Selah: Pause and Reflect

[This is one in a series of devotional reflections prepared for Horley Baptist Church during December 2022]

Once in royal David’s city stood a lowly cattle shed,
where a mother laid her baby in a manger for his bed ^[1]

What sort of picture do these words invoke? Have years of familiarity with the Christmas story created a sanitised image of a delicate wooden cot lined with clean hay and surrounded by some well-behaved cattle?

There is a cattle shed alongside our garden; we are familiar with its distinctive characteristics. A cow can be likened to a food processor into which you feed green grass and from which you obtain white milk. There is a by-product to this process, brown in colour and malodorous to the senses. Even in modern times, ‘mucking-out’ is a regular activity for those who keep dairy cattle and it is fair to assume that first-century animals were similarly behaved.

Child in the manger, infant of Mary ^[2]

A manger is a food trough for livestock of various kinds. It is a functional item, probably rough hewn, certainly not a piece of fine furniture. Fodder would be dumped into it;, it might contain insects or dead mice, the animals would slobber over it. Shepherds might be used to such conditions; wealthy astrologers certainly not.

Both these Christmas carols were written by devout women with strong clerical connections. They were both prolific writers of devotional songs and poetry. Did they have some special inspiration or did they succumb to artistic licence? Isaiah certainly had some inspiration when he wrote:

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Isaiah 54 v2-3 [NIVUK]

The Biblical accounts of the birth of Jesus are primarily those in the opening chapters of Matthew and Luke. Neither of those accounts mentions a ‘lowly cattle shed’ with ‘the oxen standing by’; furthermore, Matthew tells us that the unspecified number of wise men came some time later, after the family had moved into a house. Whatever the actual details, being born into such circumstances was just the first of many indignities that this baby would endure during his time on earth, and throughout the years since.

Child who inherits all our transgressions, all our demerits on Him fall.

But Christmas is not the end of the story.

And our eyes at last shall see him, through his own redeeming love,
for that child, so dear and gentle, is our Lord in heaven above,
and he leads his children on to the place where he is gone.

Is that child in the manger still an outcast and stranger or do you recognise him as Lord of all??

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Resources:
[1] Cecil Frances Alexander, 1848
[2] Mary MacDonald & Lachlan McBean, 1888

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Bible dates: Where appropriate, the dates given for Biblical events are based on the Bible Timeline resource
and are subject to the constraints defined on the corresponding webpage.

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Contributed by Steve Humphreys; © the Author