Airbrushing the nativity until it looks like a still from a Richard Curtis Rom-com
makes us poorer, not richer. 

Excuse me, but can someone tell me where this London is?  Am I missing something here?  Perhaps I can frequent a café in richardcurtisland so that something of its witty and beautiful aura can rub off on me! 

You see a similar fiction perpetrated on TV holiday shows.  The scenes are carefully edited and the presenters are perfectly made up. The sea glistens under a sun-baked sky and venues are always easy to get to and enjoy.  You ache for your holiday to be like this – and then you remember yours will start at Heathrow terminal 4.

The subversive alternative to this is the video recorder holiday which you make yourself that lacks flattering lighting and is riddled with minor disasters.  The luxury holiday villa the brochure promised is actually a crumbling apartment block where there is no hot water, the fridge and the air conditioning are broken, you are on the seventh floor with no railing round the balcony for your toddler and the planes fly about fifty feet over the building as they begin their landing.  The swimming pool has a dead rodent floating in it and the salad bar is full of e coli. 

Let’s be honest, there are also two versions of this nativity which we rejoice at Christmas.

The first is airbrushed like the holiday show or richardcurtisland.  It is a pretty picture book stable that looks warm and cosy.  The stars shine brightly in the sky.  The cattle are neatly arranged round the baby.  Mary has a smile broader than the youthful Osmonds.  The hay is inviting like a fluffy pillow.  The shepherds get the first snaps which can be sold on to Hello magazine for a cool million as the Holy Family relax at home. 

The second version of the nativity is the video recorder version.  As Mary approaches term she has to make a pointless and demanding journey to satisfy a new tax regime supporting an unpopular armed occupation.  Perhaps Joseph miscalculated how busy the town would be with a population on the move like that and there is no room at the inn for them.  Mary puts her first born in a manger, leading us by inference to the conclusion that the delivery suite was a stable, and so its image becomes imprinted on generations to come.  There would be no heating outside the primitive dwellings of Bethlehem and so the cold would have seeped into the bones in that way you can’t shake off, whatever time of year it actually was.  The filth and the squalor, the bacteria and the smells would indelibly mark this birth.

There is little human joy to compare with the arrival of a child, so perhaps Mary and Joseph rose above adversity, finding encouragement too in the secret promises of God about their Jesus.  But even this consolation is dashed at some near unspecified point when Herod unleashes his implacable rage on the children of Bethlehem.  The family are forced to become refugees, fleeing for their lives and no doubt made cruelly aware that the children of Bethlehem died because they were in town at the wrong time.

Callous bureaucracy that treats people like pawns; temporary homelessness which risks neo-natal death; refugee status incurred by a tyrant; early life lived in Egypt away from family support.  These are some of the details of the infancy of Jesus, like the grainy image from an old camcorder of events you would rather forget. 

Why did God do it this way?

It can’t have been by accident: after all, nobody can insure God against bad outcomes and so he has to get it right, even when it looks wrong to us.  I think this birth narrative shows us what kind of saviour we were sent.  The luxury and sense of entitlement that goes with wealth are absent here.  The pomp and ceremony surrounding kingship are scarcely to be seen.  The cushioned and protected existence of leaders who lose touch with their people is eschewed.  Most people spend their lives trying to be upwardly mobile.  God began his by choosing to be downwardly mobile. 

This nativity gives us an early clue that the Son of God was destined to become our servant.  That he endured humiliation, pain and suffering and finally absorbed the horror of human sin on the cross is the beautiful and mysterious heartbeat of a God who is worth the loyalty of every human heart.  And this nativity sends a coded message about suffering which those who are well easily miss.  Many people’s lives are messed up like that first stable.  Few extended families in reality are free from the sadness which broken hopes and broken dreams evoke.  God has the authority to inject resilience and hope into households which are on their knees because his was floored at birth.  He’s been there before we were and he will remain there for others long after we have moved on.