The problem with the familiarity of the Christmas story is not that it becomes so ordinary that we lose sight of its wonder, but that it becomes so extraordinary that we lose sight of its ordinariness.
The wonder of the story arises directly from its ordinariness. A one-camel town in the northern region of an occupied country. A simple tradesman’s family, not destitute but not wealthy either. A first son, born in unusual circumstances, but not in a palace, not even in a house. An ordinary upbringing, learning the family trade, going to lessons. So little of significance that no one ever bothered to write any of it down.
But this ordinary story is made extraordinary by the central figure, Jesus. He didn’t carry his father’s name, because Joseph wasn’t his true father. He had the rough hands of a carpenter, but that was not his life’s work.
At the centre of this simple story is the amazing claim that God became human. That the creator of the universe, so long untouchable by human hands, now lay resting in the arms of the wife of a carpenter.
Instead of being “up there”, wherever “up there” might be, he entered history in order to change history. God was now “down here”, living in our very midst. God was with us—Immanuel.
As Max Lucado puts it: Christ travelled from limitless eternity to be confined by time in order to become one of us.
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