Ross Douthat, in an Op-Ed column, titled "Ideas From a Manger," writes the following about the Nativity in the Sunday New York Times (12-21-13):
PAUSE
for a moment, in the last leg of your holiday shopping, to glance at one of the
manger scenes you pass along the way. Cast your eyes across the shepherds and
animals, the infant and the kings. Then try to see the scene this way: not just
as a pious set-piece, but as a complete world picture — intimate, miniature and
comprehensive.
Because
that’s what the Christmas story really is — an entire worldview in a compact
narrative, a depiction of how human beings relate to the universe and to one
another. It’s about the vertical link between God and man — the angels, the
star, the creator stooping to enter his creation. But it’s also about the
horizontal relationships of society, because it locates transcendence in the
ordinary, the commonplace, the low.
It’s
easy in our own democratic era to forget how revolutionary the latter idea was.
But the biblical narrative, the great critic Erich Auerbach wrote, depicted
“something which neither the poets nor the historians of antiquity ever set out
to portray: the birth of a spiritual movement in the depths of the common
people, from within the everyday occurrences of contemporary life.”
