Unless you had a blood relation to that baby, you might be wondering why I told you. I mean, you’re happy for the couple. You just don’t know them. You’ve never read about them in Us Weekly, and their story wasn’t featured on the news.
It was ordinary. Just like the thousands of other births that happened in similar communities that same night.
And that’s the point.
The message is this: Jesus didn’t just come for the rich and famous. He didn’t come only for the prestigious and the noble. He came for the nobodies. He came for the people that others would never give a second thought to. The ordinary. The unimpressive and unremarkable. The forgotten and overlooked.
Jesus’ mission was reflected even in the manner of his birth. The infinite Creator of the universe was born under the most unspectacular circumstances.
If you didn’t already know the significance of what was happening, you’d never know. And yet God was doing something so spectacular that we can hardly even grasp the full weight of its significance 2000 years later.
God is writing eternity into the ordinary.
And so that means that maybe, just maybe, through Jesus, God can write an eternally spectacular story in the midst of your ordinary, bland, mundane, nobody life.
Maybe the abundant life Jesus offers isn’t just for the rich, the talented, the well-adjusted, the presentable, the lovely people of the world. Maybe, just maybe, it’s for you too.
That’s powerful. And that’s what Christmas is all about.
Yes, You Can Keep Your Nativity Scene.
Nativity scenes are great. I love mine. And, yes, it depicts Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in a stable. But I’m not getting rid of it.
The tradition of this nativity image is a great comfort to many of us. It calls our hearts to remember the impact of God becoming flesh and dwelling among us. And that’s a good thing.
Let’s lean into it even just a little more by remembering that Jesus, the King of Glory, came to us in the most inglorious and unspectacular fashion possible.
This Christmas, may your heart be filled with the wonder that Jesus came for you, in the form of someone just like you.
A version of this article originally appeared here.
