When the manger is empty.
It may be that only a person fallen into deep depression is unable, in this dark time of year, to sense how near the victory of light has come. The sun is just about to turn upward again, and the dark time will vanish from our memories as if it had never been, as it does every year. The anticipation and the foreboding of light already now tingle in the pit of the stomach and laugh in the face of the darkness. Soon we will once again enter a new cycle of time, to some degree renewed and hopeful, drawing along with us, through our pre-holiday and holiday activities, even the sorrowful, the depressed, the hopeless. And this is truly genuine socializing in one great togetherness, far greater than other holidays celebrated throughout the year are able to achieve.
Christmas, with the celebration of Christ’s birth, broadens and deepens this socializing. It broadens it in the sense that at Christmas vast crowds of people stream to the churches. There come the great and the small, the old and the young – those who know their church well, those who come to church once a year only at Christmas, and also those who enter a church for the first time. It deepens it, because the Christian message of the Savior’s birth reveals a much deeper perspective on Christmas, compared with how folklore and folk traditions explain the meaning of the Winter Solstice.
But here it must be recalled that to celebrate the feast of Christ’s birth is not Christ’s command. And in the early days of Christianity the congregations did not celebrate this feast. Only considerably later, in the fifth century AD, as some sources attest, the Christian church in the West and the East began to introduce the observance of the feast of Christ’s birth. Despite this, the celebration of the feast has a biblical basis, which we find in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew.
On the one hand, the celebration of the feast of Christ’s birth has a spiritual basis, but on the other hand it was introduced by people, just like all other traditions. In it, human conceptions and God’s revelation meet. The presence of the human part is metaphorically symbolized by the manger in which the newborn is laid. The manger had been carefully made by some craftsman, to be used for feeding livestock. It was clean and smelled of fresh straw. There was also someone who allowed Joseph and Mary to use it, and they laid in it the little Jesus, who did not belong to this world, but who, as the Son of God, was God’s revelation to people. The little child rested submissively in a human handiwork, just as today He submissively yields to the tradition of His birthday – both when the news of little Jesus’ birth is sung in songs, recited in poetry, and possibly also when a doll is laid in the manger that belongs to the church’s decoration.
Together with Jesus’ birth, God’s angels brought to the inhabitants of the earth a message that unmistakably testified to peace with God. In many places in the Old Testament there are tidings that a time will come when God’s wrath will subside and a bringer of peace will be sent to people.
“Peace on earth,” the angels proclaim to the shepherds when Jesus was born.
“Peace be with you,” says the already risen Christ to His disciples on Easter morning.
“For He is our peace,” writes Paul in the letter to the Ephesians, calling on the readers to renounce expressions of hatred.
Unmistakably this Child of Peace calls us to peace with God and to peace among ourselves. It seems that the Christmas service is the place where one can truly experience the peace that comes from God Himself, hearing the message of the gospel and savoring the Christmas mood. Just as on the historical day of Jesus’ birth, when all who heard the good news had gathered at the manger.
On this occasion I want to be like a child and ask: but why is it that many who leave the church, having heard the message of peace, are not bringers of peace? Why is there no peace on earth? Why is there no peace among people?
Perhaps because Jesus does not rest in the manger at all? Perhaps because every year we lay Him anew in the manger according to our own notions, thereby unwittingly overshadowing the fact that Jesus has not promised to come to us each year as a little child, but He has promised to come a second time, and that will be only once and the last.
And so many, after celebrating Christmas, once the songs have been sung and the candles have gone out, are left with an empty manger. Because the child created in the imagination is not in it. The child has long been the risen Jesus. But the joy of the feast, which so strongly stirred all the senses, has dissipated together with the smoke of the dying candles.
Yet life and socializing go on. How does socializing happen at an empty manger? First of all, by filling it. By filling it with various goods in various ways and by various means. Some giving generously of themselves, others giving generously and also taking for themselves, others more cunning – taking only for themselves. When the manger is at last full, then the dividing of the manger’s contents begins. As the folk saying goes: “At a full manger there are many eaters.” And then the spoons are handed out according to other traditions. The larger ones to the strongest, the smaller ones to the weaker, but the weakest of all are often left empty-handed. Everyone with a spoon, regardless of its size, still has friends and friends of friends, who also need to be served. For a deeper understanding of this truth, another metaphor is useful, one connected with piglets jostling at the trough. And such socializing, sad as it may be, is not characteristic only outside the church. Here it is hard to argue against the scientists who say that the human being differs from the pig, in a sense, by only a few percent. Yes, and the peace, the peace that is so generously given in the newborn Jesus, is simply not there, because Jesus has been cast aside, but the manger has been kept. Perhaps only for a moment, when the belly is full and the pleasures fulfilled, a euphoric peace is experienced.
To some this comparison may seem cruel. I agree. But true – agree with me. For there are only two paths after receiving the revelation that the Christmas message gives us – either to leave the feast together with Jesus and become bringers of peace, or to remain at the empty manger.
Rudīte Losāne
LLSTA chairwoman