Photo by Olivia Anne Snyder on Unsplash
As a midwife, I regularly have the privilege of being involved with the birth of a baby. At the last such occasion, I watched through the dimly lit room as a newborn boy lay against his mother’s chest for the very first time. His parents pored over his every feature: the shape of his ears, were they the same as his Dad’s? Were his toes long like his mother’s? Did this also happen with Jesus? In Luke 1:31, the angel tells Mary that she will conceive and give birth to a son, and she is to give him the name Jesus. While we normally focus on the miracle inherent in these words, what the angel describes is actually profoundly normal. A young woman will become pregnant, give birth and name her baby. This is how a woman becomes a mother. Jesus will truly be the son of Mary, and so he would have been like her in some ways. Maybe Jesus inherited her beautiful dark eyes or her knack for storytelling, we don’t know. But we do know he was her child.
But unlike any baby boy I have helped into the world, this normal human child of Mary would also be extraordinary. He would be great and be called the Son of the Most High (Luke 1:32). This baby boy was not of Joseph’s body, but would instead be of God, the Holy Son of God. The fact that Mary was a virgin (Luke 1:34) when she became pregnant makes clear the origins of this child. Jesus is the Son of God as well as Mary’s son.
As a midwife, I have a visceral sense of what this means. Through the Old Testament, God acted in our world through burning bushes and mountain-top moments with thunder and lightning and smoke. But now in Jesus, God enters deeply into our world. Not just strolling on in or even blasting into the world on some cosmic chariot. God became one of us in the slow and humble way that we all come into the world. Over nine months, God was knit together as a foetus shrouded in amniotic fluid in Mary’s body, and then God was born through her strength, and blood, sweat and tears.
The feeling of my hands around that other baby boy is so tangible to me, as he slipped into the world squishy and slimy and purple. This is the fleshly reality of birth.. How amazing for God to choose to be one of us like that.
In all of this, God affirms the goodness of the female body. That the Holy Son of God would enter the world by growing in Mary’s womb, being given birth through her labour and fed by her milk: all these ordinary bodily functions show that the female body and all its parts are not in any way dirty or contaminating. Birth is a beautiful act of life-giving, created by God for us, which Jesus, very God himself, experienced in the usual way. God is willing to be intimately involved with us and for us.
The fact that Jesus took on the whole of what it is to be human, even as far as being a foetus and a newborn, has a lot to say to us about our embodied lives now. It reaffirms the goodness of embodied human beings that God declared back in Genesis. I say goodness not in the sense of our behaviour post the Fall, which isn’t always good, but of the created goodness of being human. Our fleshly bodies are good, and so is their functioning. Our bodies, though frail, are not dishonourable.
Also, our bodies and their biological sexes are good. Jesus being male and becoming a man values maleness and the experience of life in a male body. But God also chose Mary as his dwelling place for nine months and entrusted her to bring Jesus into the world and feed and care for him thereafter. The female body is also honoured. Mary willingly took on this role as we see in Luke 1:38 “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Bodies, both male and female, are actively involved in the world’s redemption.
In the fourth century the church father Augustine, commenting on Titus 1:15, wrote about the incarnation that “it did honour to both sexes, male and female, and showed that both had a part in God’s care; not only that which he assumed, but that also through which he assumed it, being a man born of a woman.”
Our physical reality as embodied humans is not in any way bad or unworthy. Jesus took on human physicality in its entirety, right from those earliest moments of being nurtured and nourished inside a woman’s body during pregnancy in the same way that we all have.
In Mary’s pregnancy, Jesus unites himself with Mary as her son, but he also therefore unites himself with every human being as our human brother, a son of Eve, one of us, with us. The Holy Son of God became one of us to make us holy. He was given birth to, in order to give us new birth.
Hebrews 2:11 tells us that “Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.” (NIV)
This story of the beginning of Jesus’ life on Earth, him being fully God, but now also fully human through foetal development, birth and childhood to adult life, it’s at the very heart of our relationship with God. Jesus became one of us to live among us, to stand in our place, to heal our relationship with God and be our eternal king.
This is what we declare in the words of the Apostle’s Creed: I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, (on the one hand, and on the other) born of the Virgin Mary. Son of God, and son of Mary.
The human body is a place where God could dwell in a male body, but also in a female body in a different way, God with us, amongst us and indeed in us, all by that same Holy Spirit of life. Jesus is God drawn so near to us, so intimately present with Mary, but therefore, as a result, also close and near to all of us, as one of us.
This Christmas, let us see Mary and the wonder of her pregnancy and birth, for in doing so, we see God. As we think of God come as a baby, we can know the lengths that God has gone to in order to be one of us, to be with us. Jesus in Mary’s body, Jesus born through her labour, Jesus then living among human beings as one of them, is a pointer to God truly becoming one of us.
Jodie McIver is a registered midwife and author of ‘Bringing Forth Life: God’s Purposes in Pregnancy and Birth’ (available here and here). Jodie and her husband Tim are in Anglican ministry together and parents to three children.
thewadrproject.com 