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Each gospel account has a different idea about how God comes to live among us in the flesh. We’ll explore each one, one at a time, noting their differences in order to find the Christological emphasis of each.
What does it say about Christianity, that our central figure is narrated variously, the story itself responsive the context of author and community of reception?
The #nastywomen who begat the messiah. Say their names: Tamar. Rahab. Ruth. Bathsheba. Mary. A reprise of a sermon Katie has preached twice before, in 2016 and 2019.
Baptism is the only birth that matters. For Mark, there’s no birth narrative – just a baptism. John is the midwife of Jesus’s new life; God the Father looks on in amazed pleasure (“Wow!”); Jesus comes of age in the desert; then he begins to speak in his own voice, and his first words? “The reign of God, y’all!”
Lowly mother, lowly shepherds, lowly messiah. Luke has a strong economic theme running through his gospel, beginning at the beginning. From Luke we get the barn, the manger, the swaddling clothes, the impoverished holy family and their impoverished guests. When the angels show up to sing the shepherds toward that baby, what’s happening to our own sense of economic privilege and poverty?
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. For John, Jesus arrives from cosmic pre-existence. And the only birth referenced by John is our birth – “But to all who received him…he gave power to become children of God, who were born…of God.” How about if Christmas is when we get born, our true identities made plain by the light of Christ?
Christmas Eve is for dreamers. If we do the genealogy from Matthew on the First Sunday of Advent, we have Joseph and his dreaming available for a short meditation on Christmas Eve – an invitation for us to dream, our sanctified imaginations pulling us into new and beautiful possibilities in the days to come. There’s a lot of hope here…
Religion makes God possible. What if Simeon and Anna are the apologists we need for religious infrastructure, for a community of tradition and ritual and accountability? What if we could understand that the religion (the church) is not the thing, but it is the vehicle by which the thing can come to us? (It can come other ways, for sure, but early recognition of Jesus included these who were ensconced in traditional religious structure and community.)
Global Jesus vs. local powers (a.k.a. Herod). The astrologers “from the East” who pay homage to toddler Jesus are ethnically, geopolitically, and religiously wrong for this story. But they signal to Herod, and to us, that something much bigger is happening in this child. God is staking a claim against Empire, and it feels like a threat. “Don’t you know, we’re talkin’ about a revolution, and it sounds like a whisper” (Tracy Chapman).