The Christmas story, as related in the Gospels, furnishes the background for memories that reach back to childhood. Few of us, either as children or admiring parents, can ever forget the Christmas Nativity plays that created such excitement in our earliest years at school. Frequently they are remembered as much for what went wrong as for what went right. Every primary teacher knows that organising the very young into a coherent public performance is both a messy and uncertain business.
The infancy narratives of Jesus reach beyond nostalgia. They remind us, in the words of the Letter to the Philippians, that at his Incarnation the Son of God did not stand aloof from a messy and uncertain world. “His state was divine, yet he did not cling to his equality with God but emptied himself to assume the condition of a slave, and became as men are; and being as all men are, he was humbler yet, even to accepting death.”
