Dec 20 – the song of the commoner
2009 October 20
Week Four Dec 20 Luke 2: 1-20 At Jesus’ birth, the holy family is welcomed into a peasant home, where the people do their best and it is enough. Common people shelter him. The unclean shepherds are judged to be clean and they who are outcast become honored guests. A savior is born for outcasts/lowly. INVITATION: Invite someone unlikely to join you for the Gathering on Christmas Eve.
Strictly speaking, the Luke passage tells us nothing about a peasant family, a welcome, or a home. It says that there was no room at an inn, and that Mary laid the child in a manger. There seemed to be some confusion at the arts team meeting as to what a manger is. This is a manger: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manger
Luke tells us nothing about the inn, the inn-keeper, any kind of family the inn-keeper may have had, or anything about the inn-keeper’s attitude toward receiving Mary and Joseph. We know nothing about their interaction with the inn-keeper. Luke doesn’t give it and doesn’t even mention the keeper.
What Luke knows about the scenario is this: After a journey, Mary is ready to give birth and does so in a manger “because there was no room at the inn.” It doesn’t even say an inn-keeper gave her permission. If we want to conjecture, I don’t see a conjecture toward sympathy and welcome on the part of what is for a Luke a hypothetical inn-keeper making any more sense than a conjecture toward the inn keeper not existing or the inn keeper being hostile. Are we really to believe that upon seeing Mary tired from her journey and about to give birth, a welcoming inn-keeper wouldn’t have been able to make room somewhere…maybe even in his own quarters? But that’s not the story we have.
So, what peasant home are the holy family welcomed into? What peasant people “do their best and it is enough”? I don’t get the sense from Luke that anyone besides Mary and Joseph are sheltering Christ. Perhaps by “the people who do their best and it is enough” we mean Mary and Joseph. That would make sense. But the idea of them being welcomed into a peasant home is not in the text.