A Tale Of Mangers And Swaddling Cloths

Luke 2:1-7  John20:5  Luke24:53

“She wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger”

These are words that trip so easily off the tongue as we recount once again the wonderful story of the birth of Jesus. Yet, it seems to me that we must never fall into the trap of seeing this story in isolation from everything else that happened to Him and I’ve been thinking how it is that swaddling cloths and mangers give us two important threads which help us to see the significance of the Christmas story in the light of what was to follow.

Jesus was as good as born in the open air. It is unlikely that the stable would have given much protection from the elements and so it was natural that Mary would gather some linen cloth and wrap her baby up for protection against the cold.

Some thirty years later they would tear him down from a cross dead and Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus it was, who would gently carry that body to a specially prepared tomb, and they would bind in cloth again according to the burial custom of the day.

Swaddling cloths – there at his birth and at his death, and at his second birth for   when the disciples go to the tomb early, John records twice that Peter noticed that the cloths which had bound him were now lying in a place by themselves.

There is all sorts of speculation about the place where Jesus was born.

Was it a stable, was it part of the house or was it possibly a cave?

The latter is a distinct possibility.

Whatever it was, it is likely that the manger in which they laid him was hewn out of rock. It was probably not the simple wooden construction of our nativity plays but something sturdier and stronger.

Some thirty years later, they laid him in rock again, in a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid and they fully expected that this rock would encase him forever. He began quietly and uneventfully in a rock hewn manger and ended quietly and uneventfully in a rock hewn tomb.

Little did they know that these strongholds could not contain him either infant or full grown for long.

“She laid him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger” says Luke in his account of the birth of Jesus.

“They wrapped his body in a linen cloth and laid him in a rock-hewn tomb” says the same writer in his account of the death of Jesus.

His is saying something we must never forget.

The birth of Jesus only has significance in the light of what happens next.

The story of Bethlehem’ stable only springs to life if you have heard and accepted the story of Jerusalem’s tomb. His birth, his death and his resurrection have to be joined together if we are to understand the meaning of God coming down to earth for us in human form.

Not just by being one of us as a child , though that is miracle enough– but undergoing the full struggles of humanity even to the point of death. His identification with our beginnings and our endings is how salvation is won for us.

Do not lightly pass over these familiar references to swaddling cloths and mangers for they are important markers as to who this Jesus really is and what it is that he really does.

And if we can respond to such a love as this we will find that he gathers us into an enwrapping as soft as any linen and into an eternal promise firmer than any rock.

It is of swaddling cloths and mangers then, that the love of God is made.

RH 25.12.07