Peter Carruthers
This is an extremely belated article to mark last Sunday, the Third Sunday in Advent; I have been away from my desk for a few days.
In line with the ‘tradition’ I mentioned in my last Advent article, in this article, and in the final in my Advent series tomorrow, I turn my attention to Jesus’ first coming, and to the accounts of His nativity.
Jesus’ birth is, of course, ‘significant’ in the sense of ‘very important’. But that is grossly to understate the case. By ‘significant’, here, I mean it is replete with ‘signs’ and symbols - things that have depths of meaning beyond their surface appearance. I explore just some of these below. Seeing beyond the all-too-familiar stories and scenes will, I hope, enrich our experience of Christmas and maybe help explain it to neighbours, friends and family.
The nativity story abounds with beauty and goodness, and it is true! Revealing the ‘significance beyond the signs’ is, I suggest, one way of effecting the ‘new apologetic’ proposed in my recent article.
The story we retell at Christmas, in words, pictures, drama, and song, combines the gospel accounts with many later traditions. Some of the latter, like the ox and the ass (see below), go back to the very early centuries after Jesus’ birth.
The Nativity is a very rural story, indeed, a ‘farming story’. And we reflect this even today. In our depictions, Jesus’ birth is usually situated , as the song goes, in ‘a draughty stable’, with Jesus lying in a manger on a ‘bed of straw’. He is surrounded by animals: the ox and the ass are in attendance; the shepherds turn up with lambs in their arms or on their shoulders; the wise men arrive on their camels. I imagine, like me, you will also have seen horses, dogs, cats, rabbits and (totally implausibly) pigs, in school and Sunday School nativities!
Nature and the produce of the land are also central to household celebrations of Christmas. We decorate our homes with vegetation: the Christmas tree, holly, mistletoe etc. Food and drink are at the heart of Christmas. In more frugal times, Christmas was an opportunity to enjoy things one could not obtain or afford during the rest of the year (eg ‘exotic’ foods, like oranges, nuts, and dates!).
“Oh little town of Bethlehem”
The first Gospel’s account of the Nativity opens by telling us that Jesus was born in Bethlehem (Matthew 2:1).
Why Bethlehem?
The gospels give us two reasons. As Luke reports, because Joseph was “of the house and lineage of David”, he had to be in Bethlehem, the city of David, for the Roman census (Luke 2:1-7). This ‘coincided’ with Jesus’ birth. Matthew reminds us that it was to fulfil the prophecy of Micah that the Messiah would come from Bethlehem (Micah 5:2: Matthew 2:6).
Digging a little deeper, however, reveals some further reasons why Bethlehem is significant (and why it might be of special interest to rural and farming people).
Bethlehem is first mentioned in the Bible as the site of Rachel’s tomb (Genesis 35:19), but its substantial introduction is in the story of Ruth and Boaz, a ‘farming story’ set in an agricultural community at harvest time. Ruth, the destitute widow is protected and provided for by, and eventually married to, Boaz, her ‘kinsman redeemer’, pre-figuring Jesus who as incarnate Saviour and Lord is kinsmen-redeemer to all who receive Him. Ruth and Boaz were the great-grandparents of David, the ‘shepherd-king’, again a type of the Lord Jesus Himself.
Further, Bethlehem means the ‘House of Bread’. Jesus is the "bread of life”, the “living bread which came down from heaven” (John 6:48-51), so it is fitting that He is born in the ‘House of Bread’.
“Lo within a manger lies”
Not only was Jesus born in the ‘house of bread’, as if to emphasise the point, He was also He laid in a manger, a container for animal feed. Early Christian writers saw the manger as signifying the Ark of the Covenant, which contained a piece of manna, the bread that fed Israel in the wilderness. Jesus is the true manna, the “bread of God.. who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” (John 6:33).
However, unlike the manna of ancient Israel, which sustained only earthly life, those who eat the true manna, the living bread, will live for ever.
Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (John 6:47-51).
“The ox and ass and camel which adore”
No animals are mentioned in the gospel accounts of Jesus birth. But Luke’s mention of the manger may be intended to indicate the presence of animals. An ox and an ass, however, appear in very early depictions of Jesus’ birth and have so done ever since. In her poem, ‘In the bleak midwinter’, quoted above, Christina Rossetti adds a camel, possibly belonging to one of the wise men!
The first surviving source referring to the ox and ass is Origen’s (184-253) thirteenth homily on the Gospel of Luke (composed about 235). This text, quoting Isaiah 1:3, states that the manger in which Christ was laid “was that very one, which the prophet foretold, saying, ‘the ox knows its owner and the ass its master’s manger’”.1
The ox and the ass represent the animals, who, therefore, know who Jesus is and worship Him (hence Christina' Rossetti’s, “which adore”), witness the Incarnation, are with Jesus during His temptation in the wilderness (Mark 1:13), and will live in peace and harmony in the Messianic age to come (Isaiah 11:6-9, 62:25).
Some early Christian writers also saw the ox and the ass as symbolically fulfilling the Septuagint’s translation of Habbakuk’s prophecy that the Lord “will be known in the midst of two living creatures” (Habbakuk 3:2, LXX).2 This translation is suggestive of the Lord “enthroned upon” the Ark of the Covenant “dwelling between” the two cherubim at either end (Exodus 25:18-22; 1 Samuel 4:4; Psalm 80:1; Psalm 99:1), itself evocative of the garden of Eden, guarded by cherubim after Adam and Eve were ejected from it (Genesis 3:24). In both cases, cherubim signify and guard the presence of the Lord God Himself.
Likewise, at the Nativity, the presence of the Lord God in an ark is signified and watched over by living creatures. But, in keeping with His coming in humility, the ark is a feeding trough and the living creatures are farm animals.
Hence, the Septuagint version of Habakkuk 3:2 both recapitulates the Lord’s presence above the Ark of the Covenant in Israel’s history, and anticipates His manifestation through an event yet to take place, “when the time is come”, and one which demonstrates His mercy.
“O Lord, I have heard thy report, and was afraid: I considered thy works, and was amazed: thou shalt be known between the two living creatures, thou shalt be acknowledged when the years draw nigh; thou shalt be manifested when the time is come; when my soul is troubled, thou wilt in wrath remember mercy” (Habakkuk 3:2, LXX).
As Gregory Dipippo notes:
“Prophetic confirmation of the belief that God became knowable in the Incarnation, and is thenceforth known to man, was found by the early Christians in the Greek version of the canticle of Habakkuk, a Biblical passage of the greatest importance to both theology and liturgy.”
The ox and ass also represent the way Jesus’ coming into the world brings together things that were separate, opposed, alienated, antagonistic. The ox, a ‘clean’ animal’, represents the Jews; the ass, an ‘unclean’ animal, represents the Gentiles. As Simeon declares, alluding to Isaiah (49:6) (but significantly reversing the order), Jesus comes to be both a light to the Gentiles and the glory of Israel (Luke 2:32).
This theme runs right through the Nativity story. Jesus’ birth is witnessed by: men (Joseph, shepherds, Magi, Simeon) and women (Mary, Anna); poor, rural, unsophisticated, Jewish shepherds and rich, urban, urbane, Gentile Magi; earthly people and animals, and heavenly beings; Simeon (a man of Jerusalem, representing the southern kingdom of Judah) and Anna (of the tribe of Asher, representing the ‘lost’ northern kingdom of Israel). Ultimately, this reconciling of opposites is manifest in the unifying of divinity and humanity in the Incarnation itself.
“All meanly wrapped in swaddling bands”
After Jesus was born, Mary “wrapped Him in swaddling cloths, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7). The swaddling cloths and the manger were, in fact, the distinctive sign by which the shepherds would recognise the one who is Saviour, Messiah and Lord (Luke 2:11-12).
Wrapping babies in strips of cloth was the custom of the day and continued for many centuries after. It was indicative of a mother’s loving care and attention (cp Ezekiel 16:4).
The manger is mentioned three times in Luke’s account (Luke 2:7, 12, 16). As above, it was a trough for animal feed, made of wood or stone, and possibly built into the floor. As one writer comments, “wood-constructed mangers like we know from our Nativity would not survive for modern archaeologists to find, but stone-carved and plaster-lined mangers are known from excavations to be on the ground floor of domestic structures in Israel throughout biblical times (see 1 Samuel 28:24; Judges 11:31; Luke 13:15)”.
The Greek word (kataluma) translated ‘inn’ in Luke 2:7 is the same word used to describe the upper room or guest room in which Jesus and His disciples celebrated Passover (Luke 22:11; Mark 14:14). In Luke’s account of Jesus parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), he uses a different word (pandocheion) to describe the public inn with its innkeeper (pandocheus). Luke is, therefore, indicating that Jesus was born not in the upper guest room, but on the ground floor of a home (which doubled up as a stable for more valuable animals like oxen and donkeys) or an adjacent cave, similarly used. Early tradition favours the latter.
“By the early second century AD even pagans were widely aware of the tradition that Jesus was born in a cave used as a livestock shelter behind someone’s home, and they reported the site of this cave to the emperor Hadrian.”3
These, and many other aspects of Jesus’ birth, prefigure His passion and resurrection. Early Christians recognised this and represented it in their iconography. The swaddling cloths in which He is lovingly wrapped by His mother anticipate the “linen cloth” (Matthew 27:59), “fine linen” (Mark 15:46-47) or “strips of linen” (John 19:40) in which He is lovingly wrapped by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus (and possibly again by Mary herself).
The swaddling cloths of Jesus’ birth represent His taking on human finitude and mortality (Genesis 3:19-21). The “Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14); the infinite divine Logos took on finite humanity. This is the heart of the Christmas story and the most important reason for celebrating Christmas. Indeed, the early church instigated what we now call Christmas as the celebration of the Incarnation in order to counter the Arian heresy that Jesus was a created being and not God incarnate. As one writer notes, in the ancient world, the most crucial and contested doctrine of the Christian faith was not the divinity of Christ, but the ‘humanity of God’. Even today, the Orthodox Church still prefers to call Christmas the feast of the Incarnation of Christ.
At His resurrection, however, Jesus casts aside these ‘swaddling cloths’ of mortal humanity and leaves them abandoned in the empty tomb, opening the way for those who believe in Him also to be free of mortality and have everlasting life (John 3:16): ‘this mortal puts in immortality’; “death is swallowed up in victory” (Isaiah 25:8; 1 Corinthians 15:53-54).
Further, according to this writer,
In Jewish tradition, leaving a linen napkin neatly folded at the table meant that the meal was not over yet, and that the diner planned to return, hence the neatly folded linens in the tomb following His crucifixion signify Christ’s intention to return.
“In fourth-century catacomb paintings and sarcophagus reliefs, the manger is often depicted as a wicker basket or a stone trough”.4 The former evokes ‘Moses in the bulrushes’. The latter is suggestive of a burial chamber. Similarly, the cave in which Jesus is born foreshadows the tomb in which He is buried and from which He is resurrected.
Perhaps, the best known prefiguring of Jesus’ death is the Magi’s gift of Myrrh (Matthew 2:12), encapsulated in Verse 4 of ‘We Three Kings’.
Myrrh is mine: Its bitter perfume Breaths a life of gathering gloom. Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, Sealed in the stone-cold tomb.
At both His birth and His death, He is attended by rich men bearing myrrh (Matthew 2:12; John 19:38-39).
In addition, angels attend and announce both Jesus’ birth (Luke 1:26-38; 2:9-14) and His resurrection (Matthew 28:2-7; Luke 24:4-7; John 20:12-13).
“Oh come to my heart, Lord Jesus”
Finally, to return to the location of Jesus’ birth as above, as one writer puts it, ‘guest rooms’ or ‘upper rooms’ (katalumata) serve as bookends to Jesus’ life and ministry. There was no room for Him in a kataluma on the first night of His life. He presided over a meal in a kataluma on the last night of His life. And He appears to His disciples in a kataluma after His resurrection. As we entertain guests and share meals this Christmas, may we also invite Jesus into the ‘guest room’ of our lives, our families, our churches and our communities.
Isaiah goes on contrast the perspicacity of the animals with the obtuseness of the people: “But Israel does not know, My people do not consider” (Isaiah 1:3b). That an ass sees what a man is blind to is also suggestive of Balaam and his ass (Numbers 22:22-34).
“This translation is based on a variation of the Hebrew consonantal text, read with different vowels from those now found in the Hebrew Bible” (Gregory Dipippo, 2012. The ancient origins of the nativity scene, Part 1)
Keener, C S. 1993. The Bible Background Commentary. New Testament. IVP.
Hello Peter, lots to think about here. Do you know the story of The Apple Tree Man- an ox and ass feature and in the story at the stroke of midnight on Christmas eve they speak to each other- but were never heard to speak again. Christmas greeting, from Jenny Cunningham and Perse Peett.