Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus – well, duh! The moment in human history when God decisively participates in our life, becomes “one of us”, when God becomes flesh, becomes incarnate.
On such a major feast we are spoilt for choice of readings. You could go to four different masses on Christmas. And if you did, you would hear four different sets of readings! (see The Nativity of the Lord). Many would be the familiar stories of the birth of a baby in Bethlehem, of angels and shepherds, and the prophecies that foretold of this decisive moment. But that’s not all, there is something more.
For the early Christians the human life of Jesus was obviously important, but in a way it was just that – obvious. They probably didn’t know Jesus personally, but they very likely knew someone who knew someone who did. The humanity of Jesus was not an issue. The divinity of Jesus was more significant, but even that was not a strange concept. After all, the Roman emperors claimed to be divine; Alexander the Great thought he was a god. The boundary between divine and human was much more porous than we think of it as being.
So, yes, Jesus was human, and divine, born at a particular moment in human history. We get that from Luke’s story of a birth in an insignificant village in Galilee, with a single small inn that was out of rooms that night (Lk 2:1-14). We also hear it from Matthew, in a very different form, with a genealogy (he was clearly targeting fans of Finding Your Roots) – not just Jesus son of David, but every link before and after, right back to Adam (Mt 1:1-25).
John however gives us a totally different perspective (Jn 1:1-18). He doesn’t tell us how Jesus was a man, and the son of God, born in a particular time and place. He tells us how Jesus existed for all time, not just from the beginning of creation, but that he was the source and origin of God’s creation. We often hear how there are two accounts of creation in the Bible, in the first two chapters of Genesis. But really there are three. John gives us the third.
Jesus was a man born of Mary in Bethlehem of Judea, but he is also the Alpha and the Omega, the one who stands at the beginning and end, not just of human history, but of all history, of all creation. In John’s words: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him… The Letter to the Hebrews (Heb 1:1-6) puts it more briefly: God spoke to us through his Son, through whom he created the universe.
So yes, a baby who was human and divine, but also the one who “to those who did accept him, gave power to become children of God”. If we accept him we have that power, we can become children of God, part of the world that Jesus created.
We aren’t just observers of the Christmas story, we are participants in it.