This image came my way recently; I don’t know who made it, I wish I did, and I beg the artist’s forgiveness for reproducing it here unattributed. I find it brilliant and extraordinarily moving.

The account of José and María (or Yusuf and Maryam) and their soon-to-be-born son Josh is about many things on many levels, but it is not not the story of an unwed teenage mother with a fiancé who is not the biological father of her child but nevertheless assumes their care, searching for shelter, having been required to travel even in her condition in order to facilitate the payment of taxes to an occupying power whose language they probably do not speak, and later forced to flee the country seeking refuge from brutal state terror ordered by a lunatic puppet of a leader. Such is the Holy Family.

We know this story. We have met these people, though we may not have paid them much attention. They are thousands of children, women, and men in every age and every place since at least the dawn of civilization, and a particular family in our own place and time. And not ‘even’ – reservedly, incidentally, apologetically, or in-spite-of-it-all – here, but precisely, deliberately, and fully here, is where, our faith tradition tells us, the divine is to be found. It can be unpacked in infinite ways, but this is in essence the Christmas story.

God, like Orthodox icons, or even some kinds of nonrepresentational art, is abstract enough to be universal; God in Jesus Christ is so vividly particular as to be universal and timeless again, like a Rembrandt or a Caravaggio or a late medieval work or indeed this illustration: if the Incarnation happened here, it could have happened anywhere. Because it happened here, it does happen everywhere.

Watching the news, we may wonder whether the leaders and societies of the ‘first world’ (and others) will let Christmas come to them this year, or any year. But as it did then, it will come no matter what, with all the primal urgency of childbirth: the time has come; the King and his Kingdom cannot be contained. We may aspire to be midwives and nursemaids to this most miraculous of new lives; we might be doddering temple-dwellers awaiting it; we are just as likely to be heathen sorcerers seeking it, or even ragtag shepherds on the margins not paying any particular attention.

In any case we will come upon it, unexpectedly, this new life. When we do encounter it, let us like St Mary and St Simeon joyfully embrace it, and embrace those who bring it to us, for they are part of the package. Let us like the magi bow down before it and them, and like St Joseph tend and provide for it and them. Let us, like our own Lord, humble ourselves to serve those whom the world calls lowly, and so doing serve him.

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