The Nativity
Almost nine months ago, on a Tuesday in March, we paused the full solemnity of Lent in order to commemorate with modest, still-Lenten joy the Feast of the Annunciation. Every year on March 25, unless that day falls during Holy Week or the week of Easter, the church celebrates the moment when the angel Gabriel appeared to Mother Mary and announced that she would conceive and bear God’s Son, whom she would name Jesus.
Since this year that day was a Tuesday, we celebrated the Annunciation at Ancient Roots, our contemplative Eucharist that takes place in the parish hall at 6:00 pm on Tuesdays in Lent. And, since that day was also the fourth Tuesday of March, we observed the Annunciation at our monthly Eucharist in the chapel at Butterfield Trail Village. Although we did not add “alleluia” back to our liturgy, we did use white stoles and heard joyful readings, which felt delightfully out of place in the middle of a penitential season.
It makes sense, of course, that the church would remember Jesus’ conception exactly nine months before we celebrate his birth, but, unless March 25 happens to fall on a weekday when we are already planning to gather for worship, many of us would not even notice. How different that is from Christmas! Our whole world—sacred and secular—revolves around December 25 regardless of what day of the week it falls on. Many years, as Christmas Eve approaches, I may not be able to tell you what day it will be, but I can absolutely tell you how I will spend every minute of the day whenever it comes.
I wonder whether we might recover an important principle of our faith if we gave the Annunciation a little more attention. I wonder if Christmas might feel even more special if we took time to distinguish between the incarnation and the nativity.
Sometimes we call Christmas the “Feast of the Incarnation,” but that is not correct. Christmas is not the day we celebrate the incarnation—the moment when the Word became flesh—when the second person of the Holy Trinity was united inseparably and hypostatically to human nature, thus enabling our adoption and redemption by God. That great moment was not shared with shepherds or witnessed by an innkeeper. It was between Mary and God—hidden within her body—a quiet miracle that, in time, she chose to share with Joseph and her relative Elizabeth.
Instead, Christmas is known as the “Feast of the Nativity”—the day of Jesus’ birth. Christmas is the day when we celebrate the biological consequence of the incarnation—the revelation of the God-become-human to the world outside of Mary’s womb. If we want to celebrate the incarnation, we need to go back to March 25 and celebrate the moment when the Holy Spirit came to Mary, allowing the child conceived in her womb to be holy.
Having preached a bunch of Christmas Eve sermons, I must confess that I often appeal to the doctrine of the incarnation when attempting to convey to the congregation the hope that God gives us at Christmas. The baby Jesus lying in the manger matters to us because that is Emmanuel, God with us. The one who was born in Bethlehem is more than a wise teacher or a spotless moral example. He came to save us from our sins and deliver us from death because, as the God-man, he alone has the power to defeat sin and death.
In a sense, the right time to celebrate all those things is back in March. Even while the baby was still inside Mary’s womb, the union of divine and human in the person of Jesus Christ had been accomplished. We get a sense of that when we hear Mary’s song, the Magnificat, which she sang in praise of God’s salvation several months before giving birth. Sure, the nativity of Mary’s child is worth celebrating robustly, but I think that there is something more beautifully ordinary to celebrate at Christmas than the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us. If we were to give the Annunciation its due, how might the Feast of the Nativity become its own distinct celebration?
Childbirth is a risky proposition, especially in the first century. There were other, less vulnerable, less uncertain mechanisms culturally available for God to come and dwell on the earth. The Greeks and Romans had plenty of stories about the gods putting on human disguise and living among mere mortals. Why not pretend to be one of us for a while, until human beings learned what it means to be god-like? Why not skip the messiness of infancy and childhood altogether?
The idea that God would come and be with us is strange enough, but the thought that God would be born as a tiny, weak, helpless infant is absolutely ridiculous. Not only would that lead to radical claims like calling Jesus’ mother Theotokos or the God-bearer, but it would also mean that the God-child would need to live for years before anyone could tell that he was really something special. Why would God keep this great work of salvation hidden for so long? And how would the community of faith ever articulate its unwavering belief in the full divinity of one who was as susceptible to the vicissitudes and vulnerabilities of human life as any ordinary person? How are people supposed to believe in the power and promise of a God who cannot even change his own diaper?
Theologically as well as temporally, the feasts of the Annunciation and the Nativity are inseparably linked. In Jesus Christ, God does not just become like us. God becomes fully us—all of us, completely us—because only then can we be set free of the inherent brokenness we carry as citizens of a broken world. “God has not healed that which God has not assumed,” the fourth-century theologian Gregory of Nazianzus wrote, emphasizing the fullness of the incarnation. God must become completely human if human beings are to be completely healed. And that remarkable sort of incarnation requires an ordinary sort of nativity.
Mary believed what the angel Gabriel had said to her, and she offered herself fully as a vessel for God’s salvation. In that moment, God became fully human within her womb. But, in order for that radical divine action to come to fruition, the ordinary yet miraculous human process of gestation and childbirth needed to take place. There is no way for a human being to come into this world unless they are born. That is what we celebrate at Christmas—not only that the Word became flesh but that, in order to dwell among us as one of us, the infinite Word of God enters this world just like all of the rest of us.
On Christmas Eve, we will celebrate the natural nine-month consequence of the supernatural incarnation, yet the birth of Jesus is more than an ordinary event. In the infinite imagination of God, there may have been another way for God to come and save us, but we know of no other way for God to become one of us except to be born. No matter how hard I try, I doubt I will be able to avoid an appeal to the incarnation in this year’s Christmas sermon, but I hope also to convey the significance of the nativity itself. I hope that, for each one of us, Christmas will be as extraordinary and familiar as the salvation God grants us in Jesus Christ.
Yours faithfully,
Evan D. Garner
