“I will turn aside and see this great sight.”
You might be forgiven for attributing this line from Christmas morning to the shepherds. Or so it seems to me. Here is what they do say, in Luke 2:15 (read at the dawn Mass, just a verse following the reading at night): “Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened.”
The language is not, perhaps, as similar as my imagination wants it to be. In fact, the situations are rather different. Moses, while keeping his flocks near Mount Sinai, sees in the distance a bush alive with flame that does not burn up. The shepherds, keeping their flocks near Bethlehem, are confronted with what was no doubt a terrifying and amazing sight: an angelic announcement followed by the eruption of the heavens into song. Rather than being quietly pulled away, they are instructed in vivid detail: “And this will be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger” (Luke 2:12).
Differences aside, I cannot help but see that first “go and see” moment—Moses on Mt. Sinai—as a figure of the second—the shepherds summoned to the manger. In fact, the Byzantine tradition has always seen in the burning bush a type of the holy Theotokos, the Blessed Virgin Mary. She is the unburnt bush who carries the fire of the divine nature without being consumed. Many icons show Moses looking at a burning bush in which she and her divine son are enclosed, hidden for later revelation. And so, in a very real sense, the shepherds are called to see in fact what Moses saw only in symbol. To Moses, at the bush, was revealed the holy name of God. Yet in the manger, the shepherds see God, face to face. To Moses was revealed the Law. To the shepherds was revealed the Word made flesh.
And why is the manger such an important “sign” of this news? Luke sees fit to mention the manger three times in his short story. It’s an odd detail, in many ways—one we have trouble detaching from several centuries of imaginative nostalgia. Modern Christians seem to like imagining the Holy Family as outcasts, relegated to some faraway place inhabited only by the “friendly beasts.” But there simply were no such places in first-century Judea. Animals often shared the same structure as people. Not that babies were ordinarily placed in mangers, or that there is nothing unusual about the fact that seemingly no one in the household was willing to make room for a woman heavy with child. But the manger is a sign not just of lowliness somehow separated from human society, but rather a kind of lowliness within the ordinary crowded hustle of human life.
Still, Luke’s emphasis that this is a sign bears repeating, because it was not, before Luke’s account, a sign of very much emphasis among most Christians. We do not, after all, know what those first generations knew about the Lord’s nativity. There were several reliable witnesses, first of all Our Lady, who possibly shared such details with the apostles in due time. But the Nativity enters not at all in, for example, the teaching of St. Paul, which occupies most of the New Testament. In the epistle readings for Christmas, we heard about how Christ has “appeared,” as the promised fulfillment of God’s promises. It does not seem significant that the Lord first appeared in a manger.
Yet Luke finds this important. Maybe we could pin this to Luke as, by tradition, the first painter and iconographer of Our Lord and his mother—the Evangelist, in other words, with a real sense of visual impact. This is no small thing to point out, as the ancient iconographic tradition of the Nativity almost always includes representation of an ox and an ass, emphasizing not so much a “stable” in the modern picture as the manger itself and the animals it normally served.
That visual tradition, I suspect, recalls a biblical memory that Luke would also have known, a verse from the opening lines of Isaiah, where God begins to indict his people for their failure in living up to the covenant:
The ox knows its owner,
and the donkey its master’s crib;
but Israel does not know,
my people do not understand (1:3).
The word “crib” there is sometimes translated “manger.” Either way it is the same thing we see in Luke 2. Israel, unlike the ox and even the famously stubborn donkey, cannot even recognize his master’s manger. The Lord tries to feed him, but he turns away.
Back to the Nativity, we begin to see, not very long into the story, how Israel fails to see his master. First there is the apparent scandal of the Lord’s own distant relations in Bethlehem who cannot find anywhere better for him to stay. “He came unto his own, and his own received him not” (John 1:11). Much later, when Jesus begins to tell people how he is their food and drink, how his flesh and blood will be their salvation, they walk away, scandalized. How could this man give us his flesh and blood to drink? How could this man be our manger?
In the Nativity story itself, the whole thing is painted with sign after sign, layer upon layer. God the Son lies in a feeding trough—a feeding trough that God’s people refuse to see. He is born in Bethlehem, which means “house of bread.” And the shepherds, who do acknowledge him, suggest that the mediation of Moses between God and man has now transformed into a more lavish personal investment, where God’s favor is available even in the face of a child.
This child welcomes our love regardless of whether we bring him the perfect gift. We might see the manger as a reason to scold Joseph’s cousins, all these centuries later, for their failure to see the obvious. But failing to see the obvious is rather like what humanity has been doing since Adam and Eve, since Israel’s chronic failure to keep faith, like what you and I do time after time with our favorite, habitual sins, our routine shrinking away from baptismal grace. So in God’s providence, Joseph’s uncaring family become for us another sign. God incarnate certainly deserved more, but he didn’t need more. He was, after all, enthroned on the lap of the most beautiful creature under heaven, the crown of all God’s works, the future queen of heaven, the unburnt bush, the mystical rose. Just as at the Annunciation, her welcome was enough. We made no room for him, but she made for him a “meet dwelling place.” All we have to do is, like Moses, like the shepherds, turn aside to see.
Could it be any easier? There is a necessary time to confront the teaching of Jesus in his adult ministry, a necessary time to confront the doctrinal implications of his passion and resurrection, a time to weigh the consequences of our relationship with him and the Church he founded. But before we do any of that, we have to let him in. We have to make room. He is very small, but there is no avoiding this step. Sometimes we can treat Christianity as an elaborate exercise in building the perfect nursery, rearranging the furniture, finding the perfect décor, laying out linens, toys, books. But none of that has any point unless you actually take the baby home.
This Christmas, bring the Lord Jesus home. Let him in your heart. He stands at the door and knocks.