Christmas is a season when Christians and non-Christians alike consider the birth of Jesus. The season should provide, not just a unique opportunity for Christians to teach about the meaning and significance of Jesus, but it should also force Christians to consider the significance of Jesus’ birth. 

Many Christians tend to jump over Jesus’ birth and run straight to the cross (this isn’t even to mention our tendency to undervalue the resurrection). However, the cross does not happen without the birth. Jesus’ birth begins God’s redemptive process through the incarnation, meaning that Jesus’ birth is significant for several reasons: 

Salvation

Without Jesus’ birth, salvation does not occur. God’s salvific plan is to renew all creation by establishing “new heavens and a new earth.” Regarding humanity, God desires to save the entire person (i.e., body, soul, and mind). For God to save the entire person, God had to become an entire person (i.e., fully human). If God is not born, then humanity is not saved. 

Equality

Protestant Christian traditions miss the significance of Mary. For God to be born of a woman is for God to raise the status of women. Consider this, in Women and the Gender of God, Amy Peeler points out that when Mary was still bleeding after giving birth to Jesus, according to the law, she would be unclean. Her uncleanliness meant that anything and anyone she came in contact with would also be unclean, and she could not enter the temple as long as she remained unclean. However, in her uncleanliness, she was nursing God. 

Whereas in the first century, women could be viewed as lesser, temptations, and regularly unclean, God chose to be born of a woman. God chose a woman, even in her uncleanliness, to feed Jesus. The birth of Jesus highlights the significance of women in the salvific work of God. 

Validation

Jesus’ fully human birth is a validation of the human experience. Throughout human and Christian history, people have looked down on the birthing process. I already mentioned the Jewish religious stigma associated with female bleeding. Additionally, one could point to historically Christian beliefs about original sin, passed on through the sex act to subsequent generations, or philosophies such as Platonism or Gnosticism, which denigrate the human body as bad or sinful. 

It seems to me that Jesus’ birth gave not only significant validation to the female human experience but also all human experience. We should not undermine what Jesus’ birth says to females by making it of secondary importance to Jesus’ meaning to the human race in general. However, it must be noted that humanity, as God declared in the very beginning, is “very good.” 

by: Spencer Shaw