There was once a man, called the excellent Theophilus, who thought that it was important to know at what precise hour, of what day, of what year, our Lord was born, and on what other precise date He began His public ministry. For his sake, Luke, the beloved physician, put into his Gospel quite a number of hints about Herod the Great, and Tiberias Cæsar, and Pontius Pilate, governor of Judea, and the other Herod, Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip, tetrarch of Ituræa and of the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias, the tetrarch of Abilene, with Annas and Caiaphas, the high priests. But, despite this carefulness to set things in their chronological order, for the sake of Theophilus, who evidently thought that emperors and tetrarchs were very illustrious personages, we do not and perhaps never shall know the precise date of our Lord's nativity. His coming was unmarked by clocks and calendars, and the death of Herod is an event more precisely dated. The birthday of Jesus is celebrated a fortnight earlier in the West than in the East, and it is certain that the Christian era did not begin with Anno Domini One. The world took little account of Him with whom a thousand years are but as one day.
Yet this unobserved nativity is now honored more widely than any other festival. Indeed, it has become, for society and commerce, a season as unchallengeable as the tides.
Of the eminent personages mentioned to the excellent Theophilus, not one now interests mankind. We only remember the birthday of Herod Antipas because it was the occasion of a wicked murder. But if you were to abolish the birthday of Christ, you would inflict on mere trade a loss only to be reckoned in hundreds of millions sterling.
Bethlehem of Judea
Jesus was born in Bethlehem, "the House of Bread," the granary of the promised land, where Ruth, the stranger, gleaned the golden corn that was without money and without price, and David refused to drink from the everlasting well the water for which brave men jeopardized their life's blood. Bethlehem was the home of the boy who, defending his sheep from the lion and the bear, could sing that the Lord was his shepherd; and, by remembering Bethlehem, we understand how it was that our Lord also became the Good Shepherd who resisted the thieves and the robbers, and offered Himself as the daily Bread of Life, promising to us, at the cost of His heart's blood, a well of living water, ever springing up within us unto everlasting life. He loved the traditions of His birthplace, and thought less of David's bloodstained crown--which, indeed, He never mentioned except to refuse it--than of David's belief in God's care, which led him, when a fugitive, to take the shewbread itself.
What brought the unborn Messiah to Bethlehem was a Roman census, the claim of Cæsar from which none of us can escape--a claim not to bless but to burden, not to give but to tax, not to help but to govern, not to save but to slay--which claim was yet overruled for our salvation. To Cæsar, the world consists of rich people and poor people, who may be made liable for tribute money and possibly for military service; but in our Lord's more searching census--the Lamb's Book of Life that is never out of date--the hungry and the thirsty are enrolled, the pure in heart, the heavy-laden, and the martyrs. The Roman census left Jesus without a home or protection. It did not matter to the Emperor what became of Him or of any other baby, and He nearly fell a victim to a massacre more ruthless even than the mortality of infants that has continued ever since.
The Holy Family went to the inn. In the olden days, Bethlehem had been a place where a lonely Moabitish widow, like Ruth, was secure from insult and want; but the hospitality by which good men sometimes entertained angels unawares had decayed, and Joseph must needs make his way to a public khan. Ingenious people suggest that this khan was the very house of Boaz which, they say, was the homestead that David granted to Chimham, the son of that generous friend in distress, Barzillai the Gileadite, and that afterwards became the caravanserai from which the reluctant Jeremiah set forth with the Jews who sought exile in Egypt. If the inn of Bethlehem was really the farmhouse of Boaz, then it follows that Jesus was turned away from His ancestral home, and denied even a cradle in His own patrimony. Certain it is that almost the only inn mentioned, either in Old or New Testament, was this inn at Bethlehem, and that in Jeremiah the reference is curiously exact.
Jesus did not forget that when He was born He had nowhere to lay His head. Possibly He foresaw that there never would be much room for Him in an inn, whether ancient or modern; for when He sent forth His disciples on their mission, He did not tell them to book a bedroom at an hotel, but directed them to seek out the old-time hospitality on which Elijah and Elisha depended. So far as we know, He never slept in an inn, but visited homes like that of Martha and her sister Mary, which was also the practice of Paul on his journeys. The very existence of the modern hotel is a symptom that the home has failed; and if our homes were what they should be, there would be less need for restaurants and public-houses. When the perfect city is built, there will be no tavern therein, but many mansions, where every traveler may freely find a place that he can call his own.
In the meantime, He tells us that it will be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for those cities which deny hospitality 'to those who come in His name. And in the parable of the Good Samaritan the condemnation of Jericho lay precisely in this--that the wounded traveler had to be accommodated, not in a freely offered home, but in the inn, at two pence a day, with further payment for any extra expenses. If we only lend to those who are sure to repay, then Jesus asks us, what thank have we? The Gentiles, who make no profession of religion, do that. And if we invite to our dinner-parties only those who will ask us in return, once more, what thank have we? Neglected Himself, it is for the neglected that He thus pleads.
"Lying in a Manger"
The stable has disappeared, only to be modernized, so that for Italy it becomes an Italian scene, and for Flanders a bit of the Flemish. The Ancient of Days thus rises amongst us clad in our own garments and influencing our own customs. Doubtless the stable was a humble refuge, but at least it was not a cage nor a jungle. As that quiet painter, Sidney Cooper, knew so well, the animal life of a stable is disciplined and obedient, lacking entirely the tiger-like ferocity of lust or the snakish uncleanliness of vice. This was why the angels could sing of glory to God in the highest when God's glory lay among the cattle, for it is not the hard and dirty hand, but the hard and dirty heart, that, like the wild beasts in the desert, leaves Christ an hungered and alone with the Devil. Ever mindful of His birth among the oxen, He was the friend of those that labor and are heavy-laden, and would give them rest. He would make their yoke easy and their burden light. And He began life by trusting Himself entirely to those who work humbly for their humble living.
Let us look at Him as He lay in the manger. There was no halo about His head, nor miracle other than the miracle of His babyhood. The inn filled and emptied, as travelers, knowing nothing of the Saviour close by, came and went. It might have been your own little babe in his cot, the one you love-possibly the one you lost; yet on that delicate and helpless shoulder rested, as Isaiah foresaw, not the consolation merely, nor the salvation, but the government of the universe. I have been reading of a Buddhist "incarnation" in which an old man was born with a white beard and wise speech. Jesus began life with no language but a cry, yet He was wiser than the aged, since His was the science of the nursery; not statecraft, nor trigonometry, nor Kultur, but love, joy, peace, and trust, expressed in order, cleanliness, natural instincts, and method. As a little Child He leads us.
Christ within
Good men who ponder over these things tell us that, somehow or other, we ourselves are intimately concerned in this birth of Christ. William Shakespeare was a gift from God to the human race, but we do not read of anyone suggesting that William Shakespeare should dwell in men's hearts. Indeed, if we all tried to be bards of Avon, we should encounter stranger calamities even than those with which our foolish and wicked Europe is to-day chastened. Yet from the days of the first Christians onwards such language has been constantly applied to Jesus, and without any sense of unreality:
Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born,
If He's not born in thee, thy soul is still forlorn.
The man who wrote those lines was Johann Scheffler, a Protestant physician, of philosophical mind, who turned Roman Catholic. At Clare College, Cambridge, there was once a learned person, called Ralph Cudworth, who also held that "the great mystery of the Gospel, the very pith and kernel of it, consists of Christ formed in our hearts." Again, we have Isaac Williams, the Tractarian, who expressed the belief thus:
Within us, Babe divine,
Be born, and make us Thine.
Be born, and make our hearts
Thy cradle and Thy shrine.
The cloud of witnesses includes John Keble, who spoke of our Saviour as:
On the bosom laid
Of a pure virgin mind.
While in his herald hymn, Charles Wesley, the Methodist, sang of Jesus, formed in each believing heart." The Christmas Collect in the Episcopal Prayer Book refers to us as regenerate," which is simply a Latin word for "born again." And I like to think that Charles Dickens, the novelist, agrees with those grave Puritan divines. He did not write a Christmas Collect but a Christmas Carol, in which he told how miserly and hard-fisted Scrooge repented of the evil that he had done and began " an altered life." In his relief, he was " as light as a feather, as happy as an angel, as merry as a schoolboy, as giddy as a drunken man and if his behavior was a little unconventional, so also was that of the lame man leaping as an hart.
Even in fiction, we are thus taught what changes are wrought in us by the birth of the Saviour amid the dull animal routine of our dumb brute existence.
It is perhaps to be noted that, even when they suggested, years later, that His birthplace was Nazareth, He did not once correct their error by mentioning Bethlehem. It was not and is not His custom to assist us by special revelation in matters where a little inquiry on our part, with the brains that God has given us, would bring us at once to the facts. And in truth Bethlehem is now no longer His special birthplace. Wherever hearts are willing, there is He born; wherever He is cherished, there is His cradle; wherever He is reverenced, there is He wrapt tenderly in swaddling clothes and held to the hearts of men.