Growing up in Scotland in the late ’90s, I was familiar with the story of the Nativity, though my parents were atheists and I attended public school. I knew it as a cozy, even cute, narrative. At Christmastime in school assembly, we sang Christmas songs that told of the Christmas story: Nearly 2,000 years ago, under a starlit sky, many events were taking place, as the ancients had prophesied…. My mum still has a drawing I did at school stowed away, of a stick-figure Mary standing over a stick-figure Jesus in a brown box with a speech bubble proclaiming, “He’s wundful!” And, perhaps most formatively, we did Nativity plays, in which I was an angel adorned with wings that my mum had crafted for me from coat hangers, lace and ribbon. The main thing I remember about my time as an angel is that a girl named Alice had a nosebleed mid-play and my lovely wings were stained with blood.

I internalized that cozy Christmas story and carried it into adulthood: A woman named Mary had a baby named Jesus—who also was the Son of God—in a stable surrounded by sweet, fuzzy animals, with her quiet but kindly husband, Joseph, at her side. Shepherds saw a guiding star, the Wise Men brought gifts, and now we get to stack gifts under a tree and eat an indulgent meal in commemoration of this happy event.

Yet the story of the Nativity, though fundamentally joyful, should be shocking, challenging. The fact of God coming into the world as a flailing infant was scandalous to the society in which Jesus and the early Christians lived, but it is no less scandalous now. The Christmas story makes no concessions to the fact that the kingdom of God is with the weakest, most helpless among us. Even for those raised in Christian homes, who may have read the Bible accounts of the Nativity aloud on Christmas morning or attended church on Christmas Eve, the searing, radical nature of Christ’s entry into the world has likely been dulled by the highly consumerist, often frenetic season that Christmas has become. 

In his first apostolic exhortation “Dilexi Te” (“I Have Loved You”), which focuses on Christ’s love for the poor, Pope Leo writes: “Precisely in order to share the limitations and fragility of our human nature, he himself became poor and was born in the flesh like us. We came to know him in the smallness of a child laid in a manger…” (No. 16). Perhaps today in the United States, in an age when infant death has thankfully become less frequent than it was in Jesus’ time, we have lost the sense of what it means for God to choose to enter the world this way. But for most of human history, around half of all babies born would die before their 15th birthday, the majority dying as infants. Newborn babies are still extremely vulnerable to the poverty, famine and disease that has plagued humanity for most of its existence. It was in this incredibly weak and fragile condition that God revealed himself to us, making plain from the get-go Christ’s solidarity with the poorest and most vulnerable.

In her comic but piercing children’s story The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, Barbara Robinson reminds us of how outrageous the Christmas story is through the eyes (or ears) of children who, upon hearing it for the first time, instinctively recognize it for what it is. The Herdmans, a sibling set of six ragtag children known for cussing, shoplifting and committing arson, decide to go to Sunday school for the first time after learning that there would be free snacks. As the Sunday school prepares its annual Christmas pageant, it becomes apparent that the Herdmans don’t know the Christmas story. As Mrs. Bradley, the Sunday school teacher, recounts it to them, they are rapt, recognizing the account of Jesus’ birth as the shocking, radical story that it is: