City United Reformed Church
CHRISTMAS FOR ADULT CHRISTIANS
Session 1

  The first session of the course is simply to refresh your memory of the Christmas story as it is commonly told –for instance in dramatic action in the annual Nativity Play.  Surely you remember the Junior Church Nativity Play.  Did you wear your dad’s dressing gown and a Christmas cracker crown to play one of the Wise Men?  Or, your head wrapped with a tea towel, were you a Shepherd?

 Setting the scene

  Bible Activity:  

1.     You are in charge of producing this year’s Nativity Play for the Junior Church . Arrange the following items from the Christmas story in the order you wish them to appear.   

         Check your list with what you read in the first two chapters of Matthew and Luke.

When you have completed the activity, ask yourself some questions about the experience. Was the sequence you set for the events as clear-cut as you anticipated?  Where are the ambiguities?  Where are the problems? Is this a fair exercise? 

How others responded

The variety of responses to this first exercise was fascinating. Some of you took the assignment to direct a Christmas play quite literally and made suggestions for creative responses to the problem of presenting the story of the birth of Jesus in a contemporary way. The story as we have received it is set as a tableau in a shop window, with people standing on the pavement outside talking about how lovely it all is, for instance, and then along comes John the Baptist to tell the REAL story, the true meaning of Christmas! I think I am going to pinch this idea for use here at City Church . Another made a director's decision to heighten the dramatic action by intertwining the shepherds and the wise men:

Magi arrive in Jerusalem

Annunciation to the shepherds

Star stops over house

Shepherds visit

Magi visit

Nice! But it is the meantime the more pedestrian business of trying to put all these scenes in order that raises intriguing and creative problems that will begin to open up the nature of the biblical narrative.

One of you spoke of the “responsibility to hold fast to what is actually in Scripture”, but you were all quick to recognise that the story that is actually in Scripture is not so clear cut. The problem was most in evidence for you in where, relatively, to place the visits of the Shepherds and the Wise Men, and to a lesser extent the relative positioning of the annunciation to Joseph.

Only one of you made a strong point of seeing the problems emerging from the fact that the scenes come from two different gospels, Matthew and Luke, and that at the end of the day these seemed to be “two distinct stories”. Here, pretty much in full, is what one of you said:

”As none of the scenes listed appear in both Matthew and Luke I found
difficulties in slotting the two stories together.  The two scenes of
'Joseph plans to break off engagement' and 'Annunciation to Joseph' were
the most difficult to place.  They could be before 'Mary visits her
cousin Elizabeth', or equally, placed between 'Zechariah, filled with
Spirit, speaks' and 'Census ordered by Emperor Augustus'.  If Joseph
wanted to break the engagement when Mary began to 'show' - then this
could well have been after John the Baptist was born.

”The order of the visits of shepherds and Magi is not totally clear
either. However, the shepherds visited within the first 8 days of Jesus'
birth, while the Magi could have visited any time up to when Jesus was
two years old, and so it makes sense to put the Magi after the
shepherds.

”What seem to emerge are two distinct stories, and so is it appropriate
to try to mix them to form one whole?

”Places are a bit problematic too.  Matthew starts at Bethlehem , Judea
and going via Egypt , ends in Nazareth , Galilee .  In Luke, Mary is in
Nazareth to begin with, and she travels back and forth to Judea to visit
Elizabeth and then eventually to Bethlehem .  The family pay a visit to
Jerusalem before heading back to Nazareth .  Mary obviously has family in
both Galilee and Judea , and maybe Joseph has likewise.  The two stories
certainly agree that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and was brought up in
Nazareth .”

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