Thinking about the true meaning of Christmas leads us to contemplate the nature of Our Saviour’s coming in to this world. What is the significance of His entry upon this mortal existence in the form of the son of a peasant? After all, He was really the Son of God, so why couldn’t he have been born a prince?

Wouldn’t Jesus have had more credibility if he had had a position of power in the world of His day, more presence, more clout ?

The answer to all this is presumably no, because that was not the Divine intention. Indeed it says much to those detractors who claim that there was nothing special about Christ, it had been done before and all the rest of it.

In Luke 2 v42-49 there is the story of how the twelve-year-old Jesus amazed the learned doctors and lawyers in the Temple with His knowledge and understanding. Isn’t this all the more remarkable, given His working class background?

In John 6 v42 we read of the incredulity of the citizens of Nazareth as they listen to Jesus teaching in their synagogue "Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know ?" A local boy, who has been away, comes back and dumbfounds His former neighbours with His knowledge of matters spiritual.

Under normal circumstances we certainly wouldn’t expect to see a peasant do such things – especially in those days when illiteracy was the norm. It surely adds strength to the argument for Christ’s being fully divine, as well as fully human, that He was able to transcend the social and educational mores of His day in order to fulfil His mission.

But it was all meant to happen that way. The prophecies of Isaiah and others made it plain that there would be nothing privileged about the way in which the Messiah would come amongst us. What they did not know was the exact time and place. Herod was obviously worried because he feared a new King being born in Israel, the Magi or Wise Men knew something was happening as well. None, I suspect, understood the true significance of the Birth in Bethlehem.

So it had to be like that. Jesus was on a mission and it was all mapped out. Had He been a prince, or something similar, He would not have been in a position to prove his true nature and that of His purpose in coming amongst us. For a start, he would undoubtedly have been spared the ignominious death of a criminal, a rabble-rouser who needed to be silenced. But His purpose in dying that awful death was to fulfil the prophecies and be led like a lamb to the slaughter. This was the method He chose to make the one perfect and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the world.

Looked at from a purely historical perspective, it is easy to throw cold water on the life of Jesus and to write it off as a series of events in a life which was remarkable, but not that remarkable. It is necessary to take, or to have taken, the step of belief and faith to understand those events in terms of the divine essence of it all.