Gospel of Matthew, chapter 1-23

A kindergarten teacher was telling her class the Christmas story of the Shepherds and the Three Wise Men. At the end of the story she asked them: “Now tell me, who was the first to know about the birth of Jesus?” A little girl shoots up her hand and answers, “Mary.” Of course, Mary. How could anyone miss that. But adults miss the obvious because they tend to expect a more complicated answer. We have the tendency to associate God with the extraordinary and the spectacular, such as the host of angels or the guiding star. We often fail to notice God’s presence and action in the ordinary and normal things of life, such as in the birth of a child. The child’s inspired answer reminds us to take a second look at the “ordinary things of life” that we take so much for granted and to see God’s presence in them.

The Hebrews of old found it hard to reconcile their expectations of the Messiah with the ordinariness of Jesus whom they knew to be born and raised in their midst. “We know where this man is from; but when the Messiah comes, no one will know where he is from” (John 7:27). They found the ordinary ways of God’s presence and God’s action among His people too simple to be true.

We should take a moment today and ask ourselves, how does God come among us? How does God work among us? Sometimes the problem is not that God is not with us; the problem is that we do not recognize God’s presence among us. We often react like Jacob who awoke from his sleep and exclaimed, “So the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!” (Genesis 28:16).

Jesus came to us through the nine-month pregnancy of a young girl; through thirty years of normal human growth during infancy; adolescence and adulthood. He reminds us that God comes in the ordinary, normal, daily circumstances of life. God comes to us in the people we see around us being born, growing up, ageing and dying. It is often hardest to see God in the people who are near and familiar to us, just as Jesus’ kinsfolk failed to recognize Him because He was too ordinary.

The mystery of the incarnation (God becoming flesh) is that Jesus walked among us and identified with ordinary people in every way but sin, to show us how to live; how to experience God’s presence in our lives.

Fr. Hugh Duffy