Luke 2: 1-20
When you read or hear an old familiar Bible passage like today’s Christmas story, it’s easy to drift into a mental auto-pilot as the old familiar words work their ways through old familiar mental pathways. then you hardly really hear them anymore.
But one year, a certain phrase jumped out at me. I noticed that it was repeated three times in Luke’s Christmas story. You hear it first in verse 7: “[Mary]wrapped .[the newborn baby Jesus] in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.”
You run across that three-word phrase again a few verses later when we read that the angels appeared to the shepherds and told them they would find the Christ child in bethlehem, “laid [or lying] in a manger.” Then we find it again, when Luke tells us that the shepherds came to Bethlehem, found the stable and the baby lying “in a manger” just like the angels had said.
So, what is that repetitive three-word phrase? “in a manger.”
Most of our Christmas cards and our famous Christmas art show the manger as something like a wooden box between two boards nailed together in an x-shape. Maybe that’s what Jesus was placed in. But it could also have been a simple trough on the ground, made of wood, or even simply chiseled in the stone or dug in the dirt, to keep the animals from spreading the hay around while they eat.
When you read a story and run across a certain word or phrase repeated that often, that tells us that the phrase or the word itself is very important. Why is it so important? What’s so important about the manger?
For one thing, it’s not where we would expect to find a new-born king. The manger serves us notice that, from the very start, we’re not going to find this king in the usual imperial palaces or throne rooms, except as an object of derision and contempt. This king fulfills and demonstrates the word of God which says, “I dwell among the lowly, the humble and the contrite.”
Secondly, an observant Jew who knew his Bible, hearing this word “manger” three times would have thought of the words from Isaiah 1, where God says, “The ox knows his master, and the donkey his master’s manger, but Israel does not know, My people do not consider (1:3).” So, while the ox and the donkey look upon the coming of Israel’s master in the manger, his human subjects are more obtuse and unaware than are they. The manger poses to us this question: Do we have half the sense that God gave donkeys and oxen to recognize our master, and the way, the place and the spiritual food which he gives us?
The presence of ox, ass and other animals around the Christ child also tells us that Christ’s coming is good news for all creation, and not just for our immortal souls. “The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed”. ….in eager expectation of the day “that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God (Rom. 8: 19-21).” Our sister creation, the animals and the earth, are represented in the dawn of redemption by the animals that would have lived and eaten and slept around that manger.
One final thing about Jesus lying “in a manger:” it’s something missional about God, about how God reaches out to the world, and how we must, too. It tells us something about how God reaches out to the world, to every kind of person, and to each and every person. It tells us how God tailor-makes his approach to everyone, to meet us more than halfway, and to enter our daily reality in terms that we can understand.
Just look at who the first people are who hear about Jesus’ birth: they’re shepherds. They’re around animals all the time. When those animals are not out in the fields grazing, they’re in stables eating. From mangers. Mangers are part and parcel of the shepherds’ every day life.
The angels announce the good news to shepherds first, as if to say that God is now sending Israel a new shepherd, the Good Shepherd, whom He promised to send in Ezekiel 34, to replace the false shepherds among Israel’s leaders who have abused and neglected God’s flock, and who have enriched themselves at the expense of God’s sheep.
If God is going to reach out to lowly shepherds first, He’s probably not going to have the Messiah being born in a Caesar’s palace or a Roman chariot. Those aren’t places they would normally go. Nor in the innermost and holiest chambers temple, because they couldn’t go there, either. The Pharisees considered shepherds unclean, because of some of the tasks they had to take on around animals. For the Good Shepherd to reach these humble shepherds, God comes more than halfway, make that all the way, across the gulf that makes God seem so distant to us, and meets the shepherds with something they can understand, in a place that is accessible to them, and comfortable to them.
That gracious willingness on the part of God, to go more than half way and reach us where we are, did not stop in the First Century. We could all likely look over our own lives and see how God has done the same with us. Think of the friends and family members whom God placed in our path, in the times and places where we were open and willing to hear the good news.
We often see this also whenever the gospel crosses new cultural frontiers, and reaches new people in new languages. Don and Carol Richardson recorded a fascinating incidence of this, from their time as missionaries among the Saawa people of New Guinea. They learned the language enough to tell the story about Jesus. It went over well, people were interested and receptive, especially when they got to the part about the betrayal and arrest of Jesus. People laughed and clapped at that part, thinking that Judas was the hero of the Gospel story. They enjoyed stories of treachery, trickery and turning the tables. How are they ever going to understand the gospel? the Richardsons wondered.
But there was something like a manger already in the Saawa culture, ready to receive the Christ child. The Saawa were at the time in a blood feud with some neighboring villages. It got to the point where the Richardsons felt like they and their children weren’t safe, and made preparations to leave. Which upset the Saawa people. They didn’t want to see them go. So they resorted to an ancient tradition of last resort to restore the peace: they held a meeting with representatives of their enemy villages and offered each of them a “peace child.” A peace child is a child from their home or village whom they send to live in an enemy village as a guarantee that they would do no harm to anyone from those villages. If they do, then you can do to our peace child whatever we’ve done to one of yours. That was the tradition of “the Peace Child.” He or she would grow up safe among their enemies as long as the Saawa acted peaceably toward them.
This “peace child” tradition stunned the Richardsons. It was a manger, in which to place Jesus, in a way that was understandable and accessible to the Saawa. So the Richardson’s retold the Gospel story with Jesus as God’s Peace Child to us, God’s guarantee that He is at peace with us and intends to remain so, with anyone who receives Jesus as God’s Peace Child. From that revelation was born a church among the Saawa people. The Saawa went on to share God’s Peace Child with their neighbors, thus spreading peace beyond themselves. In their “peace child” tradition, God had already met the Saawa more than half way, Their tradition of the Peace Child was, in effect, their manger, waiting to receive Christ, and to show Him to the world.
What God did for the shepherds, placing Jesus in a manger, God still does for us and for the world. There’s a manger in every culture, a manger in every language, a manger in every family and community, even a manger in every human heart, ready to receive and to hold God’s gift of His Peace Child. And to show Him to the world.