1

Nativity plays and all that

I guess all or most of us have memories of nativity plays. Many years ago our eldest daughter, Eleanor, played the part of a shepherd in a nativity play at her local playgroup. Unfortunately, her younger sister, Sarah, upstaged her. She didnt mean to. She was not much over a year old at the time. She was too young to be a member of the playgroup, of course, but its leaders wanted to include as many younger siblings as possible (as if they werent running a big enough risk as it was!). So Sarah was a sheep. A good part for her to play, you might have thought, since she was at the crawling stage, and therefore took naturally to being on all fours. Eleanor had the obligatory tea towel on her head, and Sarah was covered in a white woolly shawl. Very suitable for a sheep, we thought. The trouble was there were no sheepdogs in the cast, to keep her in order. She kept on crawling off, and Im afraid became rather a distraction for everybody, as Caroline, my wife, continually had to rescue her and point her back in the right direction. A few years later, when Sarah was at infants school, we went to another nativity play. This time she played the part of Mary, and with remarkable assurance for one so young sang the rst verse of Away in a manger as a solo. There was hardly a dry eye in the place, and I will never forget it. She still sings, does Sarah. In another school, in another town, our third daughter, Jo, played her part in a nativity play. But it was her best friend I remember most. Aged eight, Jemma had stage presence. She didnt know it, but she did. She was the angel Gabriel, and what I recall above all else was her hands. She stood behind Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus in her long white robe, and stretched up her arms above them in a gesture of blessing
1

The Christmas Stories

and protection. Her hands were so small! I remember thinking at the time that a bigger person could not communicate what she was expressing. The body language would be different, the hands simply too big. I have never forgotten that moment, either. In Chester Cathedral, at the crib service on Christmas Eve 2005, we had a real baby. No donkey, no camels, but at least we had a real baby. The children of the Sunday school provided the cast. A relative of one of the mums had recently had a baby. And so it was, that after Mary and Joseph had taken their places beside the crib and the time for the birth arrived, the mother of the baby slipped on to the platform, placed her child carefully in the crib, and scuttled off again as inconspicuously as she could. It was marvellous to behold. The baby was well fed and didnt murmur. It lay there for the rest of the play, as good as gold, remaining undisturbed when the youngest of the shepherds, just two, couldnt restrain himself from showing her his teddy. Yes, the baby Jesus that day was a girl. Sometimes, of course, children who are older than one or two decide to do things their own way. Mary and Joseph arrive at Bethlehem, and knock on the door of the inn to be met by an innkeeper who instead of saying, No room here, sorry, smiles and says, Of course, come in. Which room would you like? and the teachers put their hands over their eyes and shake their heads, while Mary and Joseph stand there, not knowing what to do next. Pat Alexander, in her book, Star of Wonder, gives us a particularly poignant version of this amendment to the story. It relates to a school in the Midwest of the United States and a nine-year-old boy called Wallace Purling. Wallace was a great supporter of the underdog. He himself had learning difculties. But he knew his part well. Joseph knocked loudly on the inn door. Wallace, the innkeeper, opened it wide. What do you want? he asked. My wife is expecting a baby, said Joseph. Do you have a room where she can bring him to birth, and where we can put the baby to sleep? No room, sorry, said Wallace. Try next door. So far so good; word perfect.
2

Nativity plays and all that

Mary and Joseph looked very sad, just as they had been taught. But please can we come in? Sorry, no room, replied Wallace. Please, said Joseph, looking and sounding even sadder. A tear came into Wallaces eye. He looked at Mary and Joseph. You can have my room, if you like. A friend of my daughter Eleanor once said to her, I only know one story in the Bible: Noah and the whale. I would guess that wasnt true. If pressed, she would probably have admitted she knew the stories of the journey to Bethlehem and the angels and shepherds and kings. In our society, when the joke is already very old about the man who goes into the jewellers shop to buy a cross on a chain for his wife and is asked by the assistant, Do you want a plain one, or one with a little man on it?, and when some think they only know about Jonah and the whale, the nativity play exercises a vital role in keeping countless people in touch with a key part of the tale the Bible has to tell. Indeed, even for many of us churchgoing Christians, it continues to help shape our understanding of what we call the Christmas story, that and carols and carol services, half-remembered childrens Bibles, Christmas cards, paintings, stained glass windows, sculptures, lms and sermons. Yet, even those of us who have been going to church for years may not realize quite how far the nativity play and the rest have taken us from the Bible itself. For a start, there is not one, but two Christmas stories in the Bible, and their differences outweigh their similarities. Matthews story is a dark tale, or rather, a tale of light shining in fearful darkness. Jesus is born into a dangerous world, where a young girl who becomes pregnant before her time must hide behind her mothers skirts, when the news is told to her father, and where she, her child and her whole family risk being overwhelmed by disgrace. Matthew begins to explore that disgrace, and tells of how the Holy Spirit of God will turn it to extravagant hope. Yet the danger does not end there, for Jesus is born too close to the centre of power in Jerusalem and especially to Herod, and the news of his birth is spread by magi who seem more skilled at reading stars than politics. They succeed in causing both general and particular
3

The Christmas Stories

paranoia, and the result, after they have found the child Jesus and returned home, is a most terrible massacre of babies and infants, from which Jesus escapes, but then, with Mary and Joseph, at once becomes a refugee in a country tainted by its own ancient oppression. Matthews fragile Jesus, born at home in Bethlehem, with the women of the family and the neighbouring houses no doubt in attendance, is a candle in a dark world, where the breeze of human frailty and the storm of mens concern for their power and their honour threaten to blow it out, and nearly succeed. The nativity play rarely draws on Matthew, except on his story of the magi, but then those gures are turned into wise men and from there into kings, while the fear they engender in the hearts of Herod and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and the terrible mayhem of the slaughter that follows in their wake, are generally left aside. The Christmas story, as we know it, has much more to do with Lukes version, which is full of the light and joy we wish to nd in the feast of Christmas. Clouds do pass over Lukes Christmas sky: Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, whose birth precedes that of Jesus (but without featuring in most of our plays and carols), becomes temporarily mute and deaf; Marys initial fear and bewilderment in her annunciation scene is real enough, while for the birth she has to travel at least 85 miles because of an order of the Roman emperor; in her famous song we call the Magnicat she makes mention of the humiliation of hers which God has overcome; and in the penultimate scene Simeon speaks of the sword that will pierce her soul, and of the opposition her son one day will meet. Yet these details are not typical, and do not determine the general tone. In Luke there is no threat to Marys relationship with Joseph; there are no magi blundering about Jerusalem; there is no Herod, either. Though Augustus in distant Rome makes life somewhat precarious for a few days, he poses no threat after that. He sends no soldiers, and there is no slaughter, no ight, no living as refugees in Egypt. Nor, if we understand Luke aright, is there an inn from which Mary and Joseph are turned away, let alone a lthy stable for the
4

Nativity plays and all that

birth. Instead there are songs of thanksgiving and joy, a baby safely laid in a manger, angels dancing and singing all over heaven, and shepherds running through the dark to nd warm belonging. The whole story, this small part of the tale Luke tells in his Gospel and continues in Acts, ends where it begins, in the temple in Jerusalem, but the temple authorities who later will play such a signicant role in Jesus arrest and execution are either nowhere to be seen, or else are simply intrigued by what they see or hear. We will spend the bulk of our time in the rest of this book examining these two Christmas stories, Matthews rst, then Lukes, trying to read them as if we were doing so for the rst time. We will put out of our minds the nativity plays and the carols, wonderful though they may be. We will also free our minds of any Christian doctrine that might be there. We are told that both Matthew and Luke speak of a virgin birth, and indeed we often hear it said that such an understanding is necessary, even central to the Christian faith. We will approach Matthew and Luke with an open and a questioning mind, curious to see what they really do say on the matter, and whether that is clear and unambiguous. We will endeavour to take with full seriousness the nature of the material we will be handling. That means recognizing it as storytelling, as art. Too often, in sermons, television or radio discussion, or in lm, the assumption is made that Matthew or Luke simply and straightforwardly recorded events as they happened, or faithfully handed on the transcripts of eyewitnesses who came before them. That assumption is false. At the beginning of the lm Ben-Hur, rst shown in 1959, the star of Matthews magi story is shown moving visibly across the night sky, until it stops above the village of Bethlehem and then sends down a searchlight beam hitting the place where the baby Jesus lies. This reduces Matthews wonderful, manylayered story to bathos. Far from showing us how true his story must be, it makes it ridiculous. Equally, we will not characterize the stories of Jesus birth as mere legends, or myths. Even within biblical scholarship, which should know a lot better, we sometimes nd the opening chapters of Matthews and Lukes Gospels dismissed as
5

The Christmas Stories

having nothing to tell us about the real Jesus of Nazareth, and as being of less value than the material that does. Outside academia, also, they are too often ignored, or even despised as fanciful, as clearly not true, as suitable for young children, perhaps, and for turning into nice nativity plays, but not worthy of mature consideration. Instead, we will try to pay full heed to the artistry, the creativity, the imaginations of Matthew and Luke, knowing that poetic stories like theirs, so full of symbolism and so rich with meaning, can take us far nearer truth and far deeper into the heart of God than any mechanical reporting of events. If they have legendary qualities, then legends can have extraordinary power over our imaginations. If we could rightly call them myths, then such tales are designed to be the ones we live by, and are of all kinds of story the most signicant. At two points we will pause to offer a few reections of our own, which will bring our own faith, experience and imagination to bear on the birth stories, and provide a different kind of commentary.