When really important people come to town, everyone one knows it. NBA stadiums sell out months before LeBron or Steph Curry show up for game time. When Jennifer Lawrence or Chris Pratt do a personal appearance, hundreds of screaming fans will show up hours ahead of time. When the President visits your city, you can be sure the mayor will meet him at the airport and school children will be there to give the First Lady flowers. But the Christmas story shows us God does things differently. You might even call his way sneaky. The most important person in the history of the world snuck into town late one night and definitely did not stay in a five-star hotel. Jesus was smuggled into Bethlehem through the womb of a teenage girl, who gave birth in a barn. That’s because God is the God of Nobodies.
We all know the story of Christmas: the baby, the barn, the shepherds and magi. Hidden inside that familiar story is the surprising revelation that God’s way is to ignore the bigshots and use nobodies instead. Just count the nobodies:
Mary was a teenage girl from a small town. In Bible times women were not important people, and teenagers were even lower on the scale. Mix in her pre-martial pregnancy, and you’ve got a real nobody on your hands. But Mary was God’s choice. She conceived the baby Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit. God considered her somebody important and gave her a pretty tough assignment!
Joseph was a nobody, too. He was just a working man across town from Mary’s family. He was faced with a choice between trusting God or protecting his small-town reputation. But reputations belong to important people, and most of the important people were in Jerusalem. Joseph said “yes” to shame, yes to love and yes to God, so God chose Joseph to act as a foster-father to the Savior of the world.
Discover more Christmas nobodies on page two . . .
