In a question-answer session at a Christian college, a student schooled in the literalist tradition asked the great writer Madeleine L’Engle if she thought the creation story in Genesis was literally true. Was there a literal Garden of Eden and a literal Adam and Eve? Her answer was simple: “It’s truer than that.”
I have found that the more I read the Word, the more depths I find there are to be plumbed that go beyond the story, no matter how historically true the account. Over time, the Jews have proven to be careful historians of places, events, and genealogies. But the deeper truths of metaphor woven into the account of historical events is an interconnected revelation of eternal consequence.
In all the prophecies related to the coming of the Messiah and the events surrounding the birth Jesus the Christ, is a story that is truer than the facts of the happening. So that we would know how true it is, the details matter and are more than random, although it must have seemed so at the time.
The bookends that hold the story of what we now know as the coming of the long-expected Messiah—the bookends were made of wood. Now, one would think that an event of such consequence so long prophesied and so well-known over centuries by both the commoners and the learned, when it actually took place, would be earmarked by symbols of royalty, pageantry, and celebration by the pillars of power.
But it seems that the heavy doors of history most often swing on very small hinges. And this event and the short life-span that followed it that was to alter history was so ordinary and so unspectacular that the subtle story unfolded with little notice for those considered to be “somebody.” In fact, the wooden book-ends that held the story were not even fine polished wood, but the ripped and rugged boards that would make a carpenter cringe.
At the time the circumstances seemed a difficult inconvenience brought about by an edict from an invasive power-structure to bleed the citizens of more taxes. Only the young pregnant woman and her betrothed knew that another Presence propelled them forward, a Presence that had planted a promise and a seed in the young woman. The two of them protected that seed as best they could even though the mandate to return to the place of their genealogical origin made them strangers in an overcrowded city, bearing what, back in the Exodus that long preceded theirs, was called “the bread of Presence” (Exodus 25:3), now about to be made flesh.
So it was that these two arrived in Bethlehem, the City of Bread. But there was no “table of Presence” to hold this Bread, at least until a kind inn keeper offered his shelter for animals so the urgent baby wouldn’t be relegated to the street. The rough-sawn feeding trough, likely already half filled with seeds and grains for the evening feeding of the inn’s guest donkeys and horses, was offered, too, with some clean hay for both the young couple and their soon-to-be-born infant; the inn keeper provided at least a private corner, warmed by the breath of animals, in which Mary could finish her labor. Did the inn keeper’s wife bring water and some cloths? Did she help the awkward carpenter with the delivery?
We only know that this promised Messiah was laid on some fresh hay, swaddled in cloths to make him feel secure in this very insecure place. When his tiny hand brushed against the splintered, rough-sawn wood of the manger, did Joseph cringe, he who had sanded and polished so many pieces of fine wood for cabinets and doors and ornamental furniture?
Did Mary grasp these moments of rest and solitude with her baby before borrowed neighbors rushed in with the newborn lambs they couldn’t leave behind on the hillside, to tell of another Presence—that of angels filling the sky...and their hearts? Little did those, crowded in that stable around this fragile infant, know that this would not be the last time this tender hand would touch such rugged wood, nor that He, too, would become a carpenter, loving fine wood, sanding it smooth, making it shine.
But He would live His life against the grain, rubbing systems and governments the wrong way by his very life and words. Systems would resent his sanding and planing, the knocking off the barbs of cruelty to the poor and powerless. And this carpenter’s hand would offensively be nailed against the grain to the roughest of woods—a cross—not because He was powerless, but because His power was from another system, the law of love.
The manger. The cross. Literal bookends of a new kind of Kingdom. Yes, literal wood and a literal baby. But truer than that. The Bread of Life would invade our world in a place called the City of Bread. The seed of God himself would be laid in a rough-sawn rugged feed trough for animals, and this great God Jehovah would come all the way to where we are. He would begin and end His physical, literal days on this earth with a literal manger and a literal cross. But our own hearts would be this Bread’s table of Presence.
Oh, yes, we love the Christmas story. But in this story, everything counts because it’s so much truer than that!
