Y’all….  Christmas is upon us!  In a little under a week the big day arrives!  Presents will be opened, special meals will be eaten, and holiday joy will abound…..Or that’s the picture that many folks paint…or wish they had….or work toward.  Often the “reason for the season” gets lost in all the holiday hoopla.  Now, granted, in the festive decorations for Christmas, there is quite often found a creche or nativity scene.  The one we’re using this year is white unglazed porcelain, and we got it our first year together for next to nothing at Fruth Pharmacy.  Interestingly enough, I found the same, now “vintage” set online for certainly WAY more than “next to nothing.”  Who knew?  I sure didn’t!  But one thing I do know, that first Christmas was FAR removed from the pretty white unglazed porcelain one that we have.

By this time way back when, when Mary, Joseph, and the donkey were making their 90 mile or so trek to Bethlehem.  For us, 90 miles is nothing.  Back then?  Not so much.  They hadda walk…Mary was WAY pregnant, and the world of Mary and Joseph was a difficult and dangerous place, one whose harsh conditions were not fully chronicled in the Gospel accounts of their travails. Writers of the gospels of Matthew and Luke “are so laconic about this  because they assume the readers of the time would know what it was like,” said James F. Strange, a New Testament and biblical archeology professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Today, he added, “we have no idea how difficult it was.”

But what about after their trek was done and they actually got to Bethlehem?  Was there really “no room in the inn”, or were things, perhaps, a tad different?  Since Joseph had to go to his “hometown” so to speak, they were probably expecting to stay with family.  Luke never mentions an inn. He says that there was “no guest room.” We only assume he means the inn is full, but that’s not what Luke wrote. In the Greek he uses the word kataluma, which refers to a room attached to a family home for honored guests or travelers. Luke uses the same Greek word in chapter 22 when Jesus asks for an “upper room” to celebrate the Passover.

There is a word for an inn: pandocheion. Luke uses that word in the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10. If Luke had meant there was no room in the inn, he would have used that word. He’s saying that when Joseph and Mary arrived, none of the family had an open guest room in their house. Maybe no one in Joseph’s family even had a guest room. Maybe they were all lodging other travelers, or family elders (who would have had more claim to a guest room than a young couple). 

The typical small town family home in Judea didn’t have barns, but the house had a bottom floor room for the animals, with a short set of steps leading up to the main room where the family lived. This way animals could be led into the house at night, where they were safe, and their body heat helped to  keep the house warm. Feeding troughs, or mangers, were stone basins either standing next to or built into a connecting wall, where food scraps could be swept into them. If Mary and Joseph were staying with family, but the family had no space in the guest room for them, the next most logical place would be the area where the animals were kept. Warm, close, safe, and kinda, maybe, sorta convenient.

Ha!  When we were kids and left the door open or did something other than what we should have known not to do, momma was wont to say, “You weren’t born in a barn!”  Can you imagine Mary, a tad exasperated with young Jesus, saying…..”You weren’t born in a….oh, never mind.  Just close the door.”

But anyway, whilst they were there in Bethlehem, the time came for “Mary to be delivered.”  The verbiage indicates that sometime after they arrived Mary went into labor. Luke doesn’t give a timeframe, but neither does he imply it was an emergency. They probably had time to get settled.  And, there’s no reason to believe Joseph helped deliver the baby. Chances are slim that Joseph was even present during the birth; no self-respecting Jewish family would allow any man to be around, or let a young woman have her first child without the aid of other women. It would have made Joseph “unclean”, and he would have been ushered out, and then ushered back in to name the baby after both Mary and Jesus were cleaned up.  Birth is kinda messy, ya know.

So whilst we make our final preparations for Christmas, let’s do our best to remember that Mary and Joseph and Jesus were real, live, human beings with real, live, often dangerous, inconvenient, and troublesome problems.  They didn’t have it easy.  What truly matters to us, our should matter to us, is how they overcame those problems.  How they submitted those problems, and their lives, to living as God expected them to.  They are, and will remain, examples for all of us to follow.  Amen and a Blessed Christmas to you all.

Image credit: Born In A Barn | School Nativity | Out of the Ark Music