US Mennonite Brethren

by Tim Geddert

Take a closer look at Luke 2 and find new meaning to old traditions

Traditions become important at Christmas. We sing traditional Christmas songs. We enjoy family traditions we have inherited from our childhood or developed in our own families. And we retell the old, old Christmas story that never changes. We read the story, perhaps recite it or act it out as in my family.

 

We relive with Mary and Joseph the long, grueling trip to Bethlehem that was just a bit much for a nine-month-pregnant woman and led to a short labor and delivery on the night of their arrival in Bethlehem.

We respond with astonishment once more that the arriving king is not born in a palace, not even in a house or a hotel room, but in a barn. His first bed is a feeding trough!

We hear the angels’ message, run with the shepherds to see, ponder with Mary. In short, we relive the old story that never changes.

We try to make the traditions come alive, and we supplement them with traditions of our own. Traditions about trees and gifts and guests and Christmas dinners and lots of things that are designed to make Christmas special but often make it a dizzying cycle of busy activity and stressed nerves. Perhaps the time has come to make some changes. And I don’t mean only in the trimmings we’ve added. What if we reimagined the Christmas story itself!

I don’t mean that we should invent a new story. I mean that we should take the Bible very seriously but fill in the gaps differently than we are accustomed to doing. Have you never noticed how much of the Christmas story we actually make up with our own imaginations?

• How many wise men are there? Who knows? The Bible doesn’t tell us…so we make it three. You know, standardize it so we can create the right number of figures for the Christmas display.

• Which animals are there in the stable? Who knows? The Bible doesn’t tell us…so we make it an ox and an ass. You know, “Ox and ass before him bow, and he is in the manger now.” Oh yes, the little shepherd boy was carrying a lamb, wasn’t he?

• We use great imagination on the evil innkeeper. He’s the bad guy in the story. Whole Sunday school plays center on his opportunism (taking advantage of market conditions to quadruple his rates), his callous blindness (not recognizing the coming of the Lord of Glory), his hard-heartedness (not even finding room for an expecting couple) and his economic chauvinism. Poor carpenters just don’t cut it; you have to be a Roman census official or a respected Jewish leader to find a room in his hotel on this busy night.

And so on and so on. We use our imaginations to round out the bare details that Luke and Matthew supply. In fact, when we use our imaginations, we often imagine things that we know did not happen. The Bible says the shepherds came to a manger and the wise men came to a house. But it fits better under the tree if we just put them all together. Even though most people are convinced that the wise men came considerably later, we just put that star right up there and let it shine on the manger scene on the very first Christmas night.

And having created our images of Bethlehem, we let the story challenge us—challenge us to be as peaceful and calm as the shepherds on the hillside, as filled with worship and praise as the angels, as generous as the wise men, as contemplative as Mary and as obedient as Joseph.

It’s a beautiful story, this one we’ve filled in for ourselves. Well, beautiful except for that old innkeeper. But we need him as our scapegoat. After all, the larger than life “good guys” in the story leave us with an impossible ideal. One thing comforts us: At least we aren’t as bad as the innkeeper.

Start with the innkeeper

I want to suggest a way of reimagining what happened. I begin with the question: “How did the innkeeper get into our story?” The New Testament doesn’t mention an innkeeper.

Well, we get the idea of the innkeeper from the mention of the inn. “No room in the inn” must mean that some innkeeper didn’t make room. But the story in Luke doesn’t actually refer to an inn either—not in the original language at least. When Luke says, “There was no room in the inn,” he used a word that could mean “inn,” but almost never does. It almost always means “guestroom,” as the TNIV now translates the word.

The word used is kataluma, a word used exactly three times in the Bible. It is used once in Luke 2 and twice more to refer to the room in which Jesus had the Last Supper with his disciples. But they didn’t go to an inn. Luke clearly describes the location as a “large upper room” (Luke 22:1; cf. Mark 14:14). It is a large guestroom built, as was common for Jewish families, on the top of a normal house.

So kataluma normally means “guestroom on top of a house.” Moreover, when Luke wants to speak of an inn, he uses a different term, pandocheion. This is the term used in the parable of the good Samaritan. The injured man is taken to an inn (a pandocheion)—not a guestroom in a house. And Jesus’ parable even refers to an innkeeper, a pandocheus. It means the TNIV version correctly interprets what Luke wrote: “She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.” Baby Jesus was laid in a manger because other guests already occupied the guest room on top of the house!

No stable either!

Perhaps you are saying, “Inn, guest room—who cares? Why does it matter whether Joseph and Mary had to go to the barn because the inn was full, or because the guest room was full? It comes out the same, doesn’t it?” Well, here is where everything gets interesting. More disappears from the story than just the inn—and of course with it, the evil innkeeper. There is no stable either.

Check your Bibles. Do they mention a stable? Nope.

“But,” we protest, “there must have been a stable. There was a manger and a manger means a stable.” Not necessarily.

Evidence from elsewhere in Scripture shows that a typical first-century Palestinian manger was not to be found in a stable, i.e. a separate building made just for animals. It is found in the living room of the family’s large, one-room split-level house. The typical Palestinian peasant’s house was one large room under a flat roof. It was built with two floor levels, an upper level where the family lived, ate and slept and a lower level where the animals normally spent the night. And then, of course, there might be a guest room on the roof.

So where is the manger? In the most logical place in such a house: built into the floor of the living area, right next to the lower level where the animals are kept. Animals can stand in their lower level and eat hay from the manger built into the floor of the higher level.

A typical manger was in the living room of a house. So the stable disappears along with the innkeeper and his inn.

So then Luke 2 does not say, “They had to go to a barn because the innkeeper was too hard-hearted to make a room available for the holy couple.” Rather it says, “They were taken right into the living room, because the guest room was already full.”

The story is not about a full hotel, an evil innkeeper and the cold, dark barn. It is about a typical Palestinian house—one that makes room for the holy couple, even though the guest room is already occupied by other friends or relatives crowding into Bethlehem for the census.

Gains and losses

If this way of reading the text is correct, what do we gain, and what do we lose?

Well, this way of reading the story actually saves us a lot of trouble. It makes more sense of what we read in the Bible.

We don’t have to imagine that Jesus was born on the very night that Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem. The way Luke tells the story, it sounds rather as though Mary spent the last weeks or months of her pregnancy there. We don’t have to wonder how Mary, who has relatives in the hill-country of Judea, and Joseph, who is a native son of the village, can’t find a single family (let alone one of their many relatives) who will take them in for the night, or for a week, or perhaps for the last months of Mary’s pregnancy. We’ve had to imagine Mary and Joseph arriving the night of Jesus’ birth in order to explain why they couldn’t find a decent place to sleep.

Best of all, we don’t have to invent a new house that the family moves to after Jesus’ birth, but before the wise men arrive. After all, if the shepherds came to a manger and the wise men to a house, we imagine Mary, Joseph and Jesus must have moved in the meantime. But with this new reading, they’re in the same house all the time!

And this means the wise men and the shepherds might actually have gathered together to worship Jesus—rich and poor, Jew and Gentile worshiping the one born to be King. And we can even imagine that the star leading the wise men to the place Jesus lay shone over the house not months later, but on that first Christmas night.

And so, instead of reimaging the story in such a way that we have to throw away all our manger scenes, we actually find a story that makes appropriate even those parts that we thought didn’t quite represent what actually happened. We lose nothing. There is still a manger and there are animals, and we can argue there was even a stable, though it was part of the house.

Oh yes, we lose the evil innkeeper—our scapegoat. But then, maybe we can find better motivations for enjoying a meaningful Christmas than staying a couple steps ahead of that old scrooge. Yes, we lose the innkeeper. But we gain a wonderful picture of what it really means for Jesus to come down from heaven to join humanity—a picture of God coming down to identify with common folks like you and me, coming down right where we are, being born in a normal home like all the other babies in Bethlehem. There were probably any number of babies enjoying the soft hay of mangers in the living rooms of other crowded homes in Bethlehem that year.

The story never changes

So what does all this say about our Christmas celebrating? I referred to the reliving of the old Christmas story that never changes. Well, its essence never changes, but a little creative imagination might change some of the ways we think about it.

This reading of Luke 2 suggests a whole new internal motivation and spiritual resource for celebrating a meaningful Christmas. It challenges us to open our own living rooms for Jesus, making room for him not in the barn, not in the inn, but in our living rooms, right where the family lives, where the pets roam, where we work and sleep and play and eat—even when our homes are packed full of guests. If a home in Bethlehem can make room for Jesus in the hustle and bustle of census time, surely we can do it in the hustle and bustle of the Christmas season.

This year I don’t want to imagine Jesus lying out in a barn while we prepare our Christmas celebrations and go through the activities of the season. And I don’t want to limit the worship part of Christmas to a few reverent trips out to that stable—you know, once or twice during church services and maybe Christmas Eve or Christmas morning before we open gifts.

Rather, I want to imagine Jesus living in our house as we celebrate. I want to imagine him joining me in the kitchen as I prepare part of our family meal. I want to imagine him present—not out there in the barn. After all, they called him Emmanuel, God with us—with us not only on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning but through all the hustle and bustle of the season.

Tim Geddert is professor of New Testament at MB Biblical Seminary, a position he assumed in 1986. He is a MBBS graduate and received his doctorate from Aberdeen University in Scotland. Geddert has experience in church planting and pastoral leadership, short-term mission experiences in several South American, European and African countries, immersion into Scottish culture and church life during doctoral studies and educational and pastoral ministry in Germany. He and his wife, Gertrud, are raising their family to be bilingual and bicultural (North American and German). Geddert has written several books and many articles on Mark's Gospel as well as on other topics. This article is adapted from a chapter in Double Take, published by Kindred Press and MB Biblical Seminary in 2007.