The Christmas Cave

We’ve gotten very attached to some ideas about the birth of Jesus that are suppositions. One is that Jesus was born in a stable. In fact, Luke says Mary laid in him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn. Where that manger was is not mentioned. The oldest Christian tradition portrays the nativity has occurring in a cave. The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, built on the supposed site of Jesus’ birth, is mostly underground. And caves are still used to keep animals in Israel today. To be born in a stable is interesting enough. G.K. Chesterton finds something more in the idea of the Son of God being born in a cave.

"It was a cave used as a stable by the mountaineers of the uplands about Bethlehem; who still drive their cattle into such holes and caverns at night. Nevertheless it is true that the cave has not been so commonly or so clearly used as a symbol as the other realities that surrounded the first Christmas. It was here that a homeless couple had crept underground with the cattle when the doors of the crowded caravanserai had been shut in their faces; and it was here beneath the very feet of the passers-by, in a cellar under the very floor of the world, that Jesus Christ was born.

Whether as a myth or a mystery, Christ was obviously conceived as born in a hole in the rocks primarily because it marked the position of one outcast and homeless. Christ was not only born on the level of the world, but even lower than the world. The first act of the divine drama was enacted, not only on no stage set up above the sight-seer, but on a dark and curtained stage sunken out of sight. In the riddle of Bethlehem, it was heaven that was under the earth.

There is in that alone the touch of a revolution, as of the world turned upside down. It would be vain to attempt to say anything adequate, or anything new, about the change which this conception of a deity born like an outcast or even an outlaw had upon the whole conception of law and its duties to the poor and outcast. It is profoundly true to say that after that moment there could be no slaves."