“Let us now go even unto Bethlehem”
“Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass,” the Shepherds say, “which the Lord hath made known unto us,” albeit by way of an Angel. It is the Shepherd’s Christmas, their going to Bethlehem. Presumably they took the sheep with them. Tomorrow the Magi-Kings from Anatolia will make their way to Bethlehem via Jerusalem “hav[ing] seen his star in the East.” We easily forget what Matthew tells us. The Magi only learn about Bethlehem from Herod in his consultation with “all the chief priests and the scribes of the people together” in Jerusalem who say that Bethlehem is “where the Christ was to be born.” All come to Bethlehem and so must we. And why? That we, like Mary, might “keep all these things” “which were told by the shepherds,” “concerning this child,” and ponder them, like Mary, in our hearts.
All come to Bethlehem so that Bethlehem may abide in us. With the Magi-Kings coming at Epiphany tomorrow there will be, we might say, the break-out from Bethlehem. After presenting their gifts to the child who is God, and King, and Sacrifice, “they departed into their own country another way;” yet, as T.S. Eliot wonderfully puts it, “no longer at ease” in their former ways. Something has changed in them. It is what abides in them from the mystery of Bethlehem. Bethlehem abides in them and weighs in upon their minds. So too, I hope, for us.
The abiding presence of Bethlehem informs the Christian imaginary about the mystery of Christmas and of the Christian Faith itself. In carol and story, in art and in the great variety of crèches, the symbolic significance of Christ’s humble birth in Bethlehem, at once “the least of the cities of Judah” in Micah and yet “not the least” in Matthew’s account, an apparent contradiction that Richard Hooker explains and resolves, is signalled to us. The 15th century Florentine tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Fra Lippi captures something of the transformative fullness of the Christmas mystery. It is a crowded scene. Not easy to find any shepherds and their sheep there among the exotica of peacock and pheasant; an ox and ass are prominent in the stall, a greyhound lies in the foreground. There are horses and a great parade of people. The focus is on the Magi adoring the Child Christ seated on the lap of Mary. All come to Bethlehem.
It is a kind of reprise of Paradise, an image of the harmony and unity of God and the whole of his creation. The artistic images symbolise the meaning of Bethlehem for us as something that abides in us even in the break-out from Bethlehem. Epiphany in a way is about nothing more than Christmas for all people, omni populo, as John Cosin so clearly states. Epiphany season will be about attending to the mystery of the God who became flesh. It will undertake to teach us about God in his divine attributes and character and what that means for us. It will, in other words, carry the meaning of Bethlehem with us into the meaning of Jerusalem. They are the twin poles, already circling around us, of the Christian understanding of God’s deep and intimate engagement with our humanity without which we are less than ourselves. What is revealed and made known in the mystery of Christmas and Epiphany belongs to the fullness of understanding about our humanity in its truth. They signal the profound idea that we are capax dei, capable of God but only through the mercy of God and our thinking upon that mystery.
That is always challenging especially in our post, sub, and even anti-Christian world. Yet the significance of Bethlehem cannot be gainsaid, it seems to me, and we need to be like Mary in “keep[ing[ all these things” that are said about the child Christ and “ponder[ing] them in [our] heart[s].” All of the complexity of the story of human redemption speaks to the forms of God’s engagement with our humanity in and through the forms of its particularity.
This means a much more careful and thoughtful reading and thinking upon the Scriptural passages that belong to Christmas. I find it most intriguing that in the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer there is a wonderful interlude in which we break off from reading from Isaiah and read instead the Book of Ruth, almost in its entirety. Placed in the Hebrew Bible with the Ketuvim or Writings, the third category of texts, it is found in the Septuagint, the Vulgate, and the English Bibles immediately after the Book of Judges and before 1st Samuel. Why this interlude in the midst of Christmastide? Because of the significance of Bethlehem.
It tells a moving story about migration in flight from famine in the lands of Israel “in the days when the Judges ruled.” Naomi and her husband, Elimelech, both of whom are from Bethlehem in Judah, go to the land of Moab. Naomi has two sons, Mahlon and Chilion, who marry two Moabite wives, Orpah and Ruth. Naomi’s husband dies and then Mahlon and Chilion also die, leaving Naomi bereft of her two sons and her husband and leaving Orpah and Ruth widowed. Naomi decides to return to her homeland but bids her daughters remain in Moab. As Naomi tells them, there is nothing she can do for them by way of husbands. Orpah stays but Ruth, in a famous passage that Jesus will echo in speaking with Mary Magdalene in the Garden of the Resurrection, says to Naomi, “where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1. 16). Thus Naomi and Ruth “came to Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest.”
In Bethlehem is a kinsman of Naomi’s husband, a man of wealth, named Boaz. Ruth the Moabitess – she is referred to this way five times – goes into the field of Boaz and gleans after the reapers. It is a lovely image: gleaning in the field of Boaz in Bethlehem. The Book of Leviticus, in the chapter which is the explicit source for the commandment to “love your neighbour as yourself” and which makes it clear that the neighbour is equally the sojourner or stranger in your midst, also commands that you should not strip your fields and your vineyards completely bare but leave wheat and grapes for the poor and needy to glean and harvest (Lev. 19). It is an explicit command about a form of care and compassion towards the poor.
Boaz takes notice of her and learns that she is “the Moabitess maiden who came back with Naomi.” She asks him to let her glean. He tells her not to go to any other field or leave this one and to stay close to his maidens – there is the sense of protecting her from being molested by the young men – and to take water from his vessels. Ruth asks ‘why have I, who am a foreigner, found favour in your eyes?’ Because of “all that you have done for your mother-in-law and how you left your father and mother and your native land to come to a people that you did not know,” he says. He invokes the God of Israel “under whose wings you have come to take refuge,” a lovely image.
Under Naomi’s direction, Ruth goes to Boaz while he is sleeping, coming in under his refuge, as it were – an act of love perhaps with sexual overtones – but Boaz blesses her and tells her that while he is kin to Naomi there is another who is nearer in kinship than he to Elimelech. The idea here is that a kinsman has the right and duty to protect the property and honour of his kinsman and to provide for his family. Boaz undertakes to negotiate with the kinsman who has first rights with its duties and obligations to buy the property which had belonged to Elimelech but which now includes Ruth the Moabitess. She is included in the arrangement “in order to restore the name of the dead to his inheritance.” Boaz is successful and marries Ruth the Moabitess who gives birth to a child. Naomi takes the child and becomes his nurse. He is named Obed, the father of Jesse, the father of David. This anticipates Isaiah’s great prophecy that “there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse,” one who is sign of the Messiah upon whom rests the gifts of the Spirit and who in the Christian imagery is understood to be Jesus. All because of Ruth gleaning in the fields of Boaz in Bethlehem.
What is striking is the note of universality in Ruth’s statement to her mother-in-law that “your people shall be my people and your God my God.” This transcends the merely local and tribal world and its customs though without negating them. Instead they become the context and circumstance for the greater work of human redemption accomplished by Christ and signified in the mystery of Christmas.
In our contemporary culture the tendency would be to read this story through the lenses of the structural dynamics of power and ‘gender’ constructs, social arrangements belonging to ‘patriarchal’ assumptions, and the subordination of women as property, and so forth; all rather abstract and empty of life and the experience of life that the story presents, a kind of shallow sociology which supplants wisdom and theology. Does this do justice to the narrative of the story? Does it explain the intensity of Naomi’s situation that impels her return to her home in Bethlehem or the deep commitment of Ruth to her mother-in-law – surely an uncommon ‘sociological’ trope? Does this shed any light at all upon the theological and ethical idea of the embrace of the foreigner, the stranger, as neighbour, let alone the primacy given to life and its continuance via family and adoption? Are women simply without agency in this story, without dignity, courage, and intelligence? Does it help us to appreciate the overarching sense of the universality of God for the understanding of our humanity in the idea of divine compassion and care that shapes the narrative and its actors? In short, does it contribute anything at all to the biblical insight that connects the story of Ruth with the mystery of Christmas; namely, to our abiding with God who abides with us?
All come to Bethlehem that Bethlehem may abide in us. Like Ruth, we glean in the fields of Bethlehem and thus, like Mary, “keep all these things and ponder them in our hearts;” transformed by what we see and hear.
“Let us now go even unto Bethlehem”
Fr. David Curry
Second Sunday after Christmas
January 5th, 2025