Luke 2: 1-20
I imagine that most of us have spent much of our lives hearing and telling this story of how Jesus came into the world. Most of us hear it at least once a year, at worship services like this one. Many of us have been part of Sunday School pageants that dramatized the story. And if we haven’t, we’ve probably gone to see beloved family members in Christmas pageants and holiday offerings of all sorts.
As I thought about this sermon, I thought, what new could I possibly have to say? And then I went for a walk with a pastor friend of mine who has a son who is the campus minister at the University of South Carolina. She told me about her son’s radically different approach to the Luke narrative, and I spent the next day researching to see if her son could possibly be correct.
In a nutshell, we may have spent much of the last part of Christendom interpreting the word “Inn” incorrectly. The Greek word used here in Luke may be interpreted several ways, and one of those is “guest room.” It’s a different word from the one that the writer of Luke uses in the parable of the Good Samaritan, when the Samaritan brings the robbery victim to an inn and takes care of all the charges. So, how does the Nativity story change if there is no room for Joseph and Mary in the guest room?
The circumstances that have them in Bethlehem so close to Mary’s due date help to explain the guest room shortage. Let us consider the issue of Roman taxation, the stated reason that Mary and Joseph go to Bethlehem. Many scholars are quick to point out that this kind of imperial decree to return to one’s ancestral home to be registered likely did not happen the way that Luke tells us here: it would have been more realistic for the census to be taken in the place where people lived, and the records that we have of this kind of census say that they happened at a different time and under different rulers. In either case, the writer of Luke makes sure that we realize that the birth of Jesus happens during a time of extreme Roman oppression, the kind of oppression that forces pregnant women to travel great distances, the kind of oppression that the gospel writer’s audience still suffered, the kind of oppression that so many have endured through the centuries as long as humans have lived under the iron grip of empire.
The Roman decree that all citizens must be taxed gets Joseph and Mary back to Bethlehem and gives the gospel writer a chance to show the pedigree of Jesus, that he is part of the royal line of David. This part of the plot also helps us understand why our view of an inn might be a wrong interpretation.
We’re told that they return to Bethlehem, Joseph’s ancestral home. If Joseph returns to his ancestral home with a young and very pregnant fiancee, he would have family members who would have to take him in. In work that explores the Middle Eastern cultural background of the Gospels, Kenneth E. Bailey notes, “Even if he has never been there before he can appear suddenly at the home of a distant cousin, recite his genealogy, and he is among friends. Joseph had only to say, ‘I am Joseph, son of Jacob, son of Matthan, son of Eleazar, the son of Eliud,’ and the immediate response must have been, ‘You are welcome. What can we do for you?’ And if Joseph did have some member of the extended family residing in the village, he was honor-bound to seek them out. Furthermore, if he did not have family or friends in the village, as a member of the famous house of David, for the ‘sake of David,’ he would still be welcomed into almost any village home.”
Those of us unfamiliar with the geography of the area might not realize that Mary also has relatives nearby—Elizabeth and Zechariah live in the hill country of Judea, which is near Bethlehem.
When Joseph and Mary had to return to their ancestral home, it’s likely that other relatives needing hospitality had gotten there before them—after all, everyone must return to their ancestral home, so many people will be on the move. So, here we have another reason for a more accurate translation: “There was no room for them in the guest room.” But that doesn’t mean they would be turned away, particularly given Mary’s late-stage pregnancy. There might not be a guest room, but there’s always room in the family room, the main living area—which would have looked very different than what we think of when we say living room.
Let’s talk about the manger. Luke is very clear that Mary puts Jesus in a feeding trough. In first century Palestine, most people would need to gather their animals inside for the night for a variety of reasons, primarily safety. An animal was an investment—by bringing it inside, you could keep it safe and not have to hire help to watch over the barn. Plus, in a time before central heating, the extra body heat from the animals would be welcome.
Any number of archaeological approaches to this text have shown that most first century homes of people wealthy enough to have an animal would be split level homes: “There is a small, lower level for the animals at one end. About 80 percent of the one room is a raised terrace on which the family cooks, eats and lives” (Bailey). One diagram I saw shows the animals kept on a level a few stairs down, with the feeding troughs at the far end of the living level. [Use the space in the front of the church to demonstrate]
The manger is an important element for another significant reason: the shepherds. Let us consider the shepherds. In the time of Jesus, shepherds were part of the lower rungs of society, those smelly people who lived in the fields with the sheep, the ones who had difficult lives in so many ways. And they get to hear the Good News first. They will recognize the baby because he’s in a manger, surrounded by animals—in a sense, this baby is one of them. They, too, spend their lives surrounded by animals that they need to protect. And it works gorgeously as a symbol: the literal shepherds, who in a normal story would be the least likely to greet the Messiah, the shepherds get to be the first to see the shepherd of the world.
Throughout Luke’s Gospel, we see this inversion of what we might ordinarily expect, particularly if we had been schooled in Greek and Roman culture. This time period of Jesus’ birth and the subsequent time when the Gospel was written—these are time periods where the birth of someone important to the history of the world would not happen in the family room of a peasant house, just steps away from the animals. The mother of someone important would be a member of royalty, not an unmarried woman from the lower levels of society. A God coming into the world would be expected in Rome, not in Bethlehem, far from the center of power, and lowly shepherds wouldn’t be the first to have an audience with the new king. Luke begins his Gospel by showing us that God works in a very different way than our culture expects God to act, that salvation will come to us in ways we didn’t expect, in forms that are hardly recognized by unexpected people.
We forget how gritty this story is because we’ve had centuries of Christmas pageants and art that depicts a cozy manger scene. In fact, if you asked people to tell you what they think of when they think of the life of Christ, they’re likely to mention something from this Nativity story—or the cross. Many fewer think of the teachings of the Beatitudes, the demand for justice, love, service, and faith.
As I’ve read about how we came to have this image of Jesus in a barn, a barn which is often depicted as a 3 sided lean-to in so many of our creche scenes, I was surprised to find out that for the first 6 or 7 centuries of Christianity, much of the art depicting the life of Jesus was not of Jesus’ birth, death or resurrection. The earliest centuries of Christian art show Jesus at work in the world, particularly the work that involved miracles.
It’s different today. Our 21st century culture seems most happy with either the cute manger baby God or the brutalized body on the cross. Many forces don’t want us to see God at work in the world, much less accept God’s invitation to be part of the creation of something new. The misreading of the baby Jesus, born in a cold manger in a faraway place leads many of us to think of Jesus as a solitary force in the world. The idea of Jesus born into a a living room surrounded by extended family and the sounds and smells of animals and shepherds gives us a different picture.
From the beginning, Jesus is part of a loving community, a community that gathers in part because their government forced them to, in part because they are related. In his life, Jesus continues to create community and showed people how to survive in the face of aching loneliness and other desperate circumstances. These are qualities the world is in deep need of in our own time.
The world needs people with community creation skills. We are those people. Jesus went about changing the world in just the ways that the world needs now.
In the coming weeks, as we gather together to share a holiday meal or to exchange gifts or to welcome in a new calendar year, let’s think about how that baby Jesus, born into community, went out to continue that work of building caring community wherever he went.
Let us look around our own living rooms and recognize the ways that God continues to come into the world. Let us not leave the baby in that manger or move too quickly to the cross. Jesus has work to do in the world—and so do we, the community of Christians that he created.
For further study:
These two websites have an essay by Kenneth E. Bailey that gives some of the information given in the above academic article:
Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels IVP Academic: 2008
https://biblearchaeology.org/research/new-testament-era/2803-the-manger-and-the-inn
I hope to read this book soon; the excerpt that I read deepens the arguments in the articles that I found on the web sites above:
Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels IVP Academic: 2008
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