Is the manger a little crowded?

About this time every year, I feel like the manger gets crowded. I am talking about the little borrowed space where it is said that Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, not of Pennsylvania. We have sets called “nativity” made from all kinds of materials, from rustic to elegant. We get out the Mary, Joseph and baby figures and put them in a pleasing arrangement. Suddenly, instead of just hay, animals and maybe a crooked star, in pour cards, concerts, parties, ugly sweaters and socks with glitter, large blowups waving in the breeze and Uncle Fred who has been hitting the eggnog. It gets harder and harder to see Mary, Joseph and the baby.

Churches want us to use these weeks to reflect on the coming of Jesus into the world. The world is noisy and the manger is crowded and it is hard to reflect. That’s why I couldn’t resist this graphic from Dr. Peter Enns’ course, “A Manger Misunderstanding,” which can be found on the website The Bible for Normal People. The website’s mission is “to bring the best in biblical scholarship to everyday people.” A plus for me is that one of its leaders, Dr. Enns, is the current professor of biblical studies at Eastern University, where I got my undergrad degree. The course explores the verses in the gospel of Luke’s second chapter concerning Jesus’ birth. Other than a few verses in Mark and Matthew, this is all we have in terms of birth stories.

The aim of the course is to help sort out what the text says versus what has become culturally normative. This means exploring the biblical story in context and comparing historical accuracy with storytelling. We might not like some over-educated Bible scholar messing with our feelings about the Christmas story. However, we might gain an insight that can make these well-known but often misunderstood verses be seen in a new way.

I recently listened to a lecture by a young woman, Dr. Heather Macumber, a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and a professor in Canada. She reminds her students that the Bible is not one book but a library of books spanning thousands of years of history. The Jesus story comes in at the end and covers only about 100 years. The birth stories were circulated by oral tradition and written down, starting about 50 years after Jesus of Nazareth lived. To understand what they mean, they really need to be studied in a wider perspective over a longer timeline.

In 2012, I had an experience that influenced how I see the manger and its inhabitants. I got to go to Israel and Jordan with a biblical archaeologist. We visited the city of Bethlehem, which is in the West Bank area of Palestine. To get there, we had to go through a gate in a wall. The passageway was rimmed with barbed wire. One gives over your identification and belongings and walks single file through the checkpoint. Once our whole group was on the other side, we walked to Manger Square and the Church of the Nativity. Tradition says it was built over the place Jesus was born. The church was founded by Constantine in the 4th century, but it has been conquered and destroyed and rebuilt many times over.

Pictured is the “Door of Humility,” which is the entrance to the church off the square. One can see arches marking that the entrance was formerly much larger. It is said that it was reduced in size during the Ottoman Empire to prevent marauders from entering on horseback. It serves a secondary purpose of making everyone, regardless of status, bow in order to enter. The doorway is about four feet high and two feet wide. Once inside, the darkness subsides as one stands up to see the sanctuary lit by a plethora of lamps from across the centuries.

The grotto of the nativity is accessed by dark, narrow stairways on either side of the altar, which go down to underground caves and a grotto. The historic spot of the birth is marked by a 14-point silver star. The stairways were crowded and frankly, I was feeling claustrophobic down there. I left quickly. Seeing the spot on the floor in the grotto was anticlimactic.

What meant something to me was to bend low through a dark passage to enter the church and then stand up inside the beautiful space with the murmur of different peoples and languages all around. It was a symbolic birth of sorts.

Are the mangers of today crowded? Yes. Even the celebrated original manger was crowded. Maybe the manger is meant to be crowded so we have work to discern who is supposed to be there and why.