Day: December 25, 2024

“For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord”

In the Christian imaginary, Bethlehem is a crowded scene of symbolic significance. How much, we might say, is imagined and created out of what seems so little in terms of detail and information? There is not much data about Bethlehem but so much more in the way of symbol and significance. “This shall be a sign unto you,” the Angel says to the Shepherds and to us in the quiet of Christmas Morn. The sign of the birth of “a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord” is the babe “wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger,” born this day in the city of David, Bethlehem.

Luke uses the word manger three times in this chapter. Along with the fact that “there was no room for them in the inn,” the word manger contributes to the classical and traditional imagery of the nativity scene. But there is a deeper theological point that we hear only on Christmas Eve from John’s Prologue: “He came unto his own and his own received him not.” It signals the theme of our rejection or denial of the good.

The story of Christ’s birth in the humble circumstances of a manger or stall, meaning “a long open box or trough in a stable for horses or cattle to eat from” (OED), makes no mention of a stable or barn nor any direct mention of animals. But the word manager, (οατνη), in contrast to an inn or lodging (καταλυμα), points to the humble and lowly circumstances of Christ’s birth and thus to the realities of our finite world of limitations and hardships, of sin and evil. His birth embraces the conditions of our humanity in its various forms of brokenness or incompleteness. He does not come in power and with great glory understood in terms of worldly expectations. He comes as Saviour to redeem our finite and fallen world.

The point is that Christ’s birth confounds all our human expectations even as it reveals the deeper wisdom of the Scriptures in their interplay and interconnection about God’s purpose for our humanity. The animals associated in holy imagination with the Bethlehem scene come from the Angelic message to the Shepherds who will make their way to “see this thing that has come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.” From that will come a whole menagerie of animals and angels along with, finally, the Magi-Kings; all of which symbolize the whole of humanity and creation as gathered to God. What is that really all about except a profound sense of Bethlehem as paradise restored, an image of the hope of heaven, of salvation which is not a flight from the world or creation but its redemption and restoration? We make the mistake, as Flannery O’Connor has put it, of “domesticating divinity,” conforming God to ourselves and our comforts and expectations, as if Christ’s incarnation is little more than an affirmation of ourselves in our various identities and existential anxieties. We get it backwards. “Be ye not conformed to the world but be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds” on the things of God revealed to us in the witness of the Scriptures and by our reasoning upon them. Christ comes to redeem us from ourselves and to restore us to the truth of ourselves as known in God’s eternal knowing and loving of us.

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