All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: "The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel" (which means "God with us")

But exactly how is God with us? As Matthew continues to draw out the Jesus story he tells us how: this ‘Immanuel' is a son, ‘the child'. ‘God with us' is a kid.' Note how many times Matthew speaks of the child:

‘On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him...When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. "Get up," he said, "take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him." So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod...After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, "Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child's life are dead." So he got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel...and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth.'

‘Child', eight times in this brief narrative. ‘Take the child', five times. ‘Take the child', pick up the child, protect the child, run with the child, hide the child. This vulnerable God-with-us child, this Jesus, this saving-us-from-our-sins-‘kid' bundled up and carted off like a suitcase or a sack of rice: from Nazareth in his mother's womb to Bethlehem, then to Egypt and then back to Israel to Nazareth.

This is the open enigma of the gospel: ‘the child'. This small one comes into our bullying, beautiful world; comes into the cruelty and chance of it; the humanity of it; he comes as the poor, the refugee, the displaced person, the child on-the-run, unrecognized by those to whom he came, born ‘in the fullness of time', for us, but at the wrong time for himself. We do celebrate an odd Christmas, an odd God. GK Chesterton wrote, ‘The place that the shepherds found was not an academy... it was not a place of myths...it was a place of dreams come true.' Are not our dreams odd?