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advent bible study Holy Days Multifaith Other search markers Unpacking Antisemitism

Addressing Advent Anti-Judaism

Two contemporary paintings side by side. The first is of Isaiah receiving a burning coal to his lips by an angel. The second is the angel appearing before Mary.
"Isaiah" by Richard McBee; "The Annunciation" by Daniel Bonnell

During the season of Advent, Christians traditionally read Luke’s and Matthew’s Nativity stories alongside the book of Isaiah. It makes sense to do so, as Matthew himself makes the connection:

22 Now all of this took place so that what the Lord had spoken through the prophet would be fulfilled:

23 Look! A virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son,
        And they will call him, Emmanuel. (Matthew 1:22-23)

– Matt 1:22-23, referencing Isaiah 7:14

But when we read Isaiah only in service to our Christian story, we do harm to our Jewish neighbors with whom we share these scriptures. To utilize the Hebrew Bible (= “Old Testament,” the Jewish Bible) solely as a promise fulfilled through Christ is to suggest that these scriptures are incomplete without and dependent upon Jesus — and therefore that Jews’ interpretation of their own Bible is incorrect and irrelevant.

So how do we simultaneously honor our Advent traditions, draw from Isaiah’s wisdom, and respect the vibrant, living faith of our Jewish neighbors?

Dr. Tyler Mayfield provides some excellent options in his 2020 book Unto Us a Son Is Born: Isaiah, Advent, and Our Jewish Neighbors.

The purpose of this post is to share some of the wisdom from Mayfield’s work, and to urge pastors, teachers, and others who help shape the Advent experience for their communities to check out the entire text for even more invaluable commentary.

A photo of Tyler Mayfield, a white man with short graying hair and short gray-brown beard smiling in the woods. To his right is the cover of his book

Contents of Unto Us a Child Is Born:

  • An introduction that, well, introduces the issues with current Christian uses of Isaiah and suggests a bifocal framework as remedy
  • Chapter 1: Using Our Near Vision During Advent
  • Chapter 2: Using Our Far Vision to Love Our Jewish Neighbors
  • The remainder of the chapters delve into each of the Isaiah passages offered by the Revised Common Lectionary for the Advent season.

This post will survey key points from the intro and first two chapters, and close with actionable ways to incorporate Mayfield’s message into Sunday worship and classes. Preachers and teachers will find it immensely helpful to read the rest of the book’s chapters as lesson/sermon preparation for each week of Advent.

The Bifocal Lens

Image of one side of a pair of bifocals, with the smaller, near lens fused in the larger, far lens. A line connects the larger lens to "Far Vision: Openness to our religious neighbors; paying attention to ways we may cause harm." A line drawn from the near lens leads to "Near Vision: Our sense of identity; e.g. worship rituals, cherished hymns"

In order to maintain our Christian traditions without monopolizing the Hebrew Bible, Mayfield recommends a bifocal view:

  • Our near vision focuses on our worship practices and liturgical celebrations, grounding us in our living religious tradition;
  • Our far view pays attention to the ways those practices affect those not in our communities and “compels us to critique and reject some aspects of this tradition, those that are hurtful, inaccurate, and derogatory toward our religious neighbors” (intro).

Using Isaiah and other Jewish scriptures responsibly during worship is not merely a scholarly endeavor; as Mayfield reminds us, reading and interpreting the Bible is a matter of ethics:

[…L]iturgy and ethics are not easily separated. In her excellent and provocative book on racism and sexism in Christian ethics, Traci West notes, “The rituals of Sunday worship enable Christians to publicly rehearse what it means to uphold the moral values they are supposed to bring to every aspect of their lives, from their attitudes about public policy to their intimate relations.” …We want our worship to spur us to live out our ethical claims. (Introduction)

Using Mayfield’s bifocal lens, we can ethically navigate “the tension between identity within a particular faith tradition and openness to the faith traditions of others.”

So what are some of the ways that traditional Advent worship can lead us to do harm to our Jewish neighbors?

Supersessionism

Supersessionism, also called replacement theology, claims that Christianity has replaced or supplanted Judaism; that our covenant through Christ cancels out Jews’ covenant through Abraham and Moses (hence the labeling of the two parts of the Christian Bible as the Old and New Testaments, from the Latin word for covenant).

Synagoga et Ecclasia, two statues on the Notre Dame cathedral representing the Jewish and Christian faiths. This juxtaposition of crowned Church standing strong next to the Synagogue who is “blind to Jesus,” the ten commandments almost falling from her hand, is unfortunately depicted in numerous artworks of Medieval Europe.

Mayfield brings in Susannah Heschel’s description of supersessionism as a “theological colonization of Judaism“; she defines it as:

“The appropriation by the New Testament and the early church of Judaism’s central theological teachings, including messiah, eschatology, apocalypticism, election, and Israel, as well as its scriptures, its prophets, and even its God, while denying the continued validity of those teachings and texts within Judaism as an independent path to salvation.” (Heschel, The Aryan Jesus, 2008)

The seeds that the early church planted have born violent fruit across the centuries. This attitude of judgment and/or pity has led both to ideological violence — “render[ing] Jews invisible or irrelevant or as incomplete Christians” (intro) — and immense physical violence through to the segregation, scapegoating, forced conversions, expelling, and flat-out murder of the Jewish people across multiple continents.1

Medieval painting of figures gathered around a fire on which a book is burning. One person presses a poker onto it, while another person holds up a book to throw it into the fire. There are piles of books around this figure
Detail from Pedro Berruguete’s “Saint Dominic and the Albigensians” (1490s), depicting a Medieval “trial by fire” in which potentially heretical texts were determined to be “false” if they burned.

There are multiple instances of the Talmud — the central text of rabbinical Judaism alongside the Jewish Bible — being likewise gathered and burned across Medieval Europe due to the anti-Jewish belief that the Talmud was the primary obstacle keeping Jews from converting to Christianity. In 1242, for instance, King Louis IX of France ordered the burning of “24 cartloads” — something like 12,000 volumes — of priceless, scribe-written copies of the Talmud. This event devastated France’s Jewish community, which had been one of the seats of Jewish scholarship. Louis also followed up the book burning with a decree to expel all Jews from France: violence against Jewish scripture goes hand-in-hand with violence against Jewish bodies.

All this to say, the views we shape through worship and elsewhere truly do have real-world implications.

Mayfield argues that it is possible — indeed, necessary — to share scriptures respectfully. After all, he says, Judaism and Christianity are siblings.

While Christianity is often envisioned as the “shoot” growing from the dead stump of Jesse in Isaiah 11:1, a child who has improved upon the parent, in reality Judaism and Christianity are more like two branches extending from the same tree. They “grew out of the same milieu,” developing from the religion depicted in the Hebrew Bible during the chaotic era of that first century CE:

While early Jesus followers were formulating an identity distinct from Christ’s Jewish origins, Rome’s 70 CE destruction of the Second Temple spurred on new iterations of Jews’ own religion; following the Pharisees,2 they recentered faith around local life rather than the temple. In this way, the two religions are around the same age, growing from the same foundations! We are sibling religions; and we are neighbors. The problem is that we Christians have frequently behaved as very poor neighbors indeed.

Why Jewish “Neighbors”?

In Isaiah, Advent, and Our Christian Neighbors, Mayfield has opted for the term neighbor to describe the Christian relationship to Jews in the present day. Why? For one thing, love of neighbor is a central tenet of both Jewish and Christian tradition, originating in Leviticus 19:18 and emphasized by Jesus in Mark 12:31 and Matthew 22:39. Reading scripture through the ethic of love thy neighbor, we must ask, “If a particular reading of Scripture leads us to think badly of Jews, then is this reading Christian?” (chapter 2).

Furthermore, Mayfield continues,

I also use the concept of neighbor because neighbors do not always agree. In fact, they sometimes disagree and have to take seriously one another’s perceptions, feelings, and opinions. Being neighborly is being attentive and listening well to the concerns of others. It is realizing that your actions affect those around you. Christians act neighborly when they take seriously Jewish critiques of Christianity and Christian teachings, just as Jews act neighborly when they offer these critiques. (Chapter 2)

In reconsidering how we read and teach scripture, we can imagine that scripture is the fence we share with our Jewish neighbors, even while we dwell in different “geographies.” But when we accept supersessionist theology, we deny Jews their side of the fence; we colonize it.

Let’s look at how supersessionism manifests specifically in the ways we use Isaiah during Advent.

Resisting a Christian Isaiah

Mayfield describes how, over the past two millennia, Christians have disconnected Isaiah from his ancient Jewish context and Christianized him, even going so far as to call this eighth-century BCE prophet’s book the “fifth Gospel” alongside Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John (intro).

ID; ancient mural of Mary on a throne with a young Jesus in her lap. To her right is Peter holding a key. To her left is Isaiah holding a scroll on which the Latin for "Behold, a virgin will conceive and birth a son" is written
The Virgin Mary and Jesus, flanked by Isaiah (right) and Peter (left).

In lifting Isaiah from his seat among Jeremiah, Amos, and all the Hebrew Bible’s prophets, we sever him from his original ancient Jewish audience and deny his relevance to our Jewish neighbors today.

We hear Isaiah (and Handel in his Messiah) proclaim: “For unto us a child is born; unto us a son is given” (Isaiah 9:6) and everything in our tradition preps us to assume that the “us” in question is us Christians; that this child must be Jesus!

In our presumption that Isaiah’s prophecies are all about Jesus, we render this prophet irrelevant to our Jewish neighbors, denying the validity of their interpretations of this biblical book. But if we dig into the historical context, we can broaden our ways of understanding these texts and thus learn how to better share these scriptures.

A Christ-exclusive interpretation of Isaiah misunderstands what biblical prophets did.

We hear the word “prophecy” and think of foreseeing the future, often the distant future. But the prophets of the Bible, from Joel to John the Baptist, were largely focused on their own here-and-now:

The prophets of ancient Israel (and ancient Mesopotamia) did not see their sole activity as foretelling. They were also “forthtellers,” speaking to the religious and political issues of their day with courage and strength. As mediators between God and the people, prophets delivered messages, oracles, and visions to audiences that included kings and commoners. They interpreted the past, analyzed the present, and spoke of the future but were undoubtedly more concerned with events of the present than events several hundred years in the making. …

[T]he notion of prophecy as foretelling renders the prophet’s words irrelevant to, and uninspired for, the first hearers and readers of these messages. (Chapter 1)

There’s another historical issue with reading Isaiah’s prophecies as exclusively about Jesus as his people’s anticipated Messiah:

At the time of Isaiah in the 700s BCE, the concept of the eschatological Messiah had not yet been developed!

While the Hebrew Bible does describe figures like David and Cyrus as anointed ones (which is what the Hebrew word mashiach, “messiah,” means), the concept of The Messiah who would usher in an age of justice and peace was most likely a later development of Second Temple Judaism (516 BCE – 70 CE).

We only see The Messiah in Isaiah’s descriptions of a “Wonderful Counselor…Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6b) and a just judge on whom God’s spirit rests (Isaiah 11:1-10) because of our own bias: “We think we know what we will find before we look” (chapter 1).

Learning about a passage’s original context helps us interpret the text more faithfully as we seek its relevance today. What is more, we can and should consider its multiple historical contexts, the whole breadth of what it has meant for different groups in different eras:

Texts in Isaiah have an entire history of interpretation, which includes the “originating” context in ancient Israel, their reuse and interpretation in Second Temple Judaism perhaps, their Christian context in which some Isaiah texts became christological, the Jewish context in which some texts became messianic, and then later Christian context, that is, when these texts were attached to Advent.

The book of Isaiah was composed by ancient Israelites over several centuries, from the eighth to the fifth centuries BCE. These authors wrote for their ancient Israelite audiences with no comprehension of later events such as the life of Jesus and the growth of Christianity. Thus, the book of Isaiah does not predict the birth of Jesus. (Chapter 1)

Recognizing the long history of a piece of scripture helps reduce our sense of ownership over the text; we realize that its messages are not for Christians alone, but for faithful Jews and Christians (and Muslims, to an extent) across the millennia and today. This recognition is vital for unpacking biases and beliefs we often don’t even realize we carry deep in our psyches — and that some of the tools we use reinforce.

A Complicit Lectionary?

A key concern Mayfield explores throughout Unto Us a Child Is Born is how the lectionaries we use can guide us towards supersessionist readings during Advent. He focuses on the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) because of its popularity: Denominations ranging from the UCC to the Roman Catholic Church make use of it; overall, a huge portion of all sorts of Christians (largely in Canada and the USA) use it. 

Mayfield explains that for each Sunday, the ecumenical team that created the RCL selected the Gospel reading first, and then selected an “Old Testament” text (plus a psalm & Acts/epistles/Revelation passage) to complement that Gospel reading.

The theological ramifications of always prioritizing the Gospel in this way include an unbalanced dialogue: If we imagine the readings in conversation with each other, the Gospel always gets to choose the topic; the “Old Testament” only ever gets to respond.

Actionable Ways to Be Good Neighbors

After learning about Advent’s supersessionist pitfalls, you might be tempted simply to drop Isaiah in an effort to avoid the issue entirely. But Mayfield argues that that is a mistake:

We need Isaiah to celebrate Advent. The book’s treasures are too marvelous to set aside as ancient history or consign to another liturgical season. As we begin the liturgical year, we need to hear of swords beaten into plowshares and of barren lands blooming. …To use only the Gospel readings during Advent limits our theological reflections while also insinuating that only those four biblical books are worthy of public reading and proclamation. (Chapter 1)

Instead of ditching Isaiah, Mayfield offers practical suggestions for using the prophet responsibly:

First, we can open readings of Isaiah in church with an explicit statement: “Today we hear words from a book held sacred by both Jews and Christians.” As Mayfield explains, “This simple and accurate statement…compels us to recognize our religious neighbors even as we worship” (chapter 2).

Going further, a preacher can remind congregants that “As Christians, we understand Isaiah through our histories and theologies, but Jews do not read Isaiah this way.”

(My own thought: A pastor can even take time in an Advent sermon to acknowledge some of the history of misusing Jewish scriptures / debunking common presumptions about Isaiah’s role in the Nativity story. A Sunday School teacher has even more space to explore that history and context, and to invite attendees to imagine how Isaiah speaks to us today.)

Beyond simple statements and one-time mentions, Mayfield urges us to commit to always interpreting scriptures through a paradigm of “do no harm” — to “share as good neighbors.”

A key part of this paradigm is an intentional shift from “a more linear approach to the narrative of Scripture (in which we read the biblical books as a progression both in time and in theological depth) to a more back-and-forth conversational approach (in which we allow various texts to speak to one another).” This conversational framework creates space for the Bible’s many voices and refuses to let “New Testament” voices dominate.

An outdoor statue of two women sitting side by side. Both are robed and crowned. One holds a large torah scroll; the other an open Bible. They are smiling and looking at one another's texts.
A new representation of Synagoga et Ecclasia, mutually crowned and learning from each other. Statue by Joshua Koffman for St. Joseph’s University, commissioned in honor of the 50th Anniversary of the Roman Catholic Church’s 1965 Nostra Aetate declaration, which repudiated past anti-Jewish doctrine and actions and called for more respectful relations.

Here’s a longer excerpt from Mayfield describing how to put this paradigm into practice while remaining true to ourselves:

So, how do we, as Christians, continue to affirm one of our central claims of Jesus as the Messiah while also allowing space for the dismissal of that claim? Perhaps we are helped by returning to the tension between identity and openness.

Christians maintain strong identities in the claim of Jesus as the Christ while also remaining open to other visions of the messianic kingdom, thus realizing that the full realm of God has not come. It is vital to our identity to claim Jesus as the Messiah, and we are also open to other formulations of messiah.

One meaningful way forward along this challenging path is not to claim too much: to be careful, considerate, and humble with our messianic notions. For example, instead of holding to a messianic or christological reading of Isaiah as the only valid notion, Christians could admit openly and explicitly that these texts provide some of the necessary elements that will constitute notions of messiahship in first-century Judaism, notions Jesus and his biographers took up and used. However, these texts do not point immediately to Jesus; there is just not a straight line — historically or theologically — between Point A, Isaiah, and Point B, Jesus.

This sort of admission presents real possibilities for neighborly engagement since it ties the Christian claim about Jesus more closely to sacred texts that are used only by Christians. It does not predetermine the meaning of Isaiah for all traditions, but it allows Jews and Christians to interpret Isaiah’s prophecies based on their respective traditions, with neither tradition holding ultimate authority over the biblical text. …We could go even further to say that the Jewish reading is an important and necessary one from which Christians could learn. (Chapter 2)

More Benefits of Interpreting Responsibly!

Ultimately, a paradigm of respect and mutual conversation bears rich fruit not only in our relationship to our Jewish neighbors, but to our own faith. Letting Hebrew Bible texts stand on their own merit opens us to how a given passage speaks to us here and now, rather than limiting its prophecies to a closed loop of prophecy-fulfilled-in-Christ. Mayfield quotes Ellen Davis’ comment that

“We like to keep the frame of reference for prophecy within the ‘safe’ confines of the Bible, by reading prophecy solely as illuminating what has already happened—the birth, life, and death of Jesus Christ—and not allowing it to meddle much in the current lives of Christians” [and Jews!]. (Chapter 1)

We are not called to play it safe; we are called to let scripture breathe, and to welcome in God’s mischievous spirit! Making room for many interpretations, for multiple messages from Isaiah for different times and contexts, liberates scripture to speak to us in new, challenging, relevant ways today.

Doing so also helps us live into the tension of Advent’s dual theological themes: Incarnation and eschatology. As Mayfield notes,

These two foci do not naturally cohere. The emotions invoked by Advent call us to “prepare joyfully for the first coming of the incarnate Lord and to prepare penitently for the second coming and God’s impending judgment.”3 Joy and penitence. …We are pulled in different emotional directions. (Chapter 1)

Churches tend to lean towards the joy — but we can’t ditch the solemnity, can’t “alleviate the tension,” without robbing ourselves of “the incredible richness and grace that result from the annual eschatological collision in the weeks before Christmas.”4

As someone who centers my ministry around breaking binaries, reveling in the in-betweens where God does Their best work, I appreciate this insistence on the “both/and” of penitence and joy — as well as of Isaiah and Matthew/Mark, and of a prophetic message for Isaiah’s time, and Jesus’s time, and for us and our Jewish neighbors today.

Two contemporary paintings side by side. The first is of Isaiah receiving a burning coal to his lips by an angel. The second is the angel appearing before Mary.
“Isaiah” by Richard McBee; “The Annunciation” by Daniel Bonnell

Closing

In Advent, past, present, and future queerly coalesce:

“We have hope in what the incarnation brings to our world each day, even as we hope for the setting right of things with the culmination of history.” (Chapter 1)

Though the details certainly differ, we can thus proclaim that “even though the Messiah has come, we wait with Jews for the ‘complete realization of the messianic age'” and that in this interim time, “it is the mission of the Church, as also that of the Jewish people, to proclaim and to work to prepare the world for the full flowering of God’s Reign, which is, but is ‘not yet’”5 (chapter 2).

This Advent claim “takes the unique identity of Christians seriously as ones who have seen in Jesus our Messiah yet remain open to the fullness of that claim in the future” (chapter 2).

It is possible to shape Advent into a season wherein we don’t perpetuate harm against our Jewish neighbors, but rather grow in our respect for and mutual relationship with them. The remainder of Unto Us a Child Is Born: Isaiah, Advent, and Our Christian Neighbors is overflowing with more knowledge and advice that further enables this aim. I highly recommend checking it out. If you need help obtaining a copy, hit me up.

Have a blessed, pensive, and joyful Advent.

  1. For a thorough history of antisemitism, and how to be in solidarity both with Jews and Palestinians, I highly recommend Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism. ↩︎
  2. Pharisees were cool, y’all; go learn from the fabulous Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg about what Pharisees believed, how Jesus may have been a Pharisee himself, and the context around the Gospel writers’ negative depictions of them ↩︎
  3. Mayfield’s quoting Gail R. O’Day, “Back to the Future: The Eschatological Vision of Advent” (2008) ↩︎
  4. Mayfield’s quoting J. Neil Alexander, Waiting for the Coming (1993) ↩︎
  5. Mayfield is quoting Mary Boys, Has God Only One Blessing? (2000) ↩︎
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bible study Holy Days lent Reflections for worship services

Ash Wednesday, Isaiah 6, and the blessing in our limitations

Painting by Justin “JUST” Simmons.

The below reflection is cross-posted from Daily Ripple; see the end of this post for more information. Furthermore, if you prefer to listen instead of reading, you can listen to this piece in the latest episode of the Blessed Are the Binary Breakers podcast.

I said, “Mourn for me; I’m ruined! I’m a man with unclean lips, and I live among a people with unclean lips. Yet I’ve seen the king, the Lord of heavenly forces!”

Then one of the winged creatures flew to me, holding a glowing coal that ze had taken from the altar with tongs. Ze touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips. Your guilt has departed, and your sin is removed.”

– Isaiah 6:5-7

Did the glowing coal leave a mark? A smear of dark? A bright burn?

Reading this text on Ash Wednesday, I can’t help but connect Isaiah’s coal and our ashy crosses:

He confesses himself unclean — admits his limits, where he and his people have failed.

We profess ourselves dust — acknowledge our limits, the finite time we have here and now, and how often we’ve failed to cherish that time.

In the confession, we open ourselves to blessing. Accepting our limits, we fall into God’s limitless love.

Why these physical, ritual actions — coal to the lips, ashes to the brow — to mark these limits and the blessings they yield?

God knows, respects, loves our existence as embodied spirits, inspirited bodies. She pairs spiritual gifts with tangible signs to help us experience Her truths with our whole selves.

A glowing coal — dead plants packed deep, transformed over eons, unburied at last and set alight — touches truth-telling lips to set them free.

Ashes of palm branches once waved in worship, burned down to begin the cycle anew, mark us as individually finite, but gathered into an infinite love.

Take time to prayerfully consider your own limits. What blessings, what liberation can you imagine flowing from our individual finitude? How can you connect your limited time and gifts to a greater whole, in small ways with great love?

Photo of a bowl of black ashes, with a small dried palm leaf cross in the middle of the ashes. The bowl sits on a green palm branch.

About Daily Ripple!

I am delighted to have joined the creative team at Daily Ripple — starting with posts this week, including what you just read!

If you want to incorporate queer-affirming, justice-oriented snippets of biblical reflection written by a diverse range of Christians into your everyday life, Daily Ripple is a lovely option. It’s free, and every weekday, subscribers receive a short reflection, ending with a question meant to guide you towards action. 

I’ve been writing the daily posts for this week, incorporating queer and autistic theology into readings of Psalm 119, Mark 4, and Isaiah 6. Check them all out at the Daily Ripple.

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advent Catholic vibes Holy Days My poetry Other search markers Reflections for worship services

Nativity Beads: a poem & an essay exploring alternative interpretations of the Luke 2 story

Nativity Beads

pendant.

we think we know the story
of how you birthed our God into our midst
— but this
is not quite accurate:

the tale of your time in Bethlehem
is overlaid by two millennia
of retellings —
tradition lining up beside tradition and

when my mind becomes
a tangled mess
trying to divine
which ones Really Happened

you come.

you calm.

you guide me from

my need to know one truth
into the sacred splendor
of a whole string of stories —

each one a bead
pregnant with its little piece of Truth,
a little link between me and
your Son and you.

___

first decade.

“it’s not so bad,” Joseph says hopefully
as he helps you settle down onto the straw.

the cave walls cut the chill;
the goat who ambles close to sniff you stinks but
oh, she’s warm.

you think of births you’ve overheard
at home — the neighbor women rushing in
to help. you expected the same for yourself

but, ah well, what has been expected
about this pregnancy?

___

second.

Joseph hovers, fervent but unsure
how to help.

“if i could take your pain upon myself…”

but there is no pain!
conceived as you were
free from Eve’s bane,

as you give birth
to heaven on earth
all you know is
bliss, bliss, bliss.

___

third.

Joseph is gone.
you can picture his desperate dash
from door to bolted door
off in the town

as you lie alone
on old straw — and, God! the baby crowns

with no one to help — so you reach down
into the mess of your own blood and

yours are the first hands to wrap around
the Son of God, red and slick and — oh sacred sound!  — screaming.

___

fourth.

Joseph is gone, but near — you know he waits
pacing and praying just outside the door.

in his place — women’s faces, smiling and soothing,
letting you squeeze their hands as hard as you need

or bustling about to heed Midwife’s decrees.

the guest room was too small to hold this congregation
so you were helped into the central room
to birth the Son of God right in the heart
of this small peasant home.

the poor know how to serve one of their own.

___

fifth.

you close your eyes as agony subsides
between contractions. see yourself as one bead
upon a long strong string stretching centuries —

you are one

with Jochebed biting down to mute her moaning,
Rebekah grateful for an end to her rough pregnancy,
with Hannah, Ruth, Bathsheba, Hagar, Rahab, Leah, Eve,
and millions more unnamed. you share their groaning,
their labor, their relief, their ecstasy.

your baby crowns; the women round burst out in Glory be!

This poem was written by Avery Arden and belongs to them. If you want to use it in a worship service or elsewhere, let Avery know! You can reach them at queerlychristian36@gmail.com.

Essay

My Advent devotions this year include praying a daily rosary. Meanwhile, I’ve been fixating upon a certain reading of Luke 2’s “no room at the inn” passage that suggests Mary gave birth not in a stable, but someone’s home (more on that in a bit). As I meditated on various iterations of the Nativity tale while moving through my rosary, this poem was conceived.

This poem is structured after a rosary. For my non-Catholic friends out there who may not be familiar, a rosary is a long string of prayer beads with a crucifix or other cross hanging down from five decades, or clusters of ten beads each. Here’s a diagram (from this site):

id: diagram of a Catholic rosary with blue beads. A crucifix dangles from the bottom of a string with five beads on it, which is connected to a longer string that connects like a necklace; this longer string has five clusters of ten beads each, and every cluster has one bead between. The diagram labels different beads with their assigned prayers; for instance, each cluster is labeled as one of five decades, with 10 Hail Marys, a Glory Be, and an O my Jesus prayer. The beads between each decade are labeled “Our Father.”

You start at the crucifix and pray along the “pendant,” the strand that hangs down with five beads; then you make your way around the five decades. For me, the rosary offers a way to embody my prayer and to enter into a meditative state as I move from bead to bead and repeat the prayers. As an autistic person, having a tactile point into which to pour all my energy, one point of sensory input to overshadow all the others, is a powerful way to put aside all else and hone in on Divinity.

Pondering one story each decade is a traditional way to pray the rosary — the recommended ones are explained on this site; but for the past week or so, I’ve been imagining the Nativity over and over, a little differently each decade.

Versions whose events contradict each other — a painless Mary versus a groaning Mary; Mary alone or Mary with midwives; Mary dismissed to the outskirts or settled in the heart of a Bethlehemite home — all found their place, side-by-side, along that line of beads. As I took time with each story, the sense of contradiction as conflict faded away.

Little truths rose to the surface of each version, something to savor, a fresh facet of the story of God entering into human life. I can’t know which one was “most historically accurate,” but I could contemplate what each version says about God’s movement in Mary’s life and ours — what good news each version proclaims into our world.

So what is some of that good news? I’ll touch upon the various visions visited by each “decade” of the poem.

The first decade is self-explanatory, I think — it sets up the version we encounter in Christmas pageants, nativity sets, the Charlie Brown Christmas special… In this version, “no room in the inn” means that whatever lodgings a visitor to Bethlehem could usually expect were all full up. Though no Gospel mentions an innkeeper at all, we can all picture that figure well enough; he’s been woven into being by the dramatizations of generations. Whether heartless or apologetic, he can’t provide a bed for a pregnant girl and her husband; but look, there’s the stable, with plenty of straw and a little space among the livestock.

I have long cherished this narrative through a liberationist lens — that God chose to enter the world at the margins of the margins emphasizes Their intimate identification with the most oppressed and erased of our world! Humanity did not make room for the God who so loved the world They squeezed Their infinity into finite, vulnerable flesh; just as our human systems fail to make room for the survival and thriving of so many persons.

The second decade incorporates a bit of Roman Catholic doctrine that states that Mary felt no labor pain — since Catholicism holds that she was born miraculously free from original sin, she was likewise free from the consequences of that sin (see Genesis 3:16, where God informs Eve that her labor will be painful). Though raised Catholic, I didn’t learn about this tidbit of Mariology till late high school. I remember feeling…oddly betrayed? A facet of Mary’s relatability, her humanness, felt stripped away; her pedestal of larger-than-life perfection seemed to stretch a little higher. But this past week, I’ve taken the time to imagine a painless labor for her, and even if it’s not the story that speaks to me loudest, I have found some richness in it.

The third decade imagines Mary alone, following after Eastern Orthodox tradition. I pondered the significance of this version of events — why place Mary by herself as she births God on earth? Does her isolation foreshadow the sense of desolation her Son would feel decades later, on the cross?

What arose most strongly in me as I envisioned this version was a sense of joy and rightness — that Mary’s would be the first hands to touch the Divine she’d carried within her for nine months; that hers would be the first eyes to take in Word made flesh.

The fourth and fifth decades move away from the Nativity versions that have enjoyed the most traction and expansion over the centuries. We do away with barns and innkeepers, and bring some new characters to the stage: midwives!

Bringing midwives into the nativities I imagined as I prayed brought me deep joy. Midwives show up in various places throughout scripture — God Herself is depicted in the role of midwife in places like Psalm 22:11 (see this article for more on midwives in the Jewish Bible). Meanwhile, the most famous human midwives are probably the named, heroic women Shiphrah and Puah of Exodus 1, who protect the newborns of enslaved Hebrew women from Pharaoh. The role such women played was a life-bringing one, and imagining the relief and comfort a skilled midwife would bring teenage Mary filled me with gratitude for whoever this unmentioned woman may have been.

In “The Accommodations of Joseph and Mary in Bethlehem,” Stephen C. Carlson explains, “Childbirth was the riskiest moment in the entire pregnancy during antiquity, potentially lethal for both the mother and child. Whenever possible, women about to give birth relied on the help of relatives, friends, and midwives in and around town” (pp. 340-341). I love imagining Mary encircled by so much support as she labored to birth the God of the universe.

Carlson and other scholars suggest that it was the presence of all these Bethlehemite women at Jesus’ birth that necessitated a lot of space for the event. This brings us at last to that famous line from Luke that notes a lack of room…in the inn? or somewhere else?

I promised I’d return to readings of Luke 2:7 that argue Jesus was born not in a stable, but a house — so here we go!

At first glance, Luke 2:7 seems fairly straightforward. Since we’re talking about tradition here, I’ll offer the KJV’s version: 

"And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn."

However, digging into the Greek of the text and into the socio-cultural context of the story uncovers some complications.

It turns out that the Greek word that most traditionally gets translated as “inn” here has a broader meaning than that. The word is kataluma (κατάλυμα), and it’s only used two other times in the Gospels (or the NT as a whole): in Luke’s and Matthew’s accounts of how Jesus’s disciples found a room for the meal that we now call the Last Supper. Here’s Luke’s account (22:10-12; NRSV translation this time; with the translation of kataluma bolded):

“Listen,” he [Jesus] said to them, “when you have entered the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you; follow him into the house he enters and say to the owner of the house, ‘The teacher asks you, “Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?”’ He will show you a large room upstairs, already furnished. Make preparations for us there.”

(Side note: if you want to read about that person with a jar of water through a trans lens, check out the section of my webpage over here titled “A Simple Jar of Water.” It’s fun stuff! but not related to the discussion of kataluma.)

How can one Greek word mean both “inn” and “guest room”? The noun kataluma is tied to the verb kataluó (καταλύω) — kata + luó = “to loosen thoroughly.” When journeying with pack animals, you’d only “thoroughly loosen” their straps and packs when stopping for a long rest. Thus the verb came to mean “to take up lodging;” and the related noun, the kataluma of both Luke 2:7 and 22:10, came to stand for those lodgings — whether that was some natural shelter like a cave; a tent; an inn; or a guest room in someone’s house.

Meanwhile, there is another Greek word that means “inn” specifically — and the author of Luke uses that word in his version of the Good Samaritan story, when the Samaritan brings the man mugged and left for dead to a pandocheion (πανδοχεῖον).

So if Luke’s one other use of kataluma (22:11) refers to a guest room in a private home; and the one time he wants to specifcally refer to an inn (10:34) he uses a different Greek word…why do the vast majority of English translations of Luke 2:7 state that there is no room for Mary’s labor “in the inn” rather than “in the guest room”? (Or, to avoid making a claim in either direction, why don’t more translations apply a broader phrase like “there was no room in the lodging place”?)

To reiterate, it’s certainly possible that kataluma refers to an inn when used in Luke 2:7 — but it’s not the only possibility, or even necessarily the most likely one.

If Luke 2:7 is saying that there is no room in Bethlehem’s inn, then the classic stable setting (or a cave, as in the second century Protoevangelium of James) makes sense. However, some scholars contest

  1. whether Bethlehem, being so small, would even have had an inn, with the duty of taking in strangers passing through instead falling upon individual families; and
  2. whether Joseph and his wife would have stayed in such an inn, even if it did exist.

The reason Joseph and Mary are journeying to Bethlehem is for a Roman census, for which “all go to their own towns to be registered” (Luke 2:3). In “An Improbable Inn,” Andy Mickelson explains that Roman censuses typically required people to register not in their ancestral town, but wherever they owned property; thus one might conjecture that Joseph “had traveled to Nazareth previously to seek work or (more likely) to retrieve his fiancée Mary and bring her back to his native Bethlehem” (p. 14).

Mickelson cautions that there are some complications in the Luke text that curtail certainty in what exactly happened (visit page 15 of his article to read more about that); but 

"regardless of whether Joseph’s family home was in Bethlehem or whether it was just his ancestral home, Joseph’s ties to the village are key in determining how the κατάλυμα of 2:7 should be understood. If Joseph truly was a native son of Bethlehem, then he almost certainly would have stayed with close family members. Bruce Malina remarks that Joseph 'would have been obligated to stay with family, not in a commercial inn.' He also points out that 'if close family was not available, mention of Joseph’s lineage would have resulted in immediate village recognition that he belonged and space would have been made available.' Thus, even if Joseph was only linked to Bethlehem through lineage, that lineage would have been enough to earn him the hospitality of a distant relative. Arguments that the homes of Bethlehem would have been filled to capacity due to the census disregard the simple fact that Roman registrations took place over a period, not a single day. Regardless, an added measure of hospitality could certainly have been expected due to Mary’s pregnancy."

In placing the Nativity in a barn, stable, or cave, we run the risk of disregarding how central hospitality was to the people of Jesus’s time and place.

When I imagine the people of Bethlehem failing to find proper accommodations for the pregnant Mary and her husband Joseph, I can’t help but think of another city destroyed nearly two thousand years before Jesus’s birth — Sodom, which invoked God’s wrath by replacing hospitality to strangers like Lot with attempted violence against them (see Genesis 19). The people of Bethlehem may have been poor and oppressed, but hospitality was their way of sharing what they had and practicing their devotion to the God who instructed them to care for the stranger (e.g. Exodus 23:9; Deuteronomy 10:19; Leviticus 19:34).

Hospitality was a vital virtue not only for the Jewish people, but for various other groups in this time and place. In scripture, we find a gentile widow sharing what she believes is the last of her resources with a stranger, the prophet Elijah (1 Kings 17). Under the epithet Xenios, the Greek God Zeus embodied the moral obligation to provide strangers with hospitality. Likewise, the Romans viewed hospitality as the divine right of any guest, and the divine duty of any host. I imagine that members of any of these cultures would have expected divine wrath to follow the failure of a whole village consigning a pregnant traveler to a lonely stable!

No matter how poor, crowded, or busy Bethlehem was, I have come to doubt the presumption that not one of its residents took pity on Mary and Joseph and welcomed them in.

So let’s say we accept that Jesus wasn’t born in a stable, but someone’s house — likely the home of Joseph’s relatives. In that case, there’s still one more bit of cultural context we need to make sense of this “new” version of the story:

No matter how we translate kataluma, Luke 2:7 says that Mary laid Jesus in a manger — why the heck would there be a manger, a feeding trough for livestock, inside a house?

It turns out that mangers were totally something you’d find inside first-century Judean village houses: rather than having a separate building for their livestock, families would keep their animals outside in the courtyard during the day, and bring them inside their own homes at night. The same room in which the majority of human work and life took place during the daytime became the sleeping quarters for livestock, complete with feeding troughs:

"Typically, the main room was divided into two sections at different elevations separated by about a meter. The animals were housed in the lower section, the people slept in the upper section, and mangers were located between them." (Carlson, p. 341)

Levant homes had followed this practical arrangement since the Iron Age: one space for livestock and humans kept the animals safe from theft; plus all that body heat kept everyone warm in colder months (Mickelson, p. 17).

id: Here’s a diagram from Kenneth Bailey’s book The Bible through Middle Eastern Eyes depicting a “typical village home in Palestine with attached guest room. The diagram is a rectangular shape; the largest room is labeled the family living room and has two ovals labeled “mangers” to the side, next to a smaller segment labeled “stable.” To the right of the family living room is a “guest room,” or kataluma.

To wrap up our exegetical exploration, let’s tie all this — the manger, the midwifes, the word kataluma — together…

starting with a return to Luke 2:7:

"And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the kataluma."

In this “new” reading, Mary is surrounded by village women headed by a midwife as she gives birth. And she is not alone in a stable on the outskirts of town, but in a peasant home — and not in a guest room or little side room of that home (because that kataluma is either full of other guests or simply too small for all the women), but right in the house’s central space.

As Mickelson summarizes,

"Luke records Mary as placing Jesus in a manger because there was no space for them in the κατάλυμα. There are two plausible reasons for this. First, the guest room might have been taken by other guests, requiring Joseph and Mary to stay somewhere else in the house. While the traditional image of Bethlehem teeming with visitors for the registration is an exaggeration, it is likely that if Joseph had come for the event, others (even members of his family) may have returned as well, and the guest room may have been occupied by someone else.

The other possibility is that there was not sufficient space in the κατάλυμα to accommodate Jesus’s delivery. Childbirth in antiquity was a dangerous procedure for both mother and child, and it is likely that Mary would have been assisted by a midwife as well as the women of the house. The κατάλυμα of the Last Supper was noted for being large, but these guest rooms likely varied in size. If the room in which Mary and Joseph were staying was small, Mary would have relocated to the main room of the house, where there would have been plenty of space for the other women to help with her delivery." (p. 17)

Mickelson moves on to explain why all this matters — which I bet you’ve been wondering if you’ve read this far (or even just skimmed to this point).

If the traditional placement of the Nativity in a stable on Bethlehem’s outskirts emphasizes God’s entrance into the most marginal space possible, what does placing Jesus’s birth in the heart of a peasant home emphasize?

Mickelson argues this setting also fits the theme of Jesus’s intimate identification with the marginalized and oppressed, as it solidifies the everydayness of his arrival:

"This reading of Luke’s infancy narrative makes the story of Jesus’s birth even less unusual than the traditional reading of the story. Being rejected from an inn and being forced to give birth amid animals gives Jesus a humble yet noteworthy beginning: Jesus is born in desperate and memorable circumstances.

But placing Jesus’s delivery in the main room of a Bethlehemite home gives him a birth narrative similar to probably thousands of Jewish babies. Nothing about the circumstances is extraordinary: being swaddled was a common experience for infants, and the most that can be inferred by being placed in a manger is that the home may have been crowded and there was nothing else approximating a crib available. 

In short, Luke portrays Jesus entering the world in a rather unremarkable way." (p. 18)

Thus this “new” reading of the Nativity story is packed with richness for the liberationist reader! As a TL;DR to close this essay, I’ll summarize some of that richness now.

  • In any reading of the Nativity — whether it takes place on Bethlehem’s outskirts or in its heart — Jesus is born to nobodies in a nowhere town. His parents are brown Palestinian Jews living in subjugation to an Empire; they are impoverished; and they are dependent on the hospitality of others who share their poverty and oppression.
  • Though the narratives surrounding the actual birth scene in Luke’s Gospel — replete with angelic messages and praise-songs from priests and shepherds, a teen girl and an old widow — make the importance of Jesus’s arrival clear, for the actual moment of birth, Jesus is just one infant of thousands born in a typical peasant house. He really is just one of the poor, one of the common folk. He makes the margins the center.
  • Do we do a disservice to the poor whom liberationist theologies are supposed to center when we claim that the people of Bethlehem — from the innkeeper of our pageants to whatever relatives Joseph may have had there — fail to provide a pregnant teenager and her husband with better accommodations than a barn or cave?

    A reading that imagines village women supporting Mary through her labor; that imagines the main room of a house given over for her use, is a reading that celebrates the generosity and hospitality often demonstrated by poor and oppressed persons.

    From birth and beyond, Jesus relied upon the solidarity and generosity of his fellow poor.
  • Any possibility of an antisemitic reading of the Nativity story (that “the Jews” rejected Jesus from his very birth by refusing his parents space in their inns or homes — I’m not saying most people do interpret traditional Nativity stories in this way, but the possibility is there) are also avoided with this reading, where Jewish Bethlehemites assist in his birth.
  • This reading also speaks to how Jesus makes room for himself amid our mundane mess!

    Jesus does not wait for us in some remote corner, so that we can go to him when we decide we’re ready, on our terms; he bursts into our bustling, the everyday chaos of an average peasant home. God compels us to make space for the Divine in the center of our lives, ready or not!

Whether or not you are on board with this “new” version of the Nativity story, I hope that, if nothing else, my poem and this essay open you up to the possibilities of scripture — the richness that can come from daring to reimagine stories we think we know by heart. The more familiar a story, the less likely we are to consider new ways of reading it; but just look what is born when we step away from the familiar to explore what lies beyond, even if only for a moment!

What else? Which Nativity stories speak to you?

Resources / Places to Learn More:

  • This Guardian article, which sums the information up pretty succinctly
  • Stephen C. Carlson’s scholarly article that goes more in depth, and argues that kataluma has a generic sense of “place to stay” that fits a variety of readings
  • Andy Mickelson’s scholarly article that likewise goes in depth, including a look at extra-biblical Greek sources that also use kataluma; and that makes some arguments about the significance of one’s interpretation of kataluma to the broader Lukan narrative.
  • My friend Laura discusses the idea of the Nativity taking place in a peasant home’s central room in the context of disability theology in their podcast episode here. They parallel Jesus’s birth story with the story of Zaccheus, where Jesus invites himself over to the tax collector’s home (“I must dine with you!”) — in both stories, Jesus announces his reliance on others for shelter and sustenance, unabashed.