Just An Ordinary Nativity?

‘Immensity, cloistered in thy dear womb’ 

John Donne, ‘Nativity’, (1610)

Last week, I saw tinsel haloed angels preening in the front row, swinging their net skirts back and forth as they listened for the words they knew so they could join the singing with angelic gusto. I saw shepherds use their crooks to mischievously prod at fellow actors and Bethlehem villagers emotionally overcome, not by the miraculous birth but because they missed their mum. I clapped brave little soloists and tried not to be too distracted by deafening microphone feedback and an absurd height disparity between narrators.

School and church kids doing what they do every year. The ritual of the nativity being played out to packed halls, school gyms and churches, leading proud parents and waving grandparents through the annual retelling of the Christmas story.

And it explodes the mind to think that at the epicentre of all this choral effort, organised cuteness and earnest fun, despite the many willing or unwilling participants and frazzled teachers, is the God authored story of Jesus Christ. All these ineloquent, easily dismissed voices are telling us about something of universe changing importance. The extraordinary significance of the divine/human narrative is concealed in this yearly distorted echo of the night when the uncontainable Word of God, contained by human flesh and bone with beating heart and beautiful perfect soul was born.

Just like the unexpectedness of a baby in a manger, the truth of God’s story is told by children, perhaps in a way unexpected proclaimers carrying on the legacy of the overlooked shepherds, telling everyone what the angels had said.

There is immensity in small things. Little voices can speak powerful words that come not from themselves and not just from a script. Cloistered in the familiarity of even a school nativity play is a singular message of rescue and salvation for everyone.

Here in the tradition of the festive end-of-year season, we are presented once again with the opportunity to see with star lit eyes and humble hearts, the wonder of God’s plan for us and yet how easy it is to miss the profound, to fail to notice the momentous.

The title of a Madeleine L’Engle poem describes it as, ‘The Ordinary So Extraordinary’. I particularly love the poem’s first line, ‘He came, quietly impossible,’

The immensity of Jesus is that he is God with us, Immanuel, in unexpected places and in unexpected ways, quietly and impossibly amongst us.

Happy Christmas blog friends. x