Pondering the Pesebre – A Christmas Interlude

Each year my husband leads our family in a cherished Colombian tradition from his childhood: building the pesebre. In English, this translates as the nativity scene, but somehow that word fails to capture the 7-foot wide, multilayered scene that unapologetically spills out into my living room. We begin the way he and his grandmother, Chica Lulu, always did: staggering cardboard boxes of various sizes and cloaking them in green velvety cloth to emulate a hilly terrain. With the backdrop set, next comes the real fun of assembly. Out of an old box come the very pieces that once adorned his grandmother’s pesebre back home in Bogotá: all the classic nativity pieces are there of course, along with small wooden 1960’s-era houses, log cabins, various domestic and wild animals, an assortment of figurines, several snow-brushed pine trees, and one of my personal favorites, a single random mushroom. My husband approaches this endeavor with childlike wonder and reverent intentionality. I cannot stop laughing. 

When all is said and done, we step back to behold our masterpiece, a seasonal art installation that defies all sense of scale and reason. The retro wooden village is inhabited by a collection of renaissance-era figurines somberly toting geese – some living and some apparently just slaughtered. Sheep tower over the shepherds in their tiny wooden pens; a collection of white, blue, and green swans swim in lakes fashioned from round mirrors, guarded by a mother swan that is larger than the cow that sits watch by the manger. Chickens the height of sheep peck grain in a small hillside. Mary and Joseph peer solemnly into the medieval-era stable – they cannot fit inside because a giant baby Jesus, larger than just about anything else, takes up the entire available space. My favorite, lone mushroom sits next to a log cabin with a roof that years ago my husband painted with the Colombian flag. ¹ A string of Christmas lights illuminates the entire spectacle and adds a final touch of magic. Alas, our nativity scene is complete.

Our charming yet bewildering pesebre is a uniquely Colombian Christmas tradition and a source of great pride and joy in our home. For all its absurdity, I’ve come to love it and appreciate my husband for keeping the tradition alive with such sincerity and commitment. The pesebre, with all its inaccuracies, sits loud and proud in our living room, eclipsed in prominence only by the quintessential symbol of Christmas – our decked out artificial tree. (Behold, that beloved of all pagan rituals which contemporary consumerism has hijacked.) Looking around my living room, I have to pause and wonder if our traditions are concealing truths rather than revealing them.

Let us cut through some of these common, comforting, cemented traditions with a cold blade of truth about Christmas that could benefit more households than just mine: Jesus wasn’t born on December 25; there was no bright Christmas star over the shepherd’s field that night; there was no inn and no innkeeper to turn away Mary and Joseph; there was no mad rush to find a suitable place for Mary to give birth; Jesus wasn’t born in a stable; there were not three kings; and there was no silent night. The Bible doesn’t even tell us to celebrate Christmas – it’s a man-made holiday cleverly engineered by the fourth-century Catholic church by superimposing Christian ideas on a Roman religious day, which many Puritans and other Christians understandably banned.²

Perhaps now is a good time to confess that my family calls me the Grinch. 

I digress. 

What is the real Christmas story and what place does it have in our nostalgic, multicultural holiday living room? Can the pesebre and the pagan tree be redeemed for any fruitful purpose? Can they speak any truth at all? 

Kenneth Bailey was a biblical scholar who lived in the Middle East for much of his life. His research foregrounds the ancient, local peasant culture in which the events of the Bible took place. In work after work, he seeks to rescue the truth of the scriptures from the obscuring cultural assumptions of contemporary Western life by illuminating how texts would have been understood in the times and places they were written. His study of the real Christmas story does not disappoint. ³ 

Bailey exposes the myth that resides comfortably in the Christian consciousness, which goes something like this: Joseph took Mary with him to report for a census in Bethlehem. On Christmas Eve, she goes into labor, but Joseph can’t find an adequate place for her to give birth. There being no room in the local inn, they are turned away and are forced to seek shelter in a stable among the filth of animals, where Jesus is born. Angels appear to nearby shepherds and a Christmas star appears to three wise kings. Conveniently, they all arrive to greet baby Jesus on Christmas night, gathering together in that lowly, outcast stable with no one else in all of Bethlehem in sight. This is the Christmas story, yearly reinforced by repetition ad nauseum via songs, pageants, artwork, Christmas cards, decorations, crechés, and Christmas Eve church services.

But Bailey challenges us to lay aside our cherished myth and read the Biblical text for what it actually says. The Bible never narrates a frantic Christmas Eve search for suitable lodging for labor- pained Mary. Luke 2:6 simply records, “While they were there [in Bethlehem], the time came for her to give birth.” The idea that she gave birth on the very night of their arrival to town actually comes from The Protoevangelium of James, ⁴ an apocryphal text with just as much historical accuracy as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. ⁵ Bailey offers instead a more reasonable, biblically-based explanation: they arrived well beforehand and Joseph had adequate opportunity to secure a place to stay among relatives. ⁶ Middle eastern hospitality would have demanded this, and refusing welcome would have been unthinkable. ⁷ 

This means that they did not seek a place to stay at a commercial inn, and therefore no innkeeper turned them away. The Greek word for a commercial inn is pandocheion, which we find in the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:34. But the word used in Luke 2:7 is katalyma, which is best translated as “guest room.” Peasant homes were typically a simple, 2-room structure. The front door would have opened to a designated “stable” or area where animals would come in for the evening. This opened up to a large family room where everyone slept. The second room would be reserved for guests. When Luke records that there was no room for them in the katalyma, it likely means the guest room was already occupied and Mary, having given birth inside the home with the help of other women, would have naturally laid Jesus in a manger that was a part of the main room where she was. ⁸ This is very significant insight. 

Our Christmas myth insists that Joseph, Mary, and Jesus were turned away from the inn and took refuge in a barn among animals. But the Bible, read in its cultural-historical context, tells us that they were welcomed into a common peasant home among extended relatives and were given hospitality. As Bailey points out, “[w]hen Jesus engaged in ministry as an adult, ‘The common people heard him gladly’ (Mk 12:37 KJV). That same acceptance was evident at his birth.” ⁹ 

Next, we turn to the shepherds and the wise men. Though “The First Noel” lyrically assures us that the shepherds “looked up and saw a star shining in the East beyond them far” – they didn’t. Rather, angels declared that their sign would be a baby wrapped and lying in a manger, which is important because that’s precisely what the shepherds themselves would do with their own newborn infants. This humble sign was given to them to assure them that they would be welcomed in the company of Jesus, and signals that He would live in solidarity with them. ¹⁰ 

It was the wise men, not the shepherds, who were given a star as a sign – and the star would have been shining west of them since they were already in the east (in Arabia) and needed to travel west to get to Bethlehem. ¹¹ And contrary to all that Three Kings Day might imply about Christmas, these men were not kings but most likely wealthy astrologers, and the Bible never specifies that there were three. Finally, they would have arrived much later than the shepherds did, since the shepherds were local and the wise men had to make a long journey. But for what it’s worth, these men really did come bearing costly gifts from Arabia: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. (All good myths have some truth thrown in for good measure.) 

I would be remiss if I did not challenge the notion of a “Silent Night” that all nativities suggest. Jesus was not born into a place where “all is calm, all is bright” but was born in the context of oppression, foreign occupation, uncertainty, and bloodshed. News of His birth sparked Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents in which thousands of babies and toddlers were murdered. His beginning to human life would be surpassed in horror only by the end – a bloody murder on a cruel and unforgiving cross. The entire earthly life of Christ is framed in violence and death. ¹² And yet He comes as a Savior to both the oppressor and the oppressed. ¹³ He comes declaring hope and ushers in a Kingdom of Light that only gets brighter as the darkness grows heavier. 

We also must reexamine our thinking about gifts. Sure, the wise men bring wonderful, locally sourced gifts fit for a King, and these align comfortably with our consumeristic sensibilities. The shepherds are given the gift of a welcoming sign and the wise men are given the gift of a guiding star. By virtue of His coming, Christ Emmanuel gives the extraordinary gift of His presence, an eternally and incomprehensibly good gift to all humankind. But then we come to Mary. She, too, is given a gift: the gift of divine motherhood. While the other gifts in the story bring glad tidings and cheer, the gift for Mary is imbued with danger and bears the risk of death. ¹⁴ Her pregnancy would have led to her stoning by rabbinical law had not Joseph intervened and protected her. ¹⁵ And upon Jesus’ birth and dedication, she is not given the gift of comfort but a dark warning indicative that danger is ever- present and will be accompanied by more pain: her son will be opposed and her own soul will be pierced with a sword (Luke 2:34-35). While the Christmas story is rich with divine gifts, the gifts given to Mary should challenge us to recognize that, impossible as it may seem, our greatest suffering is divine gift as much as our greatest joy. Some gifts bring unspeakable pain, which God’s sovereignty alone can redeem for His glory and our good. 

The real story of Christmas underscores the scope, tenacity, and beauty of the Gospel that the common myth obscures. From His very birth, Jesus was welcomed by the poor even as He welcomed them. The site of God-made-flesh revealed to humanity was no other place than the home of peasants who had welcomed in travelers. The first people to receive an invitation into His divine presence were the shepherds, uneducated outcasts by the day’s social standards who would otherwise have been overlooked.[17] Christ chose to enter into their world, to make His home among them. Christmas dignifies the peasants as hosts, honors the shepherds as guests, and creates space for the wealthy to fit in among them. The wise men of Arabia are Gentiles offering riches, and they bow to worship Christ just as the local Jewish peasants who can offer Jesus nothing but welcome. Together, rich and poor, Jew and Gentile, they all herald Christ as the Ultimate Guest and Ultimate Host, who sees to it that all can be reconciled unto Him and find a place in His Kingdom.

We can read the Christmas story as a manifesto of radical Christian hospitality with powerful bearing on today’s world. It has the audacity to declare that everyone can be dignified as host and honored as guest, rendering oppressed and oppressor categories secondary if not meaningless. It insists that life is the circulation of divine gift, including gifts that bear the risk of suffering and death, a truth that frees us from the grips of victim culture and moves us to profound gratitude. It narrates a table being set before us in the presence of enemies, offering a place of welcome, nourishment, and shalom despite difference, chaos, and violence. The real story is so much richer than the caricature we herald in our overplayed seasonal songs. 

So why do we continue with our pagan tree and our pesebre? Why do we ritually preserve such cultural oddities in a home committed to proclaiming biblical truth? At least for me, they form an unconventional testament to God’s sovereignty and grace. As Christians, we often fail to articulate the Gospel, understand Truth, present Jesus accurately to the watching world, and live as one Body proclaiming one Word. We smuggle heresies into our theologies, water down our convictions, and yield to the seductive powers of comfort. Taken together, we are embarrassing and ridiculous. And yet, by the sovereignty and grace of God, He still reaches us and uses us to do good works. He still reconciles us to Himself and gives us a place at His table. He calls us His bride. He forgives us. It is a wonder to behold. The pesebre and the pagan tree remind me that despite who we are and what we do to muck things up, He is still Emmanuel, God with us. 

Merry Christmas.