“Today a Savior, who is Messiah the Lord, was born for you in the city of David. This will be the sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped snugly in cloth and lying in a feeding trough.” Luke 2:11-12, Holman Christian Standard Bible
We’re so used to those words we don’t really hear them anymore. Usually it’s, “You’ll find the baby 
wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger”—”swaddling clothes” and “manger” being archaic terms that we only use around Christmas. It’s a little shocking to read manger translated as “feeding trough” in the HCSB. Like pigs would eat from, if these people kept pigs. The angel may have seen no incongruity in the combination of Savior, Lord, and feeding trough–angels, as pure spirit beings, live an existence completely incomprehensible to us, and vice-versa. The shepherds would have noticed a contradiction, if they weren’t so immediately dazzled with the glory of the Lord. It might have struck them later. At any rate, it was the first real-world, real-time indication of what sort of Savior this would be: homeless, gritty, secret, glorious, spun out of earth and sky with dust and pollen in his nostrils and the whole universe in his heart.
A question, Dr. Luke: Was this an objective event that anyone within 50 miles could see, or was it limited to the shepherds only—a phenomenon that they, and they only, were allowed to see? Skeptics ever since have asked why this wasn’t a bigger news story at the time. I mean, really: a otherworldly glow lighting up the darkness, multitudes of angels singing at the top of their lungs (provided they have lungs)—just a flash in the pan? Possibly; the heavy tread of time has a way of treading under even the most earth-shaking happenings if they aren’t followed up. But God was already on record for pulling back the curtain for selected viewers at rare, selected times, as he did for Elisha’s fearful servant in 2 Kings 6:17. If I had to guess, I’d guess this was one of those times. The witnesses talked it up far and wide, and everyone “wondered,” but in years to come even the shepherds may have come to question what, exactly they’d seen. But Mary had one more memory to treasure.
___________________________________________
For the original post in this series, go here.
Next>