A Nativity Story

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was a paleontologist, a Jesuit priest, and a prolific author of books about spirituality, once said that Christianity “has never doubted but that God must be looked for only in heaven, that is to say in more or less direct and profound discontinuity with here below.”

The movie The Nativity Story, currently in cinemas, focuses on a God who is found only in heaven, but who in Jesus descends to Earth to save us from ourselves. Surprisingly, however, the profound discontinuity with the “here below” portrayed in the movie can’t be found in the gospels.

On the contrary, the gospels are at pains to introduce us to Jesus as the epitome of what it is to be a human being in the image and likeness of God. The divine, the authors of these gospels reveal, has always resided in humanity—we just haven’t recognized it.

While the characters in this movie are a little more lifelike than characters usually are in movies about Jesus, it isn’t exactly a stunning portrayal of the birth narratives. Yet there were times when it touched me deeply.

For instance, there’s a moment when a conjunction of planets forms a particularly bright “star” over Bethlehem. A beam of light shoots down right into the cave upon the infant who has just been born. In the glory of that heavenly beam, I saw myself. I saw all humankind. It sent chills down my spine. Tears flooded my eyes.

What I experienced was the sheer wonder of being God incarnate. For this is what each of us is.

The nativity stories—there are two of them—employ imagery to get a message across. This imagery is intended to show us how incredibly wondrous and precious we are. It points to a great Presence that lies at the heart of our humanity.

The Nativity Story doesn’t recognize that the gospel birth stories are imagery. As a consequence of treating them literally, it paints itself into a corner—and its only escape is to ignore a whole section of one of the stories. The moviemakers had no choice but to omit much of Luke’s story. Read as biography instead of as imagery, the stories go in quite different directions—a reality that they just couldn’t portray in film!

The first gospel to be written, Mark, has no birth or infancy narrative, but begins when Jesus is about thirty years old. Similarly, the last gospel to be written, John, has no birth story. Rather, it goes back to the beginning of time and shows us that the eternal being of God has always been at work in history and continues to be present in us today, the key insight Jesus shared with people that so transformed their lives.

Matthew and Luke pen the only birth stories, and the two don’t present us with a nativity scene that’s anything like the one pictured in the movie. It’s not like the nativity scenes on our lawns or in our churches, either, all of which attempt to combine Matthew and Luke as if they were telling the same story. In fact, Matthew and Luke’s nativity stories are radically different—and for an important reason.

In Matthew, there are no angels in the sky and no shepherds. Neither is there a manger. Oh, and there’s no journey from Bethlehem on the traditional Christmas donkey, either! For in this gospel, Mary and Joseph live in Bethlehem already, in a house, to which magi—astrologers from Babylon—come bearing gifts as they discern a sign in the conjunctions of the heavenly bodies.

After the magi present their gifts, they depart secretly at night, and Joseph and Mary take the infant Jesus and flee to Egypt. Herod then slaughters all the boy babies up to the age of two. Only after a long period in Egypt do the family return to Palestine. At first they try to go back to Judea, their home, but this proves dangerous. So they seek out a new home and come upon the little village of Nazareth in Galilee. Read the account carefully, and you’ll see Nazareth is new to them. This isn’t a return to a place they formerly lived.

While the family are secretly fleeing to Egypt in Matthew’s nativity story, in Luke they are instead appearing in public, presenting Jesus in the temple on two occasions at which well known spiritual figures pronounce blessings upon the infant. Then, after the rites of circumcision and purification have been completed publicly, and word of Jesus’ birth has been spread to all in Jerusalem, they peacefully return to Nazareth, their home. There is no danger from Herod, no escape to Egypt, and no slaying of the baby boys.

You cannot make these stories say the same thing. And for good reason. They are not biography, but stories that are built on characters well known to us from the Hebrew Bible. Their purpose is to show where the divine Presence can be found.

Matthew’s nativity is based on the story of Daniel in the court of the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, where magi were unable to decipher the signs given the king, whereas Daniel the Jew could. Matthew reverses this story. The pagan magi can see what the Jewish religious authorities and royal court can’t.

Matthew also retells the slaughter of the infant Hebrew boys from the book of Exodus—only now, it’s the Jewish king and the land of Palestine, not the Egyptian king, that’s the threat, while Egypt is a place of safety.

Luke’s story has a quite different cast of characters and theme. It emphasizes that Bethlehem is the city of David. Consequently, it’s a story that features shepherds—for David, Israel’s first real king, was a shepherd.

What these two nativity stories are saying to us is the topic of our next blog, to appear on Tuesday, December 19. These imagistic stories point us to the surprise places that we will encounter Presence—if we are willing to look. We will discover, as did Teilhard de Chardin, that there is no discontinuity at all between God “on high” and humanity “here below.”

In the meantime, if you aren’t experiencing the power of Presence in your life, we invite you to read Michael Brown’s groundbreaking book, The Presence Process. You’ll discover the God who has always been at the heart of humanity—a Presence that seeks to burst forth in heavenly glory in our everyday lives.