Two Christmas Stories

The Bible gives us two Christmas stories — one in Matthew and one in Luke.

We tend to think of Christmas as one seamless narrative but that’s because we have all grown up in churches where, every Christmas Eve, we take the two stories and “harmonize” them into one. We take bits and pieces from each gospel and we leave out other parts and we flip back and forth between them so that they sound like one smooth, uninterrupted story.

And that’s fine. It’s a nice way to read the story on Christmas Eve. It gives us a nice, overall picture of what happened and, if we do our harmonizing sensitively and with a real appreciation for the texts it doesn’t violate the integrity of either story.

But neither does it allow us to fully explore the depth of their meanings — their me…