Inside or Out?

For the first time in all my years studying for Christmas sermons, I ran across something I had never heard before. A professor of Greek , a subject I never studied officially in seminary, asserted in a notation that I can no longer find that the word that we have used to indicate that Mary and Joseph were turned out into the cold by the much maligned innkeeper may not have been exactly correct. This guy from a renown seminary, which I can't claim to recall, said that the word we have translated as stable or barn or basically not in the house is in a word- wrong. This guy, who we will call Achilles, just because it's the only Greek name I can think of and I like it better than "this guy"- well, Achilles, the professor of Greek said that the word that was used to indicate that there was no room in the inn really meant that there was not the best room in the inn available at the time.

I had never heard this before- that perhaps "Away In A Manger" should have been "Away on the Roll Away." Maybe this is de rigeur in seminary and a part of contemporary understandings of scripture, and frankly I'm not certain it makes a difference to my faith or my understandings of the birth of the Messiah and the difficulties of the Holy Family. Still the understandings that all of christendom share about the birth of the Christ child involves shivering in the cold. Even though scholars have argued for centuries about the timing of the birth of the child, it couldn't be in the winter because lambs are born in the spring. It couldn't be in the reign of Quirinius because a census wasn't taken until 8 A.D. According to the scholars, the time has never been right for the Messiah to be born. All of those points of debate have kind of rolled off of me, so perhaps I've forgotten all of Achilles' information on purpose because something about Jesus not getting the best bedroom seems so flippant, so diffident, so... so... Arghhhhh!

A couple of years ago, I was reading through the Advent and Christmas scriptures and was suddenly struck by the question- "Who delivered the Christ Child?" If the point of a real incarnation, flesh and blood, tooth and toenail type of Messiah, flesh and blood and yet divine, incarnation- carne- meat/flesh, then who was the midwife? The scriptures seemed to say that Joseph and Mary had been turned away from the house, but a place had been made for them in the barn. If they were out there in the hay, then who helped Mary give birth? Joseph, a Hebrew man, someone well-acquainted with the holiness codes in Leviticus? How does a man who acts as a midwife seek ablution from the priests in the temple? Or by that point when you have left Bethlehem for Egypt, do you just disregard the holiness codes and come home, raise your son, wait and watch for more angel messages?

Achilles may totally wreck some of our favorite carols, but he may give Joseph some much needed help. If Mary and Joseph were merely shuttled to the smallest bedroom, then there were almost certainly some women in the house who could help Mary up onto the bricks to deliver her firstborn, while Joseph waited with the other men. Undoubtedly, each could receive his or her own comfort by those more experienced in the delivery of children. Surely an innkeeper would have a wife to help either with the midwifery or with going to fetch a midwife, which come to think of she might have been able to do even if the Holy Family were back outside in the stable. However, there's something so lonesome-sounding to the thought of two young people out in the dark that authors over the course of centuries have remembered them solitary, without benefit of midwife save for cattle looking on encouragingly.

There is something equally disquieting about considering anything about the tiny savior's birth other than the weather and the barnyard acquaintances. Artist's renderings of the crucifixion almost all reveal a belly button, so something happened between mother and child besides tender murmurings, but a certain squeamishness sets in with much more consideration, which is why I have had a great deal of respect for Joseph.Here's a guy who takes a woman with an ever expanding waistline for his betrothed and refuses to call her out, but tries to deal with "the situation" quietly. To his amazement, I imagine, he is assured by an angel that she is still a good catch, and when they are called to go and pay their taxes he becomes a midwife. Until I read Achilles... now he may be in the living room with the rest of the fathers. Don't get me wrong; I guess I'm glad that Jesus might have been born inside, but then again.... maybe not. "The First Noel" is my favorite Christmas carol, but I like "Away in a Manger. I don't know how I feel about "Away in a Back Bedroom."