It is increasingly fashionable, and has always been quite easy to debunk a number of Christmas season staples that are either less than certain or certainly not true. We don’t know, for instance, how many wise men there were, because the Bible doesn’t tell us. Three gifts are mentioned, but not three men. We don’t even know that they arrived the night He was born. We do know that our typical image of the stable is way off. At that time the “stable” was the first floor of the home, where animals were brought at night, not a wooden structure away from the house.
These kinds of mistakes happen in part because our cultural baggage gets lost in transition. If we wanted a place to keep our animals we’d make it out of wood, and put it some distance from the people. So we assume they would do the same. Even the image of Joseph and the young Jesus as a carpenter is likely off quite a bit. And for much the same reason. Wood was relatively scarce in first century Palestine. Whenever possible homes, tools, even furniture were constructed of something far longer lasting, stone. It is likely that stone was the material Joseph worked with.
It is likely as well, for the same reasons, that the manger Jesus was placed in was not a wooden kind of basket but was instead stone, either carved into the wall of the first floor of the home, or free standing. Part of the subtext of the birth in the stable narrative is that it is consistent with the compelling notion that God humbled Himself in the birth of Jesus. And so it is, even if the “stable” is a bit more like an unfinished basement. But could there be more here?
Whether dug into the wall or standing alone, the stone mangers of that period look remarkably like the tombs of the same period. If you took a tomb, in fact, and shrunk it down to the size of a baby it would look exactly like a manger. Could it be that the original audience, when they read that the newborn child was laid in a manger would have naturally thought, “Yes, He was born to die. The end is foreshadowed in the beginning here.” And if so, should not we think the same?
Could there be yet another reason He was placed in the manger? Another message in the text? We’ve invested so much time and energy remembering He was born in a manger that we have virtually forgotten what a manger is for. A manger is the place where food was placed. The sheep know the manger is where they go to be fed. There they find the bread of life. We, His sheep, continue to do the same.
The stable story does a wonderful job of reminding us of His humility. The true story gives the same message, but also reminds us He came to die, and did so that we might live.