Christmas more than any other of our feasts displays the diversity of our gospel tradition. You might expect that how God came to earth, became a human being, would be a key element in the Christian tradition. There should be a pretty clear consensus about this – it is the thing that distinguishes Christianity from any other religion, even those that are most closely related in the shared Biblical tradition going back to Abraham. In the three great religions of the book: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, only Christianity claims that God is as close to us as another human being.
However, as usual, God’s idea of how this should play out doesn’t agree with ours. One of our gospels doesn’t say anything at all about how this all came to pass; one has a beautiful philosophical introduction but also doesn’t actually say anything about the beginning of Jesus’s life; and two do provide us with some more substantial details, but they are completely different. All of this is layed out in the different readings we have for each of our Christmas masses.
We could see this as a major problem. If we were trying to put together a CNN program or a PBS documentary it would be a disaster. How on earth can we tell this story with any conviction if we can’t even get our basic facts straight and some of our major sources don’t contain any information at all.
Fortunately we’re not trying to write an autobiography. Our gospels are certainly important in capturing the accounts that the early Christian community shared to explain and encourage each other in their faith. But their faith came first, the gospel accounts followed.
The same is true for us. We are an “apostolic church”, which means our faith is passed down from one generation to the next, starting with those apostles who knew Jesus personally. Our faith first comes from other people, maybe our parents and family, or from others who influenced us. Reading the scriptures, understanding how one account relates to another, all that follows on.
So we should celebrate the diversity that we have in our accounts of the incarnation, how God became human, and what that means. There is no single explanation that can encompass all of that, no single story that will lay out the sequence of events that could bring this about.
We believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, because in some way his continuing presence in our world, as another human being, has touched us. That is our faith and we continue to celebrate it. We celebrate it particularly in this feast remembering the beginning of that life, memorializing it in as many ways as possible, within all our traditions. There are as many different experiences of God as there are people, but they all point back to one God, one savior, one source of love in our world.