There is something perpetually moving about the Christmas story. It is the account of how God became man, and, with magnificent indifference to human preoccupations with status and accomplishments, became man in a discomfiting fashion. The girl who became his mother was unmarried, her pregnancy understandably a profound shock to the man she was betrothed to. The family into which the Son of God was born was unprepossessing; Joseph was a carpenter. And, as Fr Richard Ounsworth points out on the scriptures of the day, the birth of Christ may indeed have been placed firmly in salvation history by the account of the genealogy of Christ, but it also upended the usual course of events by ending with Joseph – who was married to Mary.