Along with the above, simply as revealing is the matter of who stays on the margins of this story. Kings, governors, and spiritual elites seem largely as background figures, and even as threats. This sample displays one thing distinctive concerning the Gospels themselves. In a key passage from Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, historian Diarmaid MacCulloch observes:
“Biographies weren’t uncommon within the historical world and the Gospels do have many options in frequent with non-Christian examples. But these Christian books are an unusually ‘down-market’ number of biography, through which extraordinary individuals mirror on their expertise of Jesus, the place the highly effective and the attractive typically keep on the sidelines of the story, and the place it’s typically the poor, the ill-educated and the disreputable whose encounters with God are most vividly described.”9
MacCulloch helps us see that the centering of “the poor, the ill-educated, and the disreputable” within the Christmas story isn’t incidental. Matthew and Luke are doing one thing that makes the Gospels distinctive by telling the story from the angle of these least more likely to be centered in historical literature. Magnificence, energy, and status don’t disappear – the smart males do pay homage, in any case – however they aren’t the primary characters of the story. What comes into focus as an alternative are staff, girls, fleeing migrants, growing older our bodies, and births that happen in lower than best circumstances and underneath the shadow of a violent empire.
Christmas is the place all of those themes rise to the floor. The story doesn’t romanticize poverty, however neither does it soften its hardship, and the approaching of Emmanuel is a reminder that that is exactly the place God chooses to dwell.
