Every December, we perform the same ritual without thinking about it. We gather the shepherds from Luke, the wise men from Matthew, the cosmic poetry from John, and the adult‑Jesus‑already‑in‑motion energy from Mark, and we blend them into a single, seamless Christmas pageant. It’s tidy. It’s familiar. It’s theologically safe in the way nostalgia always is.
But the truth is that the Gospels don’t give us one Christmas.
They give us four.
Four angles.
Four theologies.
Four ways of understanding what it means for God to enter the world.
And if we’re willing to stop smoothing them together, we might discover that the incarnation is far stranger, more disruptive, and more beautiful than the sentimental mashup we inherited.
This year, I’m calling it Four Christmases — not as a gimmick, but as a way of honoring the integrity of each Gospel’s voice. Because each writer is doing something different. Each one is telling the truth, but not the same truth. And the differences aren’t contradictions. They’re architecture.
Let’s walk through them.
Christmas #1: Mark — The Christmas With No Christmas
Mark is the Gospel equivalent of a breaking‑news alert. He doesn’t have time for backstory. He doesn’t have time for genealogies or angels or shepherds or stars. He doesn’t even have time for a baby. Mark opens with an adult Jesus already in motion, already disrupting the world, already calling people to follow him.
Mark’s favorite word is “immediately.”
His Jesus is kinetic, urgent, uncontained.
If Mark had a Christmas story, it would be one sentence long:
“God showed up. Pay attention.”
And honestly, there’s something refreshing about that. Mark refuses to sentimentalize the incarnation. He refuses to let us get stuck in nostalgia. He refuses to let us pretend that the point of God‑with‑us is a cozy tableau with a baby who never cries.
Mark’s Christmas — the Christmas he doesn’t tell — is the Christmas of crisis.
The Christmas of movement.
The Christmas that says:
“God is already here. The world is already changing. You don’t have time to stay in the past.”
It’s the Christmas for people who feel like their lives are on fire.
The Christmas for people who don’t have the luxury of sentimentality.
The Christmas for people who need God to be active, not adorable.
Christmas #2: John — The Cosmic Christmas
If Mark is a field report, John is a prologue to the universe.
John doesn’t give us a manger.
He gives us the beginning of time.
“In the beginning…”
Light. Darkness. Logos.
The architecture of reality bending toward incarnation.
John’s Christmas is not historical.
It’s metaphysical.
He’s not telling you how Jesus was born.
He’s telling you what it means that Jesus exists at all.
John’s Christmas is the Christmas of cosmic re‑wiring.
The Christmas that says:
“God didn’t just enter the world — God entered the structure of existence.”
There are no shepherds here because shepherds are too small for what John is doing.
There are no wise men because wisdom itself is being redefined.
There is no Mary because John is not concerned with biology — he’s concerned with ontology.
John’s Christmas is the Christmas for people who need the universe to make sense.
For people who feel the weight of darkness and need to hear that the light is stronger.
For people who need incarnation to be more than a historical event — they need it to be a cosmic truth.
Christmas #3: Matthew — The Political Christmas
Matthew is the Gospel that understands power.
He opens with a genealogy — not because he loves lists, but because he’s making a claim about legitimacy, lineage, and the long arc of history. Matthew wants you to know that Jesus is not an accident. He is the culmination of a story that began centuries earlier.
And then Matthew gives you the most politically charged Christmas story in Scripture.
A paranoid king.
A massacre of children.
A family fleeing as refugees.
Foreign astrologers who accidentally trigger a crisis.
Matthew’s Christmas is not cozy.
It’s dangerous.
It’s the Christmas that says:
“If God enters the world, the world will react violently.”
Matthew understands that incarnation is a threat to empire.
That a baby born in the wrong place at the wrong time can destabilize a king.
That the presence of God is not neutral — it is disruptive.
Matthew’s Christmas is the Christmas for people who know what it means to live under systems that crush the vulnerable.
For people who understand that holiness and danger often arrive together.
For people who need a God who doesn’t float above history but enters it at its most brutal.
Christmas #4: Luke — The Human Christmas
Luke is the Gospel that feels like it was written by someone who has spent years listening to people in exam rooms — someone who knows how to separate the essential from the noise, someone who understands that details matter because people matter.
Luke gives us the Christmas everyone thinks is the whole story:
Mary’s fear.
Elizabeth’s joy.
Shepherds startled awake.
Angels singing to nobodies in the fields.
A baby wrapped in cloth because there was no room.
Luke’s Christmas is the Christmas of ordinary people.
The Christmas of women’s voices.
The Christmas of God choosing the margins.
Luke is not flowery.
He’s precise.
He’s careful.
He’s compassionate.
He gives you the emotional truth without embellishment.
He gives you the theological truth without abstraction.
He gives you the human truth without sentimentality.
Luke’s Christmas is the Christmas for people who need God to be close.
For people who need to know that holiness shows up in the small places.
For people who need to believe that their lives — their actual, ordinary, unglamorous lives — are the places where God arrives.
Why the Differences Matter
When we blend the four Christmases into one, we lose something essential.
We lose Mark’s urgency.
We lose John’s cosmic scope.
We lose Matthew’s political clarity.
We lose Luke’s human tenderness.
We lose the architecture.
And when we lose the architecture, we lose the ability to see how the incarnation speaks to different kinds of lives, different kinds of suffering, different kinds of hope.
Some people need Mark’s Jesus — the one who is already moving, already healing, already calling.
Some people need John’s Jesus — the one who holds the universe together.
Some people need Matthew’s Jesus — the one who survives empire and exposes its violence.
Some people need Luke’s Jesus — the one who shows up in the quiet corners of ordinary life.
The beauty of the Gospels is that they don’t force us to choose.
They give us four angles on the same mystery.
Four ways of seeing the same God.
Four Christmases.
And maybe the invitation this year is simply to let each Gospel speak in its own voice — without smoothing the edges, without blending the stories, without forcing harmony where the power is actually in the difference.
Because the incarnation is not a single story.
It’s a prism.
And when the light passes through it, we don’t get one color.
We get a spectrum.
Scored by Copilot. Conducted by -leslie.-
Stories That Are All True 