Midnight Mass – 2010
William Allberry
24th December 2010

And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.
In thousands of schools and nurseries all over the country over the past couple of weeks the traditional nativity play has been solemnly enacted.  Preparations have taken up a huge part of curriculum time for the second part of the term; teachers have been patiently writing and re-writing the scripts, and rehearsing the children in their parts; dads and school caretakers have been hammering and sawing away to create stables and mangers; mothers have been frantically stitching tea towels and curtain material into shepherds’ gowns and kings’ robes, and using amazing ingenuity to create the angels’ wings and haloes; unless of course they have bought ready-made ones from the supermarkets!  From the bare bones of the story in the gospels an unalterable tradition has grown involving donkeys, the stable scene, and the attendant animals (whose presence at least provides the opportunity to provide parts for every child in the class); and of course there are the traditional words of the story without which the play wouldn’t be complete: Mary’s insistent cry that her baby is about to appear, and the stern ‘No room at the inn’ from the publican disturbed from his sleep.
We’ve all been part of the phenomenon – as children taking part ourselves, and some of us as parents, and grandparents, looking on.  It’s all part of the background to our Christmas celebrations, just as the carols are that sing of the little donkey on the dusty road, the lowing cattle in the lowly cattle shed, the ox and ass bowing before the infant Jesus asleep on the hay.  Or was it straw – I can never remember!  The whole story tells of the fragility of the babe in the face of a world at first indifferent, and then captivated.
All essential parts of the story.  And yet, most of these essential ingredients are completely fictitious.  Where is the donkey in the biblical account?  Why do we accept the complete indifference of a busy, admittedly over-booked Bethlehem to Joseph, who was after all of the royal line?  Was Mary actually in labour as they approached the dark streets of Bethlehem in its deep and dreamless sleep?  Where does the innkeeper come into the bible accounts?  And although many of us have bought our olive wood cribs in their stables, made by Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem, where does it say he was born in a stable?
Actually, Jesus wasn’t born in a stable.  In fact there were no stables in Palestine in those days.  I’ve just been reading a fascinating book, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, which explores and learns from the experience of Christians in the Middle East whose culture and indeed life style is far closer to that of Jesus and his contemporaries than we are.  We in the West just ignore the insights of over 10 million Arabic-speaking Christians – who by the way address God as Allah just like their Muslim neighbours – insights which, if we paid attention to them, might revolutionise the way we understand the Bible accounts of not only the birth of Jesus but the way he interacted with his friends, his family, with the women and men he met, and with the Roman authorities.  These Christians are people who live, breathe, think and participate in Middle Eastern culture; they are rooted still in the traditional ways of the Middle East, and are far close to the Semitic world of Jesus than the Greek and Latin cultures of the West, and their voices, past and present, need to be heard in the way we read the bible.
Our traditional understanding of the events surrounding the birth of Jesus – our embroidery if you like on the bare facts set out in the gospels – tends to take us away from the reality of those events into a world that contains more sentimentality than actuality.
For example: Joseph, as we all know, was returning to the village of his origin.  In the Middle East, today as then, memories are long, and the extended family, with its connection to the village of origin, is highly important.  In such a world a man like Joseph could have turned up in Bethlehem, and as soon as he announced himself as Joseph, son of Heli, son of Matthat, the son of Levi ... he’d be immediately welcomed into any number of homes  And he wasn’t just anybody, he was of the royal line of King David.  That was important to people in Bethlehem, who called their town the city of David.  This was a man who could trace his ancestry back to David – he’d be welcome anywhere in the town.  So how was it that he had such difficulty finding somewhere for him and his pregnant wife to stay?
Another example.  In every culture a woman giving birth is given special attention.  Simple rural communities the world over always assist any woman in childbirth regardless of the circumstances.  Can we imagine Bethlehem to be different?  Was there no sense of honour there?  Surely the community would have sensed their responsibility to help Joseph find adequate shelter for Mary?  And actually it wasn’t as if she was in labour as they travelled  St Luke says that Joseph came up to Bethlehem for the census, together with his espoused wife Mary, and while they were there, the days were accomplished (and so on).  So no ‘late-night-arrival-imminent-birth’ at all – there’s nothing in the bible account about that.
And again, Mary had relatives nearby.  A few months prior to the birth of Jesus, she had visited her cousin Elizabeth ‘in the hill country of Judea’ and was welcomed by her.  In Bethlehem they were only a couple of hours' walk from the home of Zechariah and Elizabeth.  If Joseph had really had difficulty finding shelter in Bethlehem he would naturally have turned to Zechariah and Elizabeth.
The embroidery on the story – all the details we slavishly insert into our nativity plays (not to mention the Christmas carols and Christmas cards) came in much later than the gospels – probably 200 years after Jesus’s birth – and the embroidered story somehow took hold.  But if we come back to the basics of the account of Matthew and Luke in their gospels, we might get a better understanding of what it was really like.
It wasn’t an inn at all – that was a mistranslation!  In those days, as the archaeology shows, ordinary Bethlehem families lived in a single room, where the section at one end was lower than the rest of the room – because that was where the animals were brought in at night – to keep them safe, and to keep the family warm.  There was a step down into the animals’ section; and carved out of the floor of the higher section, just next to the step, were a couple of hollowed out areas where the animals’ food was put, so that the animals could eat from them as they stood in the lower area.  One of these was the ‘manger’ that St Luke describes.  If the family was a little richer than others, they might have a separate chamber at the other end of the communal room, or sometimes on the roof, which was used for guests.  This ‘guest room’ was what became in later translation the ‘inn’.  (It’s the same word that was used for the ‘upper room’ of the Passover celebration.)  There was no space for them in the guest room – because it was census time, and the place was heaving with visitors.
Far from being shunned by the townspeople, then, and only grudgingly allowed to bed down in the animal quarters, Joseph and Mary were taken into the bosom of a Bethlehem family, and made at home in their shared quarters.  The animal feed was cleared out of one of the mangers, and perhaps some hay (or straw) laid down as a soft bed for the baby.
It was the shepherds – close to the bottom of the social scale in their society – who were the first to hear the news of the birth of the Saviour, the Messiah.  Was he born in one of the grand houses of the town?  No: the angels told them that the baby was wrapped in swaddling clothes (which was just what the shepherd folk did with their babies) and that this baby was lying in a manger: that is, they’d find the Christ child in an ordinary peasant home such as theirs; not in the Governor’s mansion or a wealthy merchant’s guest room, but in a simple two-roomed home just like theirs.  And when they came to visit the baby, they saw that everything was in order, just as it should be and returned, glorifying God for all the things they had heard and seen.

It’s not such a very different nativity story from the one I learned at my primary school.  But for me it makes all the difference.  It makes it more real and more believable that God took human flesh in the warmth and friendship of a family home, among friends and relatives rather than in a cold and draughty stable with an open door.  Something was happening here that was momentous, and unparalleled in all history – at last a bridge between earth and heaven, between humanity and divinity – and it was happening in a commonplace, everyday way such as happens every day in every town and city in the world when a baby is born.  Each of us has been a baby, and God identifies with each of us.  It’s this fact that the nativity plays, and the carols and the Christmas cards are all reminding us of: that God became a human baby and identifies with each of us.
I wonder if Jesus ever went back to Bethlehem?  We don’t know.  We don’t know anything, really, about the first 30 years of his life until he re-appears on the banks of the River Jordan where his cousin John is baptising.  ‘The Kingdom of God is at hand’, he said.  ‘Turn, and believe in the good news!’
The good news in a confused and needy world is simple and direct.  Emmanuel.  God is with us.  God is here for us.  And as St Paul says, ‘If God is for us, who can stand against us?’  Amen.

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