"It's bigger on the inside!" is the cry of everyone going into the TARDIS for the first time. Through those blue wooden doors is a space that could make your brain dribble out of your ears, metaphorically, and possibly quite literally as well. It's an impossible, unimaginable thing and yet, there you are. When you should be in a space smaller than a student bedroom, you're in a room large enough for a school assembly with an untold number of corridors leading to rooms including, but not limited to, a library, a wardrobe and even a swimming pool.
It's life changing for the Doctor’s companions. Rose Tyler and Bill Potts get to exchange their mundane jobs for the beauty of the universe and saving the world. Even for Dr Martha Jones and Police Officer Yaz Kahn traveling in the TARDIS with the Doctor completely changes how they see the world. As the 12th Doctor himself says (when he's pretending it's his first time):
"My entire understanding of physical space has been transformed! Three-Dimensional Euclidean geometry has been torn up, thrown in the air and snogged to death! My grasp of the universal constants of physical reality has been changed [dramatic pause] forever."
And we haven't even mentioned that when you exit through those doors you could be anywhere in time and space. If only such a place existed, outside of good editing and great set design. If only, if only, bigger on the inside were possible...
The worlds of Harry Potter and Mary Poppins use magic to create rooms, and extremely useful bags, which are bigger on the inside. And don’t we all wish that we could have a bag like that? Unfortunately, we can’t use magic outside of stories and, as the 13th Doctor makes clear, science is not an option available to us either:
Graham: How do you fit all this stuff inside a police box?
Doctor: Dimensional engineering.
Yaz: You can’t engineer dimensions.
Doctor: Maybe you can’t.
The Doctor is right, we live within the dimensions of both time and space and there’s no sign of us being able to change that.
But good fiction does reflect reality and in the final book of the Narnia series, The Last Battle, CS Lewis mentions a time that ‘bigger on the inside’ happened in the real world. On entering a stable that opens not into the inside of a stable but an entire world, Lucy comments, "In our world too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world." Narnia may be fictional, but Lucy was right, in our world you could have seen that stable, about two-thousand years ago in the little town of Bethlehem.
Inside that little town would have been a small unremarkable house, and inside that small house would have been a room which was used in the winter as a stable. Any sheep would have been moved outside (and cared for by shepherds) in order to make enough space for a young couple to come and stay. And inside that room the small food trough would have been emptied of food and lined with something soft and warm so that it could be a safe place for a baby boy. Inside that baby would have been all the potential of a human life; he might grow up to be great or good or kind or clever, just like any other baby.
Unlike any other baby, Jesus had in him something much bigger than any other human. As well as being totally human he was God. The God who made the stars and planets now looks up at them from the earth. The eternal God in a growing body, and a mortal one. The God who made humanity to be like him, became one of us, just like us, because he wanted to be with us. God incarnate; God made flesh; God with us; Emmanuel. Could there have been anything more incredible, more impossible, more strange or more beautiful inside that stable than what was actually there?
As she realises that the TARDIS is bigger inside than out, Bill is filled with amazement, asking “How is that possible? How do you do that?” The Doctor’s robotic companion, Nardole, carefully breaks it down for her:
Nardole: First you have to imagine a very big box fitting inside a very small box.
Bill: Okay.
Nardole: Then, you have to make one. It's the second part people normally get
stuck on.
There are similar questions to ask about the incarnation: How is it possible for Jesus to be both human and God? How does all of God’s glory and goodness fit inside a baby? These are fantastic questions, but the answers can be as hard to understand as making a very big box fit inside a very small box. The questions that change how we see God, the world and ourselves, the questions that change our lives, begin with a different word: why? Why did God become a human like me? Why would he choose to live on earth within the boundaries of the dimensions he created? Why would he exchange all the beauty of heaven for a mundane human life? Why was rescuing me important enough that he would do the impossible? And, of course, why does this matter?
This new version of Away in a Manger is not only musically superior to the one we all know from our childhood but the lyrics have been dramatically altered to reflect some of the wonder of that first Christmas baby and his almost paradoxical nature.
Away in a Manger (All Glory to Jesus)
If you enjoyed the mix of Doctor Who and big questions of faith and wish I’d said more about how that connects to what Christians believe. This amazing and short book by Rebecca McLaughlin does exactly that; answering some of the questions you might have off the back of this: Was Jesus Even a Real Person? How Can You Believe in a Virgin Birth? Can We Take the Gospels Seriously? And Why Does It Matter?
You can get the ebook version of Is Christmas Unbelievable? here for less than £2 which is a very good price for some big answers to some very big and important questions.