The Birth of Jesus
The Christmas story is a very familiar to so many of us in the West. Maybe you didn’t grow up going to church very often, but you probably made your way to church on Christmas Eve and Easter. Or, maybe, you didn’t grow up religious at all. But, I’m willing to bet that you knew what Christmas was and had a vague sense of its connection to a guy named Jesus. Or, the third possibility, you grew up devoutly Christian and Christmas was central to your family and you probably played a sheep at some point in the church Christmas play. You know the story inside and out. The challenge that comes with something being both culturally family and/or personally familiar is that we can lose some of the true significance and power of what makes Christmas so significant. New Testament scholar and pastor, NT Wright, offers a helpful reflection on the significance of Jesus from Luke’s Gospel account. Jesus being born in a manger is the one who will bring true and lasting peace. This promise and his humble birth is in direct contrast to the power, opulence, and empire of Rome. Let’s read Wright’s reflection.
“If you try to point out something to a dog, the dog will often look at your finger instead of at the object you’re trying to point to. This is frustrating, but it illustrates a natural mistake we all make from time to time.
It’s the mistake many people make when reading the Christmas story in Luke’s gospel. What do people know about Jesus’ birth? The manger—the Christmas crib. The most famous animal feeding-trough in all history. You see it on Christmas cards. Churches make elaborate ‘cribs’, and sometimes encourage people to say their prayers in front of them. We know about the animals too, not that Luke even mentions any; the ox and the ass feature prominently in Christmas cards and carols, though there is no indication here either that the shepherds brought their own animals with them, or that there were any in the place where Mary and Joseph were staying.
Let’s be clear about where they were lodging. Tradition has them knocking at an inn door, being told there was no room, and then being offered the stable along with the animals. But the word for ‘inn’ in the traditional translations has several meanings, and it’s likely that they were, in fact, on the ground floor of a house where people normally stayed upstairs. The ground floor would often be used for animals—hence the manger or feeding-trough, which came in handy for the baby—but there is nothing to say that there were actually animals there at the time.
To concentrate on the manger and to forget why it was mentioned in the first place is like the dog looking at the finger rather than the object. Why has Luke mentioned it three times in this story?
The answer is: because it was the feeding-trough, appropriately enough, which was the sign to the shepherds. It told them which baby they were looking for. And it showed them that the angel knew what he was talking about. To be sure, it’s another wonderful human touch in the story, to think of the young mother finding an animal’s feeding-trough ready to hand as a cot for her newborn son. No doubt there are many sermons waiting to be preached here about God coming down into the mess and muddle of real life. But the reason Luke has mentioned it is because it’s important in giving the shepherds their news and their instructions.
Why is that significant? Because it was the shepherds who were told who this child was. This child is the savior, the Messiah, the Lord. The manger isn’t important in itself. It’s a signpost, a pointing finger, to the identity and task of the baby boy who’s lying in it. The shepherds, summoned in from the fields, are made privy to the news, so that Mary and Joseph, hearing it from this unexpected source, will have extra confirmation of what up until now has been their own secret.
We have to assume that the shepherds, like other Palestinian Jews at the time, would have known what a savior, a Messiah, a Lord was to do. In case we need reminding, Luke has introduced the story by telling us about Augustus Caesar, way off in Rome, at the height of his power.
Augustus was the adopted son of Julius Caesar. He became sole ruler of the Roman world after a bloody civil war in which he overpowered all rival claimants. The last to be destroyed was the famous Mark Antony, who committed suicide not long after his defeat at the battle of Actium in 31 bc. Augustus turned the great Roman republic into an empire, with himself at the head; he proclaimed that he had brought justice and peace to the whole world; and, declaring his dead adoptive father to be divine, styled himself as ‘son of god’. Poets wrote songs about the new era that had begun; historians told the long story of Rome’s rise to greatness, reaching its climax (obviously) with Augustus himself. Augustus, people said, was the ‘savior’ of the world. He was its king, its ‘lord’. Increasingly, in the eastern part of his empire, people worshipped him too, as a god.
Meanwhile, far away, on that same eastern frontier, a boy was born who would within a generation be hailed as ‘son of God’; whose followers would speak of him as ‘savior’ and ‘lord’; whose arrival, they thought, had brought true justice and peace to the world. Jesus never stood before a Roman emperor, but at the climax of Luke’s gospel he stood before his representative, the governor Pontius Pilate. Luke certainly has that scene in mind as he tells his tale: how the emperor in Rome decides to take a census of his whole wide domain, and how this census brings Jesus to be born in the town which was linked to King David himself.
The point Luke is making is clear. The birth of this little boy is the beginning of a confrontation between the kingdom of God—in all its apparent weakness, insignificance and vulnerability—and the kingdoms of the world. Augustus never heard of Jesus of Nazareth. But within a century or so his successors in Rome had not only heard of him; they were taking steps to obliterate his followers. Within just over three centuries the emperor himself became a Christian. When you see the manger on a card, or in church, don’t stop at the crib. See what it’s pointing to. It is pointing to the explosive truth that the baby lying there is already being spoken of as the true king of the world.” [1]
[1] Tom Wright, Advent for Everyone: A Journey through Luke (London: SPCK, 2018), 95–98.