The extraordinarily ordinary nativity.
The most extraordinary element of Jesus’s birth is its sheer “ordinariness.”
There is a reason why “Silent Night” remains one of the most popular Christmas carols of all time. The two-hundred-year-old hymn has been translated into over three hundred different languages and is widely considered to be the most “Christmas-y” of all the Christmas carols. It sets the Yuletide mood thanks in large part to the words of hymnist Joseph Mohr, which lean into one of the most beautiful aspects of our Lord’s birth. The first stanza goes like this:
Silent night, holy night
All is calm, all is bright
Round yon virgin mother and Child
Holy Infant so tender and mild
There is a delightful tension within those lines, a paradox, if you will, as the night of Jesus’s arrival into this world of weal and woe is described as holy and bright, silent and calm. On one hand that night in Bethlehem was like any other night. A chill pierced the night sky that felt darker than usual thanks to the imperial hand that pressed down on all of Israel. Folks went about their business, dutifully following the emperor’s latest decree. And all the while, in a secluded room more fit for livestock than people, an unassuming mother gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. There had been many nights like this one. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary.
However, on the other hand, that night in the City of David was quite unlike any before or since — not in the least of which because that baby being cradled in his mother’s arms was no mere baby. He was the “Savior, Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11). “Jesus, Lord, at Thy birth,” Mohr writes. There is, indeed, something uniquely extraordinary about the “holy night” on which the Christ of God entered the world. And yet, by the same token, there is something profusely ordinary about it all. Perhaps that’s the point: the most extraordinary element of Jesus’s birth is its sheer “ordinariness.”
There in that cattle stall a set of normal parents did their best to abide by the decree of the Roman census while also doing what they could to allow for the uneventful delivery of their firstborn child. The whole scene was rudely unexceptional. If not for the angels, no one would have ever known that anything out of the ordinary had happened that night. Jesus’s quotidian birth is further revealed when Luke reports that Mary “gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7). “Swaddling clothes,” of course, were long strips of fabric that would be wrapped tightly around a newborn, providing him with a sense warmth, security, and safety as his little lungs got used to sucking in air.
All of this is indicative of how ordinary an infant Jesus was. Pondering Christ’s birth prompts me to recall my own experience of standing bedside as my wife gave birth to each of our three children. Those delivery rooms were always such a rush, as nurses and doctors bustled here and there, with every eye locked on Mom. Those rooms were also filled with lots of waiting, as the contractions grew more and more intense, gradually building until that sudden rush of excruciating pain and emotion as the little life your beloved had been carrying for months now nestled in your arms. Seconds after the infant’s first cries in the new world echo in that room, they are quickly placed skin-to-skin on their mother’s breasts. There is something sensationally comforting about a mom’s touch that soothes a crying newborn who has suddenly gone from the warmth of the womb to the cold of the world.
Whenever Jesus’s nativity is read aloud, I think about all of that and I am dumbfounded that the Christ of God and Savior of the world went through all of that, too, for you and me.
Jesus was born to the most ordinary of parents, in the most ordinary of ways, on the most ordinary of nights, all of which set the stage for his most ordinary life. As was foretold by the prophet Isaiah, the Messiah would have “no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him” (Isa. 53:2). Part of the reason, perhaps, why we’d rather focus on the extraordinary elements of Jesus’s birth is because those are the parts that we like to hear. Those are things that speak to us since no one wants an ordinary life. “For our generation, our curse is much different,” notes writer and speaker Jefferson Bethke. “It’s having to be ordinary” (122).
There is something inside us that yearns for more, leading us to believe that being ordinary is a bad thing. This, of course, is one of the reasons social media exists. Those digital platforms afford us the opportunity to edit and curate our lives in such a way that makes everything appear extraordinary. Instagram knows nothing of quotidian days. “Look at how beautiful, lavish, and adventurous my life is!” The law of “be extraordinary” is a law that is felt by all. This can easily be seen in the rhetoric that’s so prevalent in our day. We are inundated by such mantras as “Do more, try harder”; “Make your life count”; “Be all that you can be”; “Seize your moment.” These are the edicts that dictate our days, keeping us sprinting like hamsters on wheels.
For all that is promised by the law of “be extraordinary,” it never delivers. There is always someone “more extraordinary” than you; always another rung to climb. Those who have achieved some level of “social media” success soon learn how profusely unfulfilling such a life really is. In fact, in a 2021 profile in the New York Times, Taylor Lorenz interviewed dozens of Instagrammers and TikTok-ers who proceeded to admit to varying levels of declining mental health. You’d never know it by looking at what they post. Their pictures and videos are glossy, and meticulously edited, with each one always being more unforgettable than the last. Behind the scenes, though, there is a constant barrage of frustration, anxiety, worry, dread, disappointment, and depression. No creator has shone a brighter light on this than Bo Burnham who protests in his 2016 Netflix special, Make Happy, “Come and watch the skinny with the steadily declining mental health / And laugh as he attempts to give you what he cannot give himself.”
Living extraordinarily allows for no slowing down either. The hamsters have to keep on running. “If you slow down, you might disappear,” YouTuber Olga Kay once confessed. In a world where likes and views are the only currency that matters, “disappearing” is the worst fate imaginable. Many would rather die than disappear or risk becoming irrelevant, which explains why suicide rates for young people have tripled in the last decade. Endeavoring to be extraordinary all the time, whether in reality or online, is a “zero-sum game” that’s never able to usher in the satisfaction that we are so desperate to attain. “It almost feels like I’m getting a taste of celebrity, but it’s never consistent and as soon as you get it, it’s gone and you’re constantly trying to get it back,” admitted Lauren Stasyna, a TikTok creator in Toronto, to Taylor Lorenz. “It feels like I’m trying to capture this prize, but I don’t know what the prize even is.”
Chasing extraordinariness means pursuing a life of unending noteworthiness. It is a life that will eventually break you down and beat you up. Yet that doesn’t prevent us from going for it anyway. We are addicted to being seen, heard, recognized, and celebrated, which makes it all the more remarkable that Jesus’s arrival is so unheralded and unnoticed. His ordinary nativity serves to demonstrate how highly God values the lowly and the ordinary — enough to become lowly and ordinarily himself; enough to die for every lowly and ordinary sinner. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it:
God loves the lowly . . . God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken. (22)
On a “silent night” in Bethlehem, the God of the universe began his mission of redemption by coming as a baby in a manger. In so doing, he showcases how unafraid he is of what haunts and torments us. He is not unnerved or put off by our ruin, filth, or sin; least of all by our ordinariness. In fact, that’s precisely where he sets up shop. “God is not limited by the ordinary,” orator G. Campbell Morgan declares. “He can do, and does do, extraordinary things; God is not imprisoned within that which men call the natural; but for His own purposes, He can act in a way men can only describe as supernatural” (34). The Incarnation of the Word in our world, which we celebrate every Christmas, is the glorious fact that God in Christ comes down to us as a mere boy. He set aside all the “pomp and circumstance” he rightly deserved, eschewing his extraordinariness and forgoing the splendor to which he is entitled all to show just how far and how low his love will go.
In short, his love goes down to the depths. Rather than beckoning us to climb up to him, he comes down to us — to all of our places of heartache, loneliness, ruin, and shame. And yes, to all our places of ordinariness, too. That’s where the Word that became flesh meets us.
Integral to the Christmas season is the remembrance of how ordinary that first Christmas was, which, I’d say, is a divine reminder that our ordinariness is not something for which we need to be ashamed or scared. We need not exhaust our lives chasing after the extraordinary. In Jesus, we are given something so much better. We are greeted by a God who meets us right where we are, by a God who comes down and comes close to say to us, “No matter how ordinary you feel, no matter how ruined you are, no matter how messy you might be, no matter how much sin you have, I have come for you, and I have accomplished everything for you.” Christmas is the divine reminder that God in Christ comes to give us his extraordinary grace through the most ordinary of means, freeing us to find meaning, purpose, and hope in all of our ordinary days and “silent nights.”
Grace and peace to you, sinners and saints, and Merry Christmas!
Works cited:
Jefferson Bethke, To Hell With the Hustle: Reclaiming Your Life in an Overworked, Overspent, and Overconnected World (Nashville, TN: Nelson, 2019).
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God Is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas, translated by O. C. Dean Jr., edited by Jana Riess (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010).
G. Campbell Morgan, Luke: The God Who Cares, edited by Lawrence O. Richards, Masters of the Word (Old Tappan, NJ: Revell, 1987).