The Feast of the Nativity 2007

I often wonder how the Christ-child would have appeared in this day and age. Forgetting the details of our lives (something I'm good at) that would be different, can you imagine the Angel Gabriel declaring the message of the Annunciation to a teenage girl in an industrial estate in Birkenhead? A teenage pregnancy there would not be unusual, so the example would not exactly be of any great effect or produce great wonder. Imagine:

And there were security guards abiding in the malls, keeping watch over their flat-screen tellys by night, and the Angel of the Lord appeared to them and said, "@*£# off to the Sondheim Estate and there you'll find a kid in the dog's basket who has come to cheer you up, you miserable #*&$£5s!"

It's just so commonplace! So ordinary! The birth of a baby is important to families and friends but you don't cross town just to see the child born to a teenage mother who's probably given been put in that state following a binge in Bermondsey, however cute the baby, unless you're in social services.

What made those shepherds and those magi, travel to stop and stare at the simple sight of a young lady and a tiny baby in the oxen's trough in a stable?

Well, if you believe modern church thinkers (and it's often wise not to), it probably didn't happen. All this Nativity business is sheer literary window dressing on the part of the writers of Matthew's and Luke's Gospels, just to enhance the Lord's reputation.

Why the need to enhance the Lord's reputation? Surely the accounts of His years of ministry, his miracles, His death and resurrection, His teaching, His "wild claims" of being the Son of God, surely that spells it out quite adequately without needing a fabrication of the Nativity. Mark doesn't need the Nativity for his Gospel, and neither does John, the life of the Lord stands well enough without the stories of the baby in the manger. So why did Matthew and Luke feel the need to include these passages? Why did the Church feel that these parts of the Gospels were necessary? Why were they not edited out, as some modern folk think the Early Church was very good at?

I suppose the message of the Nativity means for me that people can react very differently to the very ordinary. Professor Dawkins would have seen the child in the manger, probably paid compliments to the mother and charitably handed over a five pound note to help the baby (he is, after all, a decent human being), but he would have seen nothing other than a rather pitiable state of humanity. He does not attribute any further significance because there is no scientific test for metaphysical significance. However, some see the significance in their science, others are told about the significance from strange agencies. The meaning is deeper than mere physicality: the ordinaryness of a mother and a new born baby forced to take shelter in a stable is just so human.

Yet we can easily see the Lord's humanity without the Nativity, so His ordinaryness is not dependent upon the circumstances of His birth. The Nativity tells us to look, and to keep looking for the Christ-child in our day and age, to see the significance of our humdrum and monotonous existence without the need for a man to point it out to us using miracles and teachings. We can find God in our lives if we look for Him, even if it gets difficult, confusing and a bit depressing. It's a bit like looking for one particular baby in a Middle Eastern town.

"Seek ye first the Kingdom of God..."

May you find the Christ-child this Christmas, and know His joy and peace.