Did Jesus have Colic?

A friend of mine always knows just how to get me thinking, and a chat we had this week was no different.  We both became mums in 2017, and as new mums we’re going through our own challenges (be it feeding, sleeping (us or the babies), winding, teething, etc.) and joys (seeing their first smiles, watching them learn to interact, become aware of the world, move their limbs…).  I’m learning that while every baby is very different, there are also a lot of similarities in what we go through as new mums. Before becoming a mum I hadn’t really thought that as a baby and a new mum, Jesus and Mary did all these things too.  It’s made me see the Christmas story a bit differently. 

Take Mary’s pregnancy for example.  I wonder if she had morning sickness, how her back felt by the end of the pregnancy, whether or not she got stretch marks.  I wonder how it felt to feel Jesus kick.  Then I think about the birth.  I ask myself what her labour was like, who cut the cord, what weight was Jesus.  Mary might have been carrying the son of God, but she was still pregnant, like any other mum-to-be.  And she had the added challenge that the baby she was carrying wasn’t fully her baby.  She knew that she was carrying God’s son, and that some day, he would have a role to fulfil that would most likely take him away from her.  What a hard truth to carry through pregnancy.

And what about life with a new-born…  Did Mary find breastfeeding easy or was it a real challenge?  How much sleep did Jesus let her get each night?  Could he self-settle?  And how did she cope with him teething, or with the dreaded 4 month sleep regression?  There are so many ways in which being a new mum is the toughest job in the world, and I wonder what it was like for Mary.  Even thinking about the joys of being a new mum, of watching my son develop and grow – what was that like for Mary, watching Jesus develop?

And I wonder too about Joseph, thinking of my husband’s experience of being a new dad. Did Joseph feel helpless during the birth? Did he get involved with burping Jesus? Did he play with him and get excited teaching him new skills?

Yesterday I was watching baby’s perfect little face as he rested it on my leg, dozing after a feed and looking totally peaceful.  It struck me that he trusted completely that he was safe, while at the same time he was completely vulnerable.  Is there anything more vulnerable and helpless than a human baby?  He relies on me for absolutely everything – there isn’t really anything that he can do for himself.  How great a contrast is that, when compared to our all-powerful, all-knowing God?  If you’re a parent, think about your child when they were first born, and really consider what it would be like for God to allow Himself to be that vulnerable.  God didn’t just come to earth as a human, but as a baby.

And of course he then developed into an adult, manoeuvring his way through every stage of development.  God experienced life as a toddler, life as a teenager (I wonder how Jesus found puberty), life as a young adult…

So as I think of my son, doing his full-body sneezes, smiling gently at me, or causing a rather disgusting mess for me to clear up, I think too about Jesus doing these things. I think about Mary gazing at her son, but also knowing that he is God’s son.  As the son of God, we could assume that Jesus was different somehow, that, as the song says, no crying he made… But I suspect that he was a very normal baby in many ways. After all wasn’t that kind of the point, for him to be human, with all that entails?

This Christmas, I’d encourage you to take a few minutes to think about Mary and Jesus, a mother and son, bonding and navigating their new world together. Think about Joseph, a new dad watching the woman he loves going through the trauma of childbirth and suddenly having a little family to protect. But most of all, take a few minutes to think about God, loving us with an incomprehensible love so huge that it prompted Him to send His son not just to join us on earth but to do so in the most vulnerable state possible: as a baby.