Silent Night, Holy Night’: Was it calm and bright, as carols and nativity scenes suggest?

A modern children’s book about the Christmas story tells of Joseph and Mary seeking refuge in several lodges before finally, an innkeeper pities them enough to offer an animal stall across the road from the inn. The color drawing on the adjacent page depicts a small, covered stall with a manger, lots of straw and a few animals.

Such embellishment is common in Christmas narratives, with Joseph and the virgin teenager Mary seeking a hotel room in a booked-up town, though Scripture only tells us Christ was placed in a manger because no room existed in the “inn.”

Well-meaning Christmas carols often capture the tenderness of the moment by depicting a world and a Messiah in peaceful slumber (all is calm and bright); a few dare foretell of the Savior’s destiny and the manner in which his peace will come.

One such song, “What Child Is This?” probably won’t be sung at children’s Christmas pageants this year.

“Why lies He in such mean estate

Where ox and ass are feeding?

Good Christian, fear; for sinners here

The silent Word is pleading.

Nails, spear shall pierce Him through,

The cross be borne for me, for you;

Hail, hail the Word made flesh,

The babe, the son of Mary!”

Are our popular notions accurate, biblical? Is the popularized nativity the way it was? “It is a fine thing, I suppose, that we honor a sacred holiday with such homey sentiments,” writes Philip Yancey in his book “The Jesus I Never Knew” about the warm Christmas of pop culture. “And yet when I turn to the Gospel accounts of the first Christmas, I hear a very different tone and sense mainly disruption at work.”

Barry Creamer, associate professor of humanities at Criswell College, said the world Jesus inhabited was eclectic, with four or five times more Jews living outside of Palestine as inside, and many Gentiles among the inhabitants of Galilee where he would grow up.

There was religious and political division, Creamer noted. Some Jews sought a Messiah to establish his rule and throw off Roman tyranny; more liberal Jews saw messianic prophecies such as Isaiah 53 as representing Israel as a nation and not an individual leader. Politically, many Jews sought freedom from Rome while others wished to meld with the dominant Greek culture and Roman rule.

“Always, when I’m dealing with these issues every year, I like going back to the New Testament stories and just reading them to make sure we remember what it does say and not try to read into it more than it says. That’s one of the keys,” Creamer remarked.

The Gospels record that angels summoned lowly shepherds to the scene to witness God’s incarnation in the manger. Later, though Scripture doesn’t record when, mysterious wise men from the East arrive, though there’s no mention of three kings from the Orient.

“There’s no implication there that (the birth) was any more known than just among the shepherds and the few people that were surrounding them and the few relatives that were part of the process of the pregnancy and all, and then those few likely Jewish diaspora (those dispersed) who came back or who taught others who came back to worship, like the magi.”

Creamer said the wise men could have been devout, learned Jews who had moved East, or Gentiles trained by devout Jews to discern the Scriptures.

But the Messiah’s humble arrival went mostly uncelebrated, Creamer said.

“I love the implication that God does great things through small things. What people consider insignificant at a particular moment has nothing to do with its significance in eternity. It’s just like the seed that God compares the kingdom to. You plant the smallest seed and it becomes the greatest herb. I love the fact that even when Christ is born in an individual, meaning when a person gets saved, what looks like just a prayer of confession and acknowledgment really becomes a life-changing and community-changing and sometimes world-changing event.”

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