I approach Christmas as my first grandchild, Leah, turns six months old. Grandparents often have more leisure to enjoy and reflect on the development of these small humans than their parents might, suffering as they are from sleep deprivation, desperate Christmas shopping and a seemingly endless cycle of feeding and nappy changes.
Her mother Rachel made this film of Leah’s attempts to learn to sit up by herself. It is comedy gold, as face-planting and instability eventually lead to balance and a sense of pride at her achievement. For me it raised the question: did the child born in a manger also learn to sit in such an amusing way? Or did the Son of God come fully formed, with perfect balance and core strength?!
The Christian claim of God becoming flesh and living among us is astonishing. He dwelt with us not just in fully adult form but in the vulnerability and fragility of baby- and childhood. A human baby is in a vulnerable and needy state much longer than other animals. Babies need to be fed and protected while they grow, learn basic tasks, and master communication.
To take the incarnation seriously means taking seriously a God who trusted that human beings would provide protection and sustenance. The creator and sustainer of the whole universe became dependent on a human family, with all of the risks and brokenness of human community and the world.
Little is reported in the gospels about how the Son of God grew from baby to man. Of course, such lack of information gave free rein for Victorian hymn writers to pen carols in which they imposed their own prejudices upon the child. I squirm inside listening to Once in Royal David’s City. This was originally a poem by Cecil Frances Alexander, published in her 1848 hymnbook Hymns for Little Children. She writes:
And through all His wondrous childhood
He would honour and obey,
Love and watch the lowly maiden,
In whose gentle arms He lay:
Christian children all must be
Mild, obedient, good as He.
So is the impression that Jesus never cried during teething, had tantrums as a toddler, or as a male teenager went through that phase when communication becomes nothing but grunts, and limbs don’t seem to work in a co-ordinated way?
In a similar way, Away in a Manger was published in the late nineteenth century and remains one of our most popular carols, often selected by adults for children to sing. Some have claimed that it comes from Martin Luther, but there is evidence that it is probably of American origin. The line which makes me feel uncomfortable is:
The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes,
But little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.
This non-crying baby is symptomatic of a view of the incarnation which positions Jesus as somehow separate from the reality of the human condition. Jesus is human, but does not experience the limitations and difficulties of being human. This is a Jesus who hovers a couple of inches above the dirt of the Palestinian roads, never gets tired or angry, and whose hopes and fears are always hopes.
Yet Christian theology is earthed in a Jesus who is fully human and fully divine. For people who live with fragile health, or are victims of political injustice or natural disasters, the Word becoming flesh means that God is truly with us in our suffering. For the scientist who is committed to the atoms, patterns, development and complexity of the world, the Word made flesh is an affirmation by God of the importance of the basic stuff of the world, and the vocation of scientists to explore it seriously.
I was at a carol service on Sunday evening, holding Leah in my arms for most of the service. I was pleased we did not sing Away in a Manger and we sang an edited version of Once in Royal David’s City! The final hymn was Charles Wesley’s Hark the Herald Angels Sing, published in 1739 and later adapted by George Whitfield. Charles and his brother John, at the source of the Evangelical Revival, understood that God’s purposes were not just about saving souls as distinct from bodies – and indeed the rest of creation. So in the third verse, Charles engages with the earthliness of human existence, writing that Jesus was ‘born to raise the sons of Earth’. At this particular service, the organisers had gone with the more inclusive line ‘born to raise us from the Earth’. While avoiding gendered imagery, unfortunately it instead seemed to adopt the fallacy of Greek dualism, wherein humans ought to be separated from the evil and dirt of the Earth. I am a child of the Earth, and God’s salvation is for the whole Earth.
Imagining the Saviour of the world at a stage of childhood where even he could not sit up straight may not make for a romantic Christmas carol, but for me it helps me glimpse more deeply the wonder of the incarnation.
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