Every Advent and Christmas season, Christians around the world our attention turns to the most astounding event imaginable: the birth of Jesus. The incarnation of God the Son, the Word who was with God and was God in the beginning (John 1:1-2). The specific moment in history when this eternal Word became a human being.
But let’s be honest: For the rest of the world, Christmas is about presents and a general sense of goodwill and cheer. It is unmoored from what it commemorates. And what Christmas stands for seems strange to many looking at Christianity from the outside.
The Peculiar Promise of the Coming King
Of course, people who don’t know Jesus aren’t alone in this. The Israelites and later Judeans didn’t entirely know who they were waiting for, either. Now, they knew the promises God had made—promises of a son, a king who would:
- Destroy the serpent who deceived the first humans (Genesis 3:15)
- Rule over a kingdom that would never end (2 Samuel 7:16; Psalm 110:1)
- Be known by many names and titles: the Son of Man (Daniel 7:13–14), the Son of David (Isaiah 11:1), the Son of God (2 Samuel 7:14; Psalm 2:7); the Lord’s Servant (Isaiah 42:1); the Branch (Jeremiah 23:5).
- Be called “Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6 NKJV)
But how would they know that this promised son had finally arrived? Through a sign: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel.” (Isaiah 7:14 NKJV).
For centuries, they waited. And as they waited, they undoubtedly wondered what this sign could mean. Did it mean a young woman would conceive and give birth to a child the way children typically do? Or was this a young woman, this virgin, who would become pregnant with a child who had no biological father?
Would the promised son’s arrival be natural, or would it be a supernatural act of God?
The Peculiar Announcement
And then, one night, an angel—Gabriel—appeared to a young woman, most likely a teenager, named Mary.
“Greetings, favored one,” the angel said. “The Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28 NET). Mary was confused and, no doubt, terrified. (Wouldn’t you be if a supernatural being showed up in front of you?) What was happening? Why was this angel calling her “favored?” Mary was no one special. She wasn’t well-known or important. She was ordinary.
Nevertheless, the angel insisted that she had found favor with God, just as so many others who seemed unimportant or insignificant had done throughout history. And God’s favor was going to be shown in a very specific way: she would become pregnant and give birth to a son, whom she was to name Jesus. He would be called “the Son of the Most High”—the Son of God—and he would be a king whose kingdom would never end (Luke 1:30–33 NET).
Although Mary was engaged, she and her husband-to-be, Joseph, were not yet married. As a God-fearing Jewish couple, they had not yet consummated their relationship. So, Mary being pregnant while still unmarried would raise questions. But even as her mind raced, Mary asked, “How will this be, since I have not been intimate with a man?” (Luke 1:34).
The angel explained that this would not be a normal pregnancy. Her child would be conceived through the power of God, he would be called the Son of God, and he would be holy—perfect, pure, and set apart—because he is God (Luke 1:35). The Word, God the Son, became the Son of God, as he took on flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14).
The Easier to Believe Alternatives
If you believe the story, you recognize the truth in its details. You know what happening and why. But do you also see why someone might find all this a bit unusual, perhaps even strange? For a baby to be conceived without two people being involved in some capacity seems ridiculous to our sensibilities. Yet, this is what happened. Jesus’ birth was a miracle—a supernatural act of God—that really did happen.
I can understand why someone might think of this as a bit of mythologizing, the result of the stories of Jesus becoming sensationalized over time. It’s the same reason I can understand why someone might prefer to believe that the whole story was borrowed from other religions entirely.1 I can even understand why someone might believe that the story of the virgin birth was an elaborate cover-up to hide that Mary had been unfaithful to Joseph, even if it does her an extreme disservice. These are easier to believe than to believe that Jesus is God in the flesh, born of a human woman with no human father.
But easy doesn’t mean honest. And honest is what we all want to be, isn’t it, especially at Christmas?
The Peculiar Good News of Christmas
For those of us who are Christians, being honest means admitting that there are parts of our faith that seem strange to anyone who doesn’t believe it. What seems clear to us might be hard for someone else to understand. It may even be frustrating at times.
I’ve been there. What I now believe about Jesus didn’t make sense to me before I believed it. Even now, there are parts that are still a mystery—parts that I don’t think anyone can ever fully understand. And that’s okay. There are things about Christianity that we can only know in part because we can only see them in part (1 Corinthians 13:9–12). But even these things that sometimes seem so strange are good news for the whole world.
In his incarnation, God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, actually became one of us. He took on human flesh, looking like other humans and “sharing in human nature” (Philippians 2:7 NET). He was a real human being with a real human mother (Luke 2:1–7). A baby who did all the things babies do, which means, despite what you might have sung in a well-known Christmas carol, there was at least some crying he made.2 He experienced all that we do because he was one of us (Hebrews 4:15).
That’s the peculiar good news of Christmas—the part that is the hardest to believe. The man Jesus was a human being. The man Jesus is God in human form. And he came into this world to heal the divide between God and humanity.
Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash
- Although it must be said that similar stories only appeared centuries after Christianity came onto the scene or require significant feats of mental gymnastics to draw a parallel. A virgin birth or conception does not play a role in the stories of Zoroaster, who had a human mother and father, or Mithras, who sprang forth from a rock, for example. ↩︎
- “Away in a Manger” has been criticized as promoting Docetism by some Christians, but if it does this, it was most likely not an intentional choice on the part of its author. It is much more likely an example of bad poetry leading to accidental heresy. ↩︎
