True story: the God who created the heavens and the earth, and all that is in them, the God who set in place the whole natural order as we know it, the one God, the only God there is, was, or ever will be — this one true God has entered into this very creation, has intervened in the natural order.

            According to this Gospel, the Gospel of Matthew, it happened like this ....

            Now Matthew doesn’t tell the exact same story other gospels do. There is no visitation from the angel Gabriel, no annunciation, no backstory of the childless priestly couple Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth — nothing like that. In Matthew’s Gospel, we are simply told that Mary was found to be “with child from the Holy Spirit.” We are just given that information in the passive voice: she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. In this Gospel, as we shall see later on, the angelic visitations are to Joseph.

            This account tells of how God entered the world in and through the person — the fully human person — of Jesus, born of Mary and Joseph. But there are more involved here, in this entrance of God into the created order, than simply Jesus. It has been said that “it takes a village to raise a child,” and this coming of God into the world in the person of the child Jesus involved a village, too. Our story begins with “the birth of Jesus the Messiah,” but that is really only the beginning. There is, if you will, a whole “village” involved here, a number of “persons,” both human and extra-human, through whom God came into the world. Let’s look at them.

God’s “village”

            There is, of course, Jesus’ mother Mary. As was said earlier, she is not as complexly drawn in Matthew as in other Gospels. She is almost a passive presence. She takes no action. Things are done to her. She is engaged to a

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