Look at the Baby in the Feedbox

It’s Christmas time, and what attention can be pried away from the presents and the parties is focused on a feedbox in the stables of a second-rate hotel in a small farming town in Israel. No, seriously. Did you ever stop to think how the Christmas story told in the Gospels would sound if it were fleshed out a bit? If a little more detailed descriptive effort had been made?

First of all, Mary and Joseph were not rich. They were average working-class folks. Joseph was a carpenter. Mary was a stay-home mother — she may have had a small cottage industry, like the American pioneer women who sold their butter and eggs, but primarily she was a full-time homemaker. So they weren’t asking for lodging at the Bethlehem Ritz-Carlton. Not that Bethlehem would have had a Ritz anyway. Bethlehem was a small town about six miles from Jerusalem, populated primarily by shepherds and farmers.

And then there’s the trip. It’s eighty miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem, and the journey would most likely have been even longer, as they would have needed to avoid Samaria. Back then, well-off people traveled by horse or camel, in caravans to protect them from brigands on the roads. Roads would have been fairly good, as the Romans were all about roads and did a pretty good job of paving all over Europe and the Near East. Well-to-do women would have traveled in a sort of palanquin affair, both to protect them from the dust of the roads and to provide them some privacy. In the unlikely event that a fairly well-off pregnant woman left her home so near to her due date, she would definitely have traveled in something more private and more comfortable than on donkey-back. But Mary rode a donkey.

 So here’s this young couple — No, I do not believe that Joseph was “an old, old man.” I think he was, at most, around 30. Mary was most likely between 15 and 20, as girls tended to marry fairly young in those days. — Anyway, here’s this young couple arriving late in the evening in this small town, hoping to find lodging. Mary’s already pretty uncomfortable because she’s nine months pregnant and she’s been traveling for about a week on the back of a donkey. She’s probably already feeling some labour pains. But all the inns in town tell Joseph he’s out of luck; there’s no vacancy. Finally, one innkeeper offers a place in his stable. Desperate to get Mary to a place where she can rest — and bear her child — they agree.

Mary had her baby in a stable. Have you ever been in a stable? They don’t smell very nice. Cows, donkeys, goats, sheep, horses, and camels all in an enclosed structure — and with the inn full, we can assume that the stable was fairly packed as well — the funk must have been overwhelming. Animal smells magnified by sheer body heat plus animal dung plus animal smells.

And there are no beds in a stable. Just stalls. Squarish boxes in varying sizes, but all fairly small, with a long hallway running up the middle. Assume that they were able to find some clean straw upon which to pile cloaks and blankets to make a place for Mary to lie down. Straw is prickly and lumpy and smelly and dusty. Not a pleasant place to sleep under the best of circumstances. And Mary’s in labour.

 While the Bible doesn’t say so, we can assume that some of the local women gathered round Mary to help her. Women are like that. We rally round our sisters when there’s a crisis. And the word would go out quickly from the innkeeper’s wife and daughters to other local women: there’s a poor wee girl here just bursting with child, and she’s going to need help. (I can imagine some grumbling about government bureaucrats and their ridiculous edicts that create impossible situations for ordinary folks.) But the midwife and the other women would probably all have been strangers. Joseph would have been sent out of the way somewhere — probably to have a pint in the inn’s public room — because childbirth was a matter for women to handle in those days. Men were not welcome.

So consider Mary. She’s in a smelly old stable in a strange town, surrounded by strange women, masses of livestock, and piles of hay, having her first child. And when the baby is born and Mary’s lying back on her pile of hay, completely exhausted (remember, she went into labour at the end of a week-long, eighty-plus mile journey on donkey-back), the only safe place for the baby is … a feedbox. (“Manger” sounds so much more romantic, doesn’t it? But it’s still a feedbox. Full of dried grass.)

Any of the crèches you’ve seen lately mirror that picture for you? I get impatient with nativity scenes. They are too clean. Too “perfect.” I suppose it’s an attempt to show the holiness and beauty of the scene. To be respectful of the Lord whose coming they celebrate.

But the fact is that what you’ve got is a couple who’s been on the road for a week and is now sleeping in a stable after the wife has given birth. It’s smelly, it’s dirty, it’s indubitably unsanitary, and the only thing holy about it is that baby in the feedbox.

I’ve given birth. Twice. Without drugs. At home. And I guarantee you that Mary was not in spotless blue and white, kneeling on the hard stable floor next to the manger, when those angels and shepherds appeared. I guarantee it. She probably had dark circles under her eyes, tangled and disheveled hair, and sweat-soaked robes. She probably lay there in the straw on whatever blankets they could muster, and slept and nursed her baby and slept some more. She probably didn’t mind the angels too much, but wished the shepherds would let her get some rest.

Did she know her son was special? Without doubt. God, through the angel, had told her so. But I am quite certain that in the days following his birth, she was less concerned with the eternal and spiritual ramifications than she was with caring for her needy newborn and finding a more appropriate and comfortable place to stay until the end of the census.

I wish I could feel that it would be respectful to make a nativity scene that showed a more realistic scene. I can’t relate to the beautiful, perfectly turned out Marys that show up in the manger scenes. But I can relate to an exhausted Mary, dirty and disheveled, making the best of a bad situation for the sake of her newborn son and her new husband.

But, of course, the story’s not about Mary, is it? It’s about the baby in the feedbox. Because that Baby was Someone special. God incarnate, come to tread on the soil of His creation, to rectify the wrongs done by the creatures He’d created, and restore them to fellowship with Him. More about that tomorrow.

Tags: Christianity, Christmas, creche, holidays, Jesus, nativity, Religion, True Stories