Summary: The Christian church has a beautiful, simple but amazing Christmas story to share with the world. Too often, however, we allow so many distractions from the stories about the incarnation as told in scripture that we begin to lose the point. The point is that God loves us and moved in with us to prove it.
Across the centuries - and maybe especially in recent times - an astonishing variety of accounts of and commentaries on the birth of Jesus have been published. Some are insightful, some intriguing and some are just playful fiction. A few are wildly creative histories that contradict church teachings - which is one more reason to know those teachings.
Let's begin by briefly looking at a few examples of those accounts and commentaries as a way of understanding that nothing measures up to the concise, astonishing story of Jesus' birth that Matthew tells in the part of his Gospel that we read today.
One such account is found in a 2024 book called My Perfect Wife, Her Perfect Son, (let that title sink in for a minute) by Joe Benevento, who sticks quite closely to the traditional Catholic understanding of Jesus' mother Mary as a perpetual virgin. The account describes a fictionalized scene in which Mary tries to tell her about-to-be husband Joseph that she's already pregnant. Benevento makes Joseph the narrator of story, and Joseph confesses that something about the way Mary has been acting lately makes him think that Mary's father has changed his mind about their upcoming marriage and now won't allow it. But Mary assures him that's not why she's anxious. Rather, she explains it this way: "It's, it's just that it's so soon before the ceremony and you still haven't said a thing. Hasn't he come to you yet to explain?"
Joseph asks her what Mary's father needs to explain to him, to which Mary responds: "Not my father, Joseph. Not him. I'm talking about the angel."1
Well, it's an interesting reimagining of what might have taken place, but readers of the book at that point can easily get so wrapped up in the Mary-Joseph struggle to grasp what's happening and why it's happening that they lose track of the core of the story the way Matthew offers it when he describes a dream Joseph had.
Another example of a retelling of the birth story comes from Joseph Ernest Renan, a 19th-century French writer and Semitic scholar. In his 1863 book called, simply, The Life of Jesus, Renan begins this way: "Jesus was born at Nazareth, a small town of Galilee, which before his time had no celebrity."2
Clearly Renan is more than a little skeptical about the Bethlehem birth story, but that beginning leads readers off into scholarly debates about evidence of the Holy Family's presence in Bethlehem and away from the good news, the gospel, that Matthew is revealing.
One more example: The Portuguese novelist Jose de Sousa Saramago, who won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in literature, wrote a 1991 book of wildly ambitious fiction called The Gospel According to Jesus Christ: A Novel. Apparently labeling the work a novel allows Saramago huge latitude to shape the story of Jesus in almost unimaginable ways.
Early in the book, Saramago describes an encounter that Mary had with someone described as a beggar, but who, readers eventually discover, was the angel Gabriel.
"Good woman," the beggar-slash-angel tells Mary, "you have a child in your womb and that is man's only destiny, to begin and end, to end and begin."
Mary asks: "How do you know I'm with child?" This is the angel's reply: "Even before the belly swells, a child can be seen shining through its mother's eyes."3
Well, that's a lovely thought, poetic even. But the beggar-slash-angel departs without explaining more, which leaves the reader thinking about the shining eyes of pregnant women and not necessarily about the astonishing incarnation of the self-giving God soon to be born in human flesh.
In the world of serious theological study, we also find countless examinations of the birth story of Jesus that Matthew and Luke tell. The great New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine, for instance, notes in her 2006 book, The Misunderstood Jew, the interesting fact that the first two chapters of the gospel of Matthew "offer seven citations from the prophets that Jesus is said to fulfill."4 That's a small example of good scholarship, but it leads readers back to the past instead of what the future holds for Jesus and us.
And the late Catholic scholar, Fr. Raymond E. Brown, filled 752 pages of his 1993 book called, simply, The Birth of the Messiah.5 I don't know how many words Brown used in that book, but it was way, way, way more than the 205 words Matthew used in his description of that birth. (At least 205 is the word count the way the updated edition of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible translates it from the original Greek.)
The truth is that those 205 words may be among the richest and most important 205 words ever written. They tell us everything we need to know about this holy baby and his reason for leaving behind the privileges of divinity and joining us less-than-perfect humans here on Earth.
They tell us that Jesus' earthly father, Joseph, was a righteous man who wanted to do the right thing by and for Mary so as not to "expose her to public disgrace." Indeed, in Eugene Peterson's paraphrase of the Bible called The Message, we find him calling Joseph at this point in the story "chagrined but noble, determined to take care of things quietly so Mary would not be disgraced."6 Chagrined but noble pretty much nails it.
So we know right from the start that Jesus had two fathers, one divine and one about as close to perfection as humans ever get, and a mother who was God's willing servant to accomplish the incarnation of the godhead into the world for the purpose of offering humans salvation.
With all that going for Jesus, how could he not grow up filled with grace, love and truth? Indeed, we now understand that when Christians talk about truth, they're not referring to doctrinal statements such as the Apostles or Nicaean creeds, though those may point to truth. Rather, for Christians, truth is a person, Jesus Christ himself. The only word that is really true is the person the church calls the Word.
Matthew's account also tells us that the name of this holy child is to be Jesus, the English version of the Hebrew name Jeshua, which means the one who saves. Matthew also uses the name Emmanuel to describe Jesus because it means "God is with us." And, in fact, for more than three decades, God was with us in the flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
Theologians have come to refer to God's presence with us through Christ Jesus as an example of kenosis. It's a Greek word that means self-giving, self-sacrificing. Christ's kenosis was the ultimate kenotic act that showed humanity how to live generously and in harmony with the one who gave it all for us to rescue human beings from themselves and from sin and death.
We humans tend to complicate things when they don't need to be complicated. Instead of reading the simple, lovely words from Matthew's gospel or the equally enchanting birth story in Luke's gospel, we move the Christmas story out of Bethlehem and into big box stores, into toy stores, into office parties.
We put up Nativity Scenes in our homes and even in public spaces alongside Santa Claus and Frosty the Snowman. We play beautiful Christmas music, yes, but we seem unable to stop there without also throwing in a song like "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer."
It's all so distracting and unnecessary. We've been given the simple gift of Matthew's 205 words that tell us all we really need to be able to rejoice at the astonishing news that the creator of the universe has come to dwell with us in person and to point us toward an eternal life in the divine presence. So let's stop and just hear those elegant, pregnant words once more, with no other distractions:
Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be pregnant from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to divorce her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: "Look, the virgin shall become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel," which means, "God is with us." When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife but had no marital relations with her until she had given birth to a son, and he named him Jesus.
That's really all we need to know to rejoice again that it's Christmas. May Christ be born in your own heart this year.