Luke’s Nativity: The Census, the Manger, and the Shepherds

Christmas Year C; Luke 2:1-14 and/or 15-20

The nativity from Luke’s Gospel is read every Christmas, but in this year of Luke there is an opportunity to consider the familiar story as part of the whole narrative.¹ While it may prove impossible (and perhaps beside the point) for many worshippers to sift out completely the Lukan elements from the Matthean in the mash-up of Christmas images and stories that inhabit our collective seasonal consciousness, the preacher nevertheless has an opportunity to expound a story and a text here, and not just an abstraction or tradition.

The two infancy narratives do share in presenting more than the fact of Jesus’ birth, but the appearance of God as deliverer in a human history dominated by illegitimate or tyrannical rulers, representative of a deeper and more obscure power whose shadow is cast over the world. In Matthew, the evil Herod and the exotic Magi invoke that wider sphere of rulers and peoples; in Luke great ones are mentioned, but the actual players on stage are more humble, and the point is made through the experience of these.

Luke opens this section with a characteristic reference to global (for him) politics and history, this time to Augustus and a great census. There is a historical problem here, about the date of Quirinius’ governorship (about a decade after Herod’s death; cf. 1:5).² If you’re in any doubt, these difficulties are rarely the stuff of which sermons are made. The preacher expounds a text, not just events we may reconstruct from it. Luke’s point is to connect Jesus’ birth to the world his readership inhabits, and to present the significance of that beginning in obscurity for empires and rulers as well as for shepherds and angels.

The mention of a census is not just a chronological marker (regardless of its accuracy). A census in pre-modern times was always a wildly unpopular exercise, designed to make the extraction of taxes— systematic plunder, not a distributive process for a common good— more efficient. The depth of antipathy to these can be seen in the story of an abortive census under David (see 2 Sam 24). Luke’s sequel also refers to a revolt that had taken place “in the days of the census” (Acts 5:37), perhaps this same one.

The journey of Mary and Joseph then has a poignant or even tragic element that could be compared to the Matthean story of the flight into Egypt. While Luke’s journey story providentially fulfills the Messianic expectation that a savior would come from Bethlehem, David’s town, the trip is undertaken under circumstances of suffering and oppression. Mary and Joseph comply as other Judeans and Galileans did, seeming to be the victims of imperial bullying; yet we discover that God has a purpose which Augustus could not have understood.

The story continues to foreground the paradoxical centrality of the poor and God’s hidden action, which relativizes or even satirizes that of the Roman imperium. The circumstances of the birth are a part of this, although Luke’s account is vague. There is a subspecies of scholar eager to tell you that the text does not refer to an “inn,” despite NRSV and most other translations, nor indeed to a stable. We might benefit from reconsidering the issue, although it’s not completely clear what we are to imagine. The word kataluma (rendered “inn” traditionally) refers to sleeping quarters, perhaps in a house divided between human living space and an area for animals to be secured, or a room made available in cases of necessity to travelers, whether in home or some other building. So this is not a “guest room,” the alternative used in some cases, which gives an equally (or more) misleading impression of bourgeois comfort.

Nativity. Fourth century sarcophagus. Musée de l’Arles et de la Provence Antique.

Luke is not interested in being more precise, but may intend the reader to imagine extended family receiving the travelers, yet only amid crowds of the temporarily displaced, and hence them getting short shrift and being relegated to an annex shared with animals. The point in any case is not that Joseph didn’t make reservations, or that the family was incidentally squeezed for accommodation, but that the makeshift arrangements for Jesus’ birth, like the census journey as a whole, place him among the marginal. This underlines the hostility of imperial rule, but also the delightful irony that this will only serve to enable God’s plan for a new ruler to come.

The announcement of the great good news to shepherds has a similar force to the scene with the displaced child in the manger. Shepherds were members of a low-grade occupation, and the appearance of the heavenly host to them in particular has an almost absurd quality to it. These are people of no account, and yet they are recipients of something like a great divine embassy, somehow deemed the worthiest audience for a triumphant appearance. This sort of exercise should have been taking place in a palace or the Temple, before people able to make sense and respond in the world’s terms. The irony is underlined by Luke’s second use of the term “good news”—the first was in Gabriel’s announcement to Mary—which has overtones of proclamation, a public and political term and not just a way of describing a happy surprise. The angels thus make these marginal characters themselves ambassadors of divine revelation. Here if not before though, we should remember that shepherds, first out in the fields and then wandering around the “city of David,” are not neutral figures relative to the tradition and story of Israel. David was once a shepherd boy and God’s unlikely act raised him to lead the people. To the significance of these shepherds’ humble status then we must add that they are a hint of the renewal of the Davidic dynasty.

The angel reassures the frightened recipients of his news—they being all too conscious of the incongruity—with the possibility of this good news “to all the people” (v.10) This is not “to all people” as the KJV once put it, but to all the people, all of Israel. This public announcement concerns God’s people as a whole, as a community. The theme of renewing and reconstituting Israel also appears in the preaching of John just after this, and though the Gospel.

The promised “sign” of the angel (v. 12) and its subsequent fulfillment may, at its simplest, be the correspondence between what the shepherds are told and what they find when they get to Bethlehem. Yet the sign is, we have already seen, far from neutral. The angel emphasizes the improvised clothing and the fact of the manger, the signs of Jesus’ arrival among the displaced under oppressive rule. The shepherds’ own choice as witnesses now has a further direct resonance, the fact that they are herders looking for one laid in a feeding trough. God’s saving presence, the start of this story in which God’s people will be saved, is among the poorest.

Luke Johnson suggests a further and striking level of significance embedded in this scene and sign. Mary has just “wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the [kataluma].” At the end of Luke’s story however, we read that another Joseph “wrapped [Jesus’ body] in a linen cloth, and laid it in a rock-hewn tomb where no one had ever been laid” (23:53).³ A few verses after this story Mary will be told that sorrow will pierce her like a sword (v.35), so there is no reason to exclude allusion here to exactly how the salvation of God will be demonstrated and effected, in contrast to all that imperial figures of that and every age claim “good news” and “salvation” to be.

While Jesus’ story will continue past this second wrapping to its own kind of triumph and still more angelic appearances, he will never be removed from the solidarity with humankind demonstrated by his initial placement in the manger.

1. These comments refer to the both readings set for the first (2:1-14—census, manger, angels, shepherds in the fields) and second (2:15-20—shepherds at the manger) services of Christmas Day, each of which allows for the extension of the reading to include the other part.

2. There is also no corroborating evidence for a single universal census, although the active memory of a “time of the census” was real (see Acts 5:37), even if that was actually a regional rather than empire-wide event.

3. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke. Sacra Pagina 3. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991, 53.