The Nativity of Christ

The Nativity is the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem — God the Son entering the world as a newborn child of the Virgin Mary. It is the event in which the eternal God is born in time.

For Inquirers

Try to picture the largest, oldest, most powerful thing you can imagine, and then picture it becoming small enough to be held in someone's arms. That is, as plainly as it can be said, what Christians mean by the Nativity: the eternal God, who made time itself, enters time as a newborn baby, born to a young woman in a small town, with nowhere better to lay Him than a feeding trough for animals.

It would be easy to hear this as a nice story about humility — God choosing to arrive quietly instead of with fanfare. That is true, but it undersells what actually happened. This is not God visiting in disguise, the way a king might dress as a peasant for a night and then go home. The baby in the manger does not stop being God for the length of His visit, and He does not go back to being "only God" afterward. From this moment forward, forever, the eternal Son is also, fully and permanently, a human being — one who was once genuinely this small, this new, this helpless.

That is why the shepherds and the strange visitors from the East matter so much to how the story is told. Ordinary shepherds, about as unimportant as anyone in that world, are the first to be told the news, by an army of angels no less. And wise men from a foreign country, guided by nothing more than a star, travel a great distance to kneel before a baby and give Him gifts. Poor and powerful, insiders and outsiders, earth and heaven — all of them end up gathered around the same manger. If you want one image for what the Nativity claims happened at that moment, it might be this: the whole distance between heaven and earth, and between every kind of person on earth, suddenly had one point where it all came together.

Overview

The Nativity celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem (Luke 2.1-20; Matthew 1.18-25), announced by angels to shepherds and honored by the magi from the East (Matthew 2.1-12).
It is kept on December 25 and is the historical, bodily "arrival" of the Incarnation that began at the Annunciation: the invisible God is now seen, held, and adored as a human infant.
The Church reads it as the fulfillment of prophecy — that the ruler of Israel would come from Bethlehem (Micah 5.1) — and as the union of heaven and earth: shepherds and magi, angels and animals, gathered around a manger.
The Fathers read the Nativity as the start of a "great exchange": the Son takes on our poverty so that we might come to share in His riches.

The birth in Bethlehem

Luke tells the story with almost no ornament: Mary "gave birth to her firstborn son. She wrapped him in bands of cloth and laid him in a feeding trough, because there was no room for them in the inn" (Luke 2.7). There is no palace, no announcement to the powerful, nothing to mark the moment as historic except what happens next: an angel appears to shepherds keeping watch nearby and tells them, "behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be to all the people. For there is born to you today, in David's city, a Savior, who is Christ the Lord" (Luke 2.10-11). The sign given to confirm this staggering announcement is deliberately plain: "you will find a baby wrapped in strips of cloth, lying in a feeding trough" (Luke 2.12).

Matthew supplies a second set of visitors, from much farther away. "Wise men from the east" arrive in Jerusalem asking, "where is he who is born King of the Jews?" (Matthew 2.1-2), and when they find Him they "fell down and worshiped him," offering "gold, frankincense, and myrrh" (Matthew 2.11) — the nations already streaming toward the King of Israel before He has said a word.

The eternal Son "born to a woman"

St. Paul states the whole mystery of the feast in a single sentence: "when the fullness of the time came, God sent out his Son, born to a woman, born under the law" (Galatians 4.4). The one born is not a new being brought into existence at Bethlehem; He is the eternal Son, sent, who takes on a human birth He had never had before. This is what the Church reads Micah's ancient prophecy as pointing toward: "thou, Bethlehem… art few in number to be reckoned among the thousands of Juda; yet out of thee shall one come forth to me, to be a ruler of Israel; and his goings forth were from the beginning, even from eternity" (Micah 5.1) — a ruler small enough to be born in an insignificant town, and old enough that His origin reaches back before there was a "before."

The great exchange

St. Gregory the Theologian, preaching on this very feast, gives the Nativity its classic patristic reading: "He Who gives riches becomes poor, for He assumes the poverty of my flesh, that I may assume the richness of His Godhead. He that is full empties Himself, for He empties Himself of His glory for a short while, that I may have a share in His Fulness."[^greg-exchange] Gregory draws the manger itself directly into this exchange a few lines later, urging his hearers to "worship the manger through which thou, being without sense, wast fed by the Word."[^greg-manger] The Son does not merely visit poverty and helplessness from a safe distance — He takes them on as fully His own, precisely so that what belongs to Him by nature might come to belong to us by grace. Athanasius states a related principle elsewhere, of the Incarnation as a whole rather than of the Nativity's poverty specifically: the Word "was made man that we might be made God."[^ath] The two are not identical arguments, but they point the same direction, and together they are why the Church treats the Nativity as already opening onto theosis.

The feast is therefore the concrete unfolding of what began invisibly at the Annunciation: what was conceived in secret is now seen, held, and adored in the open, by shepherds and kings alike. See also The Incarnation and Theotokos.

Sources

[^greg-exchange]: St. Gregory the Theologian, Oration 38 ("On the Theophany, or Birthday of Christ"), §13 — "He Who gives riches becomes poor, for He assumes the poverty of my flesh, that I may assume the richness of His Godhead. He that is full empties Himself, for He empties Himself of His glory for a short while, that I may have a share in His Fulness.". [^greg-manger]: St. Gregory the Theologian, Oration 38, §17 — "worship the manger through which thou, being without sense, wast fed by the Word.". [^ath]: St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word, §54 — "For He was made man that we might be made God.".