Chapter 1
Unusual Beginnings
Most people know at least some of the Christmas story. An angel shows up to promise a baby to the virgin Mary. Jesus is born in a stable in Bethlehem. Angels and shepherds and kings from the East all celebrate in one of the oddest birthday parties to date. We imagine the story in terms of little kids dressed up like sheep, or wooden stable structures standing up in front of churches, or at the very least a baby in a straw–filled manger. Yet, while those presentations of Jesus’s birth might resonate with us on a cultural level, they often miss the sheer unusualness of the actual story.
But that’s exactly how Luke—composer of one of the four Jesus–stories in the Bible—presents the events around Jesus’s birth: unusual.
The other writers start right off with the main character. Matthew presents Jesus as the promised heir to an ancient king’s throne who—even as a baby—threatens the rulers of the world. Mark skips Jesus’s birth entirely, jumping right into his years spent preaching and miracle–working. John takes a different approach altogether, framing Jesus as of the very same essence as the God who created the world in a kind of poetic retelling of Jesus’s life.
But Luke’s approach to the story is a bit surprising. He focuses distinctly on the people around Jesus rather than just on Jesus himself. In fact, Luke starts his version before the story itself even begins. He frames his project as a compilation of eyewitness accounts from people who were “servants of the word” (Luke 1:2). That’s an odd choice of phrase. For those steeped in Christian language and culture, some might immediately jump to conclusions. The word is Jesus, right? After all, that’s what John will say in his version of Jesus’s story (John 1:1–2). Or we might think that the word is the Holy Scriptures, as the writer of Hebrews will point out (see Hebrews 1:1). And for those who didn’t grow up with Bible stories and church, a “servant of the word” might just sound like archaic mumbo–jumbo.
But Luke has a reason for it. No matter our instinctual impression of the phrase, he does us the favor of showing us what he means. And he does it by showing us the lives of the people who got caught up in Jesus’s birth—people who responded to the word God sent to them. That story begins with two people who woke up on what should have been just a normal day only to get swept up into the whirlwind of an ancient prophecy coming to life.
No one gets up in the morning expecting to be part of the fulfillment of archaic promises from the dusty past. In fact, most of us would laugh and say “good joke” and try to move on with our lives. But the way Luke presents his story, it’s almost as if he’s asking the question, “What would you do?” What happens if we can’t escape being part of something way bigger than ourselves? Would we stop running, turn around, and say, “Alright. I’m in”?
Everyone at some point will face the story of Jesus, and everyone will have to answer the question: Will you allow yourself to get pulled into the drama—to play a role that might not be what you imagined for your life? Or will you turn your back and walk away? Luke asks his own characters that question, and he’ll get different answers from each of them. But in the end, we’ll see that no one can escape the riptide of Jesus’s story once it starts tugging on them.
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