Why do we celebrate birthdays? Because they are special, marking our progression through life. And because we all like being pampered, or partied about, to some degree. We all have them, even those of us who choose not to remember them. And Christmas is, of course, the “official birthday of my boss, Jesus.

Why do some birthdays get remembered on a bigger stage? It’s usually something about being seen to be important or influential. Somebody who did something great. Somebody we might even call a Hero.

And what is a hero? Somebody we look up to. Someone who sets a standard we might seek to follow. Maybe for some of us when we were younger it was George Best we looked up to. The footballer we admired. For some of us it might be Kelly Holmes. But it’s not just sportsmen and women it might be a political figure, even a relative or a parent.
Then we often we use the word hero to describe someone who does something extraordinary. Something we would barely think of doing. Those who fight for their country perhaps, or the police who seek to keep our streets safe.

At Christmas we are called to Celebrate the Birth of a Hero. We all know, or think we know, the Christmas stories. Stories about Mary and Joseph, an unmarried couple bringing a child into the world. Not many stories have the mother told that she is pregnant by an angelic messenger. Follow that with an 80 mile trek followed by birth in a barn. That’s heroism of a sort, but not of the baby Jesus.

The shepherds’ visit, prompted by a heavenly choir, is certainly an act of faith, possibly even heroism (if it’s something we might not do), but again not by the baby Jesus.

The later arrival of the wise men from the East, following heavenly signs to find the infant Jesus has elements of the heroic to it as well (especially tricking wily, paranoid old Herod) but once more the heroism is from them. Not the baby Jesus.

So why are we here to celebrate HIS birthday? Why might we be justified in calling HIM a hero?

Simple. The birth is the beginning of the story. The story of one who came to show us how much God wanted us to know him. About how much God wanted to know us. And the only way to truly do that, to experience human life in all it ways was to come among us in the same way as anyone else and to be born into our world. To be truly God and yet fully human. To go through life like the rest of us. To face blessing and betrayal, birth and burial, before bursting out to a renewed life we too can share.

For God to become so fully human, so we can be so filled with his eternal life – now that’s what we should call the actions of a Hero…

And maybe for us to respond is something that might make heroes out of us.

¶ 3:05 pm