Luke, the Shepherds, and the Stable

Christmas is almost here. I'm fine with that. But Advent is nearly over and I will miss it sorely. There are good reasons and bad for that, I'm afraid. I'll start with the bad one.

Here is an ordinary map of the West Bank. You probably know that because of the long tongue of Israel that sticks in from west to east has Jerusalem on the tip of that tongue, Jerusalem in notin the West Bank. Bethlehem, just 5.2 miles to the south, really is in the West Bank.

Bette and I gave some thought to that and recalled that since our property slopes sharply down on the west side of the house, we actually have a west bank of our own. So we have taken the trouble to integrate the two maps and have put a sign on our west bank at exactly the right place for Bethlehem.

On the hills just outside Bethlehem, where David was herding his father's sheep when the prophet Samuel came to that house of looking for the next king of Israel, were shepherds...um...herding their sheep. They were confronted by "a heavenly host" and rushed off, delighted, to Bethlehem.

Bette and I have managed to represent "the heavenly host" as you see. The apron is supposed to make sure everyone knows this is the host.

The stable is another matter. Here comes a lot of literary speculation. The fact that I am cribbing it from mainline bibilcal scholars does not make it less speculative. So the stable appears in Luke because he needs something that has a manger. A manger is a feed trough. I paused, midway through Advent to speculate about the stable being the property of the Village of Bethlehem and the feed trough therefore being "the public trough" which has become so famous in our time for different things. That line of thought, Jesus being fed in the public trough, is a kind of alignment of images--for ironic intent in my case.

Luke seems to have done the same thing with another intent. A number of scholars think there is a manger in the story to call back to the Jews who were hearing the story the pictures in Isaiah 1:3: "The ox knows its owner; and the donkey knows the manger of its lord: but Israel has not known me; my people has not understood me."

In response to the angel and to the heavenly host, the shepherds of Luke go to Bethlehem and find "Christ, the Lord," as the angel said and "lying in a manger," as the angel said. They tell everyone they can find about this sign and then, they are shepherds, they go back to work.
It will be Christmas in a few days and we will need to go back to work as well.

That work, as Auden puts it in the last narration of his masterful poem, For the Time Being, looks like this.

There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance

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