Okay in a Manger?Pete Greig - 22 Dec 2015

I’m trying to clear away 21 centuries of Christmas clutter, to bring the nativity story to life again in my imagination. To do this I’ve been studying, and in the process have unearthed some amazing, fresh insights about those familiar old carols, that no-one ever told me before…

While shepherds watched

When pilgrims travelled to Jerusalem to make their sacrifices at the temple they didn’t just bring any old lamb from home. They purchased one in the city itself, one that had been specially raised for the purpose. And recent archaeological digs have revealed that most of these unfortunate lambs were farmed in one particular location just five miles due south of Jerusalem. A little place called... Bethlehem.

If this is true, it means that the very first people on earth to worship Jesus probably had the job of tending the sacrificial lambs for the temple. Think about that! The shepherds knew better than anyone else that it was the blood of Bethlehem lambs that washed away the sins of the people in Jerusalem. Day and night they watched their flocks, constantly reminded that each male lamb had been born to die. 

Hark the herald angels…

This also helps explain the angelic visitation. They chose to appear to the shepherds for a very good reason. It wasn’t primarily (as is sometimes preached) a proletarian statement from the Godhead. Nor was it merely that the shepherds happened to be in the area (the inn next door was much closer and we know that it was full!) No, the angels deliberately chose those shepherds as a powerful prophetic symbol. Their presence at the birth was a sign for Mary and Joseph who would have to raise their own unblemished lamb to die, it was a sign for the Jerusalem temple that God’s perfect lamb had been born in Bethlehem, and ultimately it remains a sign for the whole world.

O, little town of Bethlehem

The precise location of the nativity is unknown but there is some conjecture, based on Micah 4:8, that the stable was situated near Migdal Edar, ‘tower of the flock’. If so, this is remarkable because Migdal Edar was where Jacob’s wife Rachel had died, giving birth to Benjamin (Gen 35:19). Mary must surely have banished Rachel’s story from her mind, as she gave birth to Jesus on the same spot. Once again the prophetic symmetry is breathtaking: Rachel giving birth to the last of the twelve tribes and then Mary, in the same place, giving birth to the first son of the new Israel.

The great Jewish-Christian scholar Alfred Edersheim confirms the significance of this location in the second volume of his ‘Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah’. He argues that Migdal Edar was situated particularly close to the town of Bethlehem, on the road towards Jerusalem, and for that reason ‘the flocks that pastured there were destined for Temple sacrifices.’

Away in a Manger

The Greek word translated ‘manger’ may literally describe a ‘stall’ for keeping livestock (in Luke 13:15 that’s how it is translated). It is therefore entirely possible that the baby Jesus was put to sleep in a stall designed to accommodate livestock, and not necessarily in the rustic feeding trough that we tend to imagine lined with glowing hay. And since sheep were such a backbone of Bethlehem’s economy, it is quite possible that he was laid to rest in a stall usually reserved for the birthing of sacrificial lambs. 

Born that man no more may die

At the age of thirty, Jesus approached John the Baptist and was greeted in an extraordinary way: ‘Behold,’ cried John, pointing at his cousin, ‘the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’. Where did this strange declaration come from? Certainly John knew the scriptures. Some measure of prophetic insight must also have been at work. But perhaps John was also recalling the simple family tales he’d heard, again and again, from his mother Elizabeth about the circumstances around his cousin’s birth. It’s not impossible (although I am stretching conjecture to the limits here) that Jesus’ family had given him the affectionate nickname, ‘Lamb’. 

God of God, Light of Light

Pointing out the morbid significance of Bethlehem as a place that bred sacrificial lambs, and of those shepherds as the ones who oversaw the process, and of that tower as a place where Rachel had died giving birth, and of that stall as a disturbing place to lay a human baby probably wont get me invited to many Christmas parties this year. But for many people this is not a happy or an easy time of year and we banish the darkness from the story at their peril. In his poem Journey of the Magi T.S. Eliot describes one of the Magi – presumably the one who’d brought burial spices for the baby - reflecting on the nativity and its peculiar conflation of birth with death:

There was a Birth, certainly

We had evidence and no doubt.
I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different

In every hidden detail, the circumstances of Jesus’ birth anticipate his death. But like a painting by Rembrandt, the shadows of the nativity story make its colours shine the brighter.  Unlike Rachel, Mary does not die. King Herod fails to kill Jesus. In the end, as at the beginning, life triumphs over death. 

What is the good news of Christmas for Syrian refugees and grieving families in the Philippines and the elderly unable to heat their own homes? It is that God sees our darkness, he acknowledges, experiences and even inhabits it for, ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.’ (Jn 1)

‘In thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting light;
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight’