefer working through dreams, as if even Heaven understands that the subconscious sometimes has fewer defenses than the conscious mind Joseph does not demand proof. He does not insist on a second opinion. He simply wakes up and does exactly what he was told, which is to say, he takes Mary as his wife and becomes the foster father of his Creator.

Think about that for a moment. Joseph, a man who worked with his hands and probably smelled of sawdust, was chosen to teach carpentry to the One who had fashioned the forests. He would show God how to hold a hammer, protect the One who holds the universe, provide for the One who provides all things. It is either the most absurd arrangement imaginable or the most perfect and perhaps, in God's economy, these amount to the same thing.

The journey to Bethlehem introduces yet another layer of divine irony to our tale. Caesar Augustus, that pompous little man in Rome who fancied himself the center of the world, issues a decree requiring everyone to return to their ancestral homes for a census. He thinks he is organizing an empire. He has no idea that he is fulfilling a prophecy, that his bureaucratic whim is actually the instrument by which God will ensure that the Messiah is born in Bethlehem, city of David, exactly as Scripture foretold. Caesar, that supposed master of the world, turns out to be merely a stage manager in a play he does not know he is in.

And so we find Mary and Joseph arriving in Bethlehem just as the child is about to be born, and here the scandal deepens rather than resolves. There is no room in the inn. The Mother of God must give birth in a stable, among animals, in conditions that would horrify even the most indifferent modern hospital inspector. The Creator of the universe makes His entrance into creation in a feeding trough, wrapped in strips of cloth that were probably none too clean, surrounded by the smell of hay and manure.

This is not how gods are supposed to arrive. The Greek gods, when they bothered to visit earth, came as mighty warriors or stunning youths or powerful animals. They came to seduce and to conquer, to show off and to take their pleasure. But the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob chooses instead to arrive as the most helpless thing in existence: a newborn infant, unable to speak or walk or feed himself, dependent on the care of two peasants in a backwater province of a second-rate empire.

Yet this very helplessness reveals the nature of divine power in a way that thunderbolts and cosmic spectacles never could. For here we see that God's strength is made perfect in weakness, that His way of conquering is not to dominate but to invite, not to overwhelm but to woo. The baby in the manger is more dangerous to the kingdoms of this world than any army ever assembled, precisely because He comes not with the power to destroy lives but with the power to transform them.

The shepherds arrive first, and their inclusion in this drama is itself a divine joke at the expense of respectability. Shepherds were, to put it delicately, not the sort of people you invited to important occasions. They smelled. They were uneducated. They lived rough on the hillsides, ceremonially unclean according to the religious establishment, sleeping among their flocks and counted among the lowest ranks of society. Yet these are the ones chosen to receive the first announcement of the Messiah's birth, to hear the angel choirs, to rush to the stable and become the first evangelists of the Gospel. God announces His arrival to those the world had written off as insignificant, which is precisely the sort of thing God would do.

Meanwhile, far to the East, learned men are studying the stars. These Magi astrologers, scholars, perhaps priest-kings of some ancient tradition notice something extraordinary in the heavens. A star appears, and in it they read a message that sends them on a journey of hundreds of miles to find a King. They come bearing gifts fit for royalty: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. They arrive in Jerusalem expecting to find this newborn King in Herod's palace, because where else would a king be born? But Herod knows nothing of this rival, and the scribes must dust off their prophecies to discover that the Christ is to be born in Bethlehem.

By the time the Magi arrive in Bethlehem, following their star, the Holy Family has found somewhat better accommodations a house, not a palace, but at least no longer a stable. Here is where our sentimental nativity scenes get the story wrong, placing the Wise Men at the manger alongside the shepherds in a charming tableau of unified worship. But Scripture tells a different tale. The shepherds came immediately, that very night, finding the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. The Magi came later perhaps weeks, perhaps months finding the young child in a house with Mary His mother.

This temporal separation is itself instructive. The poor shepherds were granted immediate access, rushing to the stable with nothing to offer but their wonder. The wealthy Magi had to travel, to search, to persist in their quest before they found what they sought. It is as if God arranged things to demonstrate that both the swift obedience of the simple and the patient seeking of the learned would be honored, that both those who have nothing and those who have much would find their way to worship the same King.

And worship they did, these foreign dignitaries, these men who had crossed deserts and mountains to find a Jewish child in an insignificant town. They fell down before Him these great men prostrating themselves before a toddler and offered their treasures. Gold for a king, frankincense for a priest, myrrh for one who would die. Their gifts were prophetic in ways they could not have understood, telling the whole story of Christ's mission in three symbolic offerings. It is worth noting that God chose to reveal His Son to Gentiles before most of His own people recognized Him, another scandal in a story full of them.

But then comes Herod, and with him, the darkness that has always shadowed the light. This paranoid puppet king, terrified of losing a throne he obtained through murder and maintains through violence, is disturbed by the Magi's questions about a newborn King. He feigns interest in worshiping this child himself and sends the Wise Men to Bethlehem with instructions to report back. But God, who knows the hearts of men, warns the Magi in a dream not to return to Herod. They depart by another route, leaving Herod enraged and scheming.

When Herod realizes he has been outwitted, his response is characteristically brutal: he orders the slaughter of every male child under two years old in Bethlehem and its vicinity. This detail two years suggests that considerable time had passed since the birth, that the child the Magi sought was no longer a newborn but a young child, just as Matthew's Gospel records. The Massacre of the Innocents is a reminder that the Christmas story is not all sweetness and sentiment, that the coming of Christ provokes not only worship but also rage, not only adoration but also violence. Even in infancy, Christ divided humanity into those who would bow before Him and those who would seek to destroy Him.

But before Herod's soldiers arrive, Joseph receives yet another dream, another urgent message from Heaven: "Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him." And so, in the middle of the night, Joseph obeys once more, taking his small family and fleeing to Egypt. The Liberator who will one day lead His people out of slavery must first flee to the land where His ancestors were enslaved. The Exodus is running backwards, or perhaps forwards in a way we cannot yet see, for this Jesus will indeed lead a greater exodus from a greater Egypt, from sin and death themselves.

Egypt, that ancient place of bondage and refuge, becomes the hiding place for the One who will break all bondage. The child who will one day multiply loaves and fish is fed on borrowed bread in a foreign land. The One who will calm storms takes shelter from the storm of Herod's murderous rage. And in all of this, we see the pattern that will define His life and ministry: that God's power operates not by avoiding suffering but by entering into it, not by escaping the human condition but by embracing it fully.

What are we to make of all this? These events from Annunciation to Flight form not a tidy theological proposition but a wild, untamed narrative that seems designed to offend every sensibility and overthrow every expectation. God enters the world not in power but in weakness, not in majesty but in humility, not in a palace but in a stable. He announces His arrival first to shepherds in a field, and later reveals Himself to learned foreigners who must search for Him. He comes as a scandal and remains a scandal, and perhaps that is precisely how we know He is real.

For if we had invented a god, we would have made him respectable, comfortable, safe. We would have given him proper credentials and arranged for him to arrive at a convenient time in a suitable location with all the right people present from the beginning. But the God who actually came the one born in Bethlehem, worshiped by shepherds and Magi alike, forced to flee as a refugee refuses to be tamed by our expectations or domesticated by our traditions. He comes in His own way, at His own time, and if that makes us uncomfortable, perhaps that discomfort is the beginning of wisdom.

The story from Annunciation to Flight teaches us that God's ways are not our ways, that His thoughts are higher than our thoughts, and that His sense of appropriate arrival would scandalize any event planner in history. It teaches us that holiness and helplessness can coexist, that power and poverty are not opposites but allies, and that the greatest King who ever lived began His reign in a feeding trough and spent His infancy as a refugee.

And if all of this strikes us as improbable, improper, or simply impossible well, that is rather the point, is it not? For the God who makes the impossible possible has arrived, and nothing will ever be the same again.

-The Seeker’s Quill