I am not usually an aficionado of Christmas adverts. However, this year, I found myself irresistibly drawn to “Loganair actually” the Scottish airline’s offering. The images in the first frames of their compilation of Christmas journeys were curiously familiar. Where could they be? Then the penny dropped. The road trip to the featured airport was spliced together from clips of varying outposts of my home island, Islay. The old Macaulay residence just missed the edit. Unfamiliar viewpoints of a familiar landscape spiked my interest.
Seeing the familiar in a fresh and different way must be the aim of all Christians at this time of year. The nativity story has become so commonplace we miss the shock and awe of what it says: God shows up in person in 1st-century Judean Palestine. Nativity plays, Christmas cards and carols lay sentiment, romance and drama on top of a strikingly unremarkable birth. It is this sheer down-to-earth ordinariness of the Eternal Word becoming unprepossessing human flesh that is the essential and staggering claim of Christmas.
At the risk of spoiling your Christmas allow me to debunk some of our favourite features that spice up nativity plays with drama. The gospels speak of no grumpy innkeeper turning Mary and Joseph away. Worse still Luke speaks not of an inn but of a fully occupied “guest room”, most likely in a relative’s house. Moreover, brace yourself, the gospels do not mention a stable but a manger, a feeding trough, which would be found inside the lower part of a family home in the area where the animals were kept. At further risk of being the Grinch that stole your Christmas let me add that the gospels do not mention a little donkey, nor a drummer boy and it is most likely that the little lord Jesus actually cried!
The gospels speak of the normal, ordinary, everyday life that God the Son entered. The astonishing reality is not that he turned up in a rustic stable with a cheerful menagerie of animals standing around, but that God, driven by eternal love moved into our world in all its weary, messy reality to identify with and redeem our human condition.
I love how Pete Greig describes it as “Dirty Glory.”
‘This then is our creed. We believe in the blasphemous glory of Immanuel; ‘infinity dwindled to infancy’, as the poet once said. We believe in omnipotence surrendering to incontinence, the name above every other name rumoured to be illegitimate: We believe that God’s eternal Word once squealed like a baby and, when eventually he learned to speak, it was with a regional accent. The Creator of the cosmos made tables and presumably, he made them badly at first. The Holy One of Israel got dirt in the creases of his hands. Here is our God – the Sovereign who ’emptied himself out into the nature of a man’.
Christmas proclaims a God who shows up, to be with us and to impregnate our everyday lives and our weary world with his living presence. As Canadian songwriter Bruce Cockburn so memorably puts it:
‘Redemption rips through the surface of time in the cry of a tiny babe’
In Jesus spiritual and temporal, eternity and time, flesh and spirit, heaven and earth are rewoven together. A God who shows up in the blood-stained straw of childbirth is a God who lays claim to all of life.
So, I am learning that there is no place in my life, no moment in my ordinary day, in which God is not invested. He means us to live a life of uninterrupted communion with him, alert and attentive to his nudging, prompting presence.
So may we each and all welcome Jesus into our every day: our world-weariness, our bubbling excitement, our family tensions our corrosive regrets and into our social conversations, our emails, our coffee breaks, our baby bathtimes and business deals.
May we find his freshness in the familiar.
Happy Christmas!
Iain