Psalm 96, Isaiah 9:2-7, Titus 2:11-14, Luke 2:1 - 20
Away in a manger
The gospel lesson for the Feast of the Nativity shows us a scene that has become immortalized in Christian culture over the past 2,000 years. the nativity scene. Jesus is there in a manger, Mary and Joseph, the shepherds. And, though the three Kings did not arrive for several weeks – perhaps even several months – later, the traditional nativity scene usually includes them as well, bearing their gifts.
I think that most of us have these nativity scenes in our homes during this season. I know there have been a success of them in our house each Christmas since Barbara and I were married. The popularity of these home displays is usually traced back to St. Francis of Assisi in the 13th Century. During a Christmas celebration he presided over one year, he created a kind of living portrait of what we see in the gospels, and later, he taught lay people to fashion small, crude versions of what he had produced with living persons, and to display them in their homes during the Christmas season.
After the Reformation, when Protestant sentiment in many quarters turned decidedly iconoclastic, the practice of displaying nativity scenes was championed and promoted by Roman Catholic bishops as a kind of “in your face” act of piety intended to refute the Puritan currents that were running through some parts of Protestantism. Those currents reached their peak with the English Puritans who not only banished nativity scenes, they banned Christmas itself along with every feature of it, such as feasting, Christmas trees, or even a holiday from work. There are many things for which the Puritans may be admired, but their iconoclasm and Bah-Humbug ideas about Christmas are not one of them. It is a sign of spiritual balance and health that Protestants generally have in our day recovered many of the classical Western practices of observing the anniversary of our Lord’s birth.
It is usually thought that the earliest Nativity scene – in the sense of a artistic representation of it – is found during the Fourth Century in a Christian tomb decorated with a mural of the Baby Jesus lying in a manger. Prior to Constantine’s legalization of Christianity, Christians were not given so much to creating murals or statues, or any other pictorial representation of Jesus or Bible scenes, because these would invariably lead anti-Christian Roman authorities to persecute those who created such things.
But, the Roman hostility toward Christianity – and any artistic representation of it – was confined to the Roman jurisdiction. Beyond that, we may suppose, the hostility toward Christian might easily have permitted even earlier representations of pivotal scenes from the Christian faith, and among these the Nativity is surely one we would expect to appear where it was possible for Christians to create such pictures.
Today, the earliest known example of a nativity scene is now dated from the year 86 A.D. and it appears on a stone tablet – one of ten which were carved to decorate the tomb of an ancient aristocrat which was excavated in the year 1995 at a place called Jiunudun, or "Terrace of Nine Women," in suburban Xuzhou, China. Many similar stone tablets have been excavated from that area as far back as 1954. From the beginning of the discovery of these tombs, art historians within China believed that the stone carvings portray scenes from the lives of the occupants of the tombs.
But, the significance of many of these tomb carvings changed dramatically three years ago, when they were viewed for the first time by Dr. Wang Witan, a 78-year-old Chinese scholar of early Christian history in China. He was particular struck by ten stone tablets that decorated a single tomb.
According to a story appearing in the December 22 edition of the China Daily, various decorative elements on these ancient tablets display the artistic style of early Christian artifacts found in Iraq and Middle East area while also bearing the characteristics of decoration during China’s Eastern Han dynasty which dates from the year 20 A.D. until 225 A.D. (http://www2.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-12/22/content_505587.htm).
"Some have decorative designs of the Arabic number 8, formed by two rare animals crossing their necks. They were almost the same as designs on Uruk oval seals found in the Euphrates River and Tigris River valleys in the Middle East," he said.
But Dr. Wang’s greatest surprise came when he surveyed the ten stones in the order they appear on the tomb. Let me read you from the China Daily report:
“ ‘The Bible stories were told on the stones in a kind of time sequence,’ [Dr. Wang] said.
“ ‘One of the reliefs showed the sun, the moon, living creatures in the seas, birds of heaven, wild animals and reptiles - images that Wang linked to the Creation story in Genesis. Another one depicted a woman taking fruit from ’the tree of knowledge of good and evil’ and a snake biting her right sleeve,’ Wang said. ‘It also included the angel sent by God to guard the tree. That’s similar to the ’Eve Tricked by the Serpent’ story in the Bible.’
The professor thought at first it was Judaism in which the owner of the tomb possibly believed, but what he saw in two of the stones changed everything.
" ‘There were four fishermen in the picture,’ Wang said of an image in the eighth stone. ‘It reminded me of the story in the New Testament about Peter, Andrew, James and John, (four of Jesus’ disciples) who were all fishermen.’
“And in the sixth stone, a woman and man are sitting around what looks like a manger, with three men approaching from the left side, holding gifts, and other men queued up, kneeling, on the right. In that scene, Wang saw the first Christmas. … There was Christmas… [said Wang] There was Genesis. There was Paradise Lost. They were on display, one by one, on 10 stone bas-reliefs excavated from an aristocrat’s tomb in the Han Dynasty." Later investigations set the date of the aristocrats death at the third year of the reign of Yuanhe” of the Eastern Hahn Dynasty, or in current calendar, in the year 86 A.D., a full 550 years earlier than historians had previously supposed for the entrance of the Christian faith into China.
Now, here we are, in Waxahachie Texas, celebrating the feast of the Nativity, or in popular parlance, the Birthday of our Lord Jesus Christ. And, for all the ways in which modern American marketing has elevated the jolly old man in a red suit as the premier symbol of this season of the year, the nativity scene still remains the most fundamental picture of what this season of the year calls back into remembrance. Why is it that the nativity scene has persisted so stubbornly in the mind of Christians everywhere? I suggest to you that it is for two reasons:
First of all, it really happened.
It not only happened, what happened was rightly perceived to have been a hinge on which the entirety of human history has turned. The gospel of Jesus Christ – from its beginning with the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, to his preaching of the kingdom of God, to his crucifixion, and his resurrection – the sheer, undiluted reality of every bit of it is what made the Apostles so fearless and irrepressible in their proclamation of the good news. This is what made the earliest Christians so fearless in the face of persecution by the Romans, by the Jews, and by the pagans of their day.
There is no more ‘in your face’ kind of thing that God has ever done than what he did by taking human nature to himself, so that in Jesus Christ we have full humanity and undiminished deity united in one person without confusion forever, as the Chalcedonian fathers put it. And in their proclamation of this good news, Christians have naturally and bluntly set forth the beginning of this good news in the birth of Jesus in a manger in Bethlehem. Every god the world has ever known has had his or her prophets and prophetesses, who go to the people who are supposed to serve and worship that god or goddess, and to deliver the word of that God to his people.
In this respect, the God of the Bible is no different from every other god that ever was or ever will be. That is, you might say, what gods do. But, the Bible’s God did something that no other god has ever done or ever will do, and that is because the Bible’s God is different from every God who ever was or ever will be. The Bible’s God united himself with his creation by taking human nature up into the very life of the godhead. In our day, the scandal of the gospel is an anemic kind of scandal, and it turns on the Christian proclamation that a man is God. How unfair, the modern feminists cry out. How non-inclusive for Jesus to be male, and not female.
But the scandal of the gospel today is a tepid thing when set up against what scandalized the world 2,000 years ago. Then, it was not that a man was God, but that was a man – that without ceasing to be God in all his glory, power, and majesty, God took up human life at the place where all humans begin their lives – in the wombs of their mothers. It was the proclamation of the incarnation that scandalized Jews and pagans alike.
And, even today, underneath all the politically correct despising of the Christian gospel, behind all the official hostility toward nativity scenes in the public square, we can still find the lingering of a modern horror. For Christmas is, indeed, a horror story for the unbeliever, for those are happy to hail any god from a distance, but who are terrified of a God who is actually human.
Remember this the next time you read about law suits by the ACLU against nativity scenes, or when you hear of some city council piously declaring that it does not wish to establish religion by allowing a nativity scene on public property. There is no hue and cry about these things when it is a Menorah on display, or Santa Claus, or a Christmas tree. Or, for that matter, when it is the symbols of other religions which get public acknowledgement.
But, the way that nativity scenes are singled out for special prohibition is a clue to what is really at work here. It is not the symbolic nature of the nativity scene – rather it is what the nativity scene symbolizes. The nativity scene insists on the two things that make the Christian faith utterly unique: its loud insistence that God not a god of this or that person’s heart; rather, He is the God of History, not merely in the sense that he rules all history, but in the sense that he entered history as one of its active participants.
And, not only does a nativity scene insist that something really happened, it insists that the THING that DID happen is SOMETHING that confronts each and every human being with the wildest kind of hope OR the wildest kind of terror. For those who receive the good news, it is news SO GOOD that it almost too good to be true. For those who reject the good news, the news that believers find almost too good to be true is enough to make the unbeliever cry out for the mountains to fall upon him to hide him from a God who has come that close.
Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, a man named Francis Rocca wrote a commentary on nativity scenes. In this commentary, he describes what he calls one of the most remarkable nativity scenes on view this year in the 16th-century basilica of San Giacomo in Augusta. He describes it with these words (http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110007719):
“Over 20 feet long and eight feet tall at its peak, it is work of the Scuottos, a family of Neapolitan artisans, and at first glance seems a faithful representation of their city’s great crèche-making tradition, down to the convention of ruined ancient columns framing the group around the manger.
“Soon, however, the observer is struck by incongruous details. Two thugs under an archway threaten each other with knives. A well-dressed man lies on the ground, his grimace and contorted hands suggesting that he has been beaten. Lepers with disintegrating faces like characters in a horror movie peer out from their caves. A row of black men and women, their beautiful physiques totally unclothed, stand in chains under the guard of what appears to be a Roman soldier. Through the half-shuttered windows of an upper-room, we glimpse a curvaceous young woman standing naked in a bath tub.
“The Scuottos claim merely to have revealed characters and scenes that were implicit in the ambiance of traditional Neapolitan crèches, but suppressed by earlier standards of propriety. And one effect of their innovations, after the viewer gets over his shock, is to highlight the sensuality of the strictly conventional elements: the abundance of food and wine; a merry trio of musicians on a rooftop, among them a dancing woman with castanets; the finely embroidered vestments that clothe the magi and even the holy family itself.”
Mr. Rocca’s commentary says all these details are incongruous. But, are they? Do we suppose that in Bethlehem on that night there were no thugs crouching somewhere in the neighborhood with knives drawn? Luke tells us that there were so many people in Bethlehem that all the inns were packed full. Do we suppose there were no prostitutes plying their trades in that environment? That there were no slaves being herded about by Roman soldiers? When Mary laid her infant son onto a mat of straw, do we suppose the world had no lepers? No mugging victims in the vicinity? Or, for that matter, no places where there was an abundance of food and wine, merry groups of musicians on rooftops somewhere nearby, or dancing women with castanets. No doubt, the Magi were well dressed, but so were any number of wealthy Jews or Romans.
So, in this Neapolitan nativity scene, there are, after all, NO incongruous elements. The world which those artisans portrayed is the same one we find around us today, and except for some differences in technological niceties, it is the world into which Jesus a was born is very much like the one we inhabit right now.
But, the point we celebrate this time of year is this: When Jesus was born, God became man, and he remains man at this very hour, seated at the right hand of God. The human history which contains his birth, also contains his death, and ALSO contains his resurrection from the dead. And this same human history, the one we inhabit tonight, will one day see Jesus’ return to the earth from heaven, when he shall, as the Creed puts it, judge both the quick and the dead and set up his kingdom on earth, a kingdom which will have no end.
When you return to your homes in the early hours of this Christmas Day, if you have a nativity scene displayed there, give it another look. It is a picture, of course; but, it points to a reality, something as real and abiding and true as your own birth. It is, for you, a source of unshakable hope; for just as you could not possibly undo your own birth, no one can undo the birth of Jesus Christ, and all that flows from it down to this very minute. When he was born, for us it was the best possible news of all. God was finally with us, among us, and he will remain so forever.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
