Luke 2:1–14

Martha L. Moore-Keish

Columbia Theological Seminary
Decatur, Georgia

For those of us who have grown up since the mid-1960s, the words of this passage summon up the character of Linus, the wise, blanket-toting young Peanuts character who recites Luke’s narrative on an empty stage in the Charlie Brown television Christmas special. Year after year, my family gathered to hum along with the Vince Guaraldi soundtrack and hear Linus’ simple reminder to Charlie Brown of the “true meaning of Christmas.” The familiarity of this text presents a serious challenge to the preacher. How, in the midst of a season that revels in the familiar and the sentimental, can we help our congregations attend with fresh ears and eyes to Luke’s story of Jesus’ birth?

In this essay, I will reflect on four dimensions of this story in an effort to recover its strangeness: the contrast between the imperial “registration” and Jesus’ birth; the anonymity of Mary’s child; the peculiarity of the “sign” to the shepherds; and the place of the angels’ song “Gloria in excelsis.”

Registration and the unregistered alien
This text begins with the official decree from Caesar Augustus that “all the world should be registered.” This registration, though historically questionable, refers to a census of those living in Roman territories for tax purposes. The words “register” (apographõ) and “registration” (apographó) appear with peculiar frequency at the beginning of this passage: four times in the first five verses. Clearly, Luke is setting a context in which the imperial authorities seek to impose order on their world. The decree of Augustus is broadcast throughout the land and has immediate consequences: “all went to their own towns to be registered.” The imperial context of this story sets a tone of official organization, full of outward busyness and social control.

In the midst of this context of official order and control, Jesus’ birth is utterly out of order. Mary is an unwed mother. Jesus is referred to as “her child,” not named in reference to any father, but in relationship to his mother. The birth itself occurs outside of the inn, beyond the boundaries of ordinary social interaction. Furthermore, while Caesar’s decree is public and has immediate, direct consequences, Jesus’ birth is quiet, understated, without fanfare. In fact, the birth of Jesus in vv. 6–7 marks a curious lull in the midst of the narrative, between the scurrying about of those going to be registered (vv. 1–5) and the sudden and scary appearance of the angels (vv. 8–14). Luke thus depicts the birth as an event that is “unregistered” in two senses: it is beyond the bounds of the prevailing social context, and it goes unnoticed by most of those around. Jesus is not officially registered, nor do those around him register the fact that his arrival has any significance.

W. H. Auden, in “Musee des Beaux Arts,” vividly portrays the second sense in which Jesus is “unregistered”: the way in which extraordinary events occur in the midst of the everyday. In his poetic reflections on paintings by Pieter Bruegel, including “The Numbering at Bethlehem,” Auden describes how the appearance of the Savior, like suffering, always occurs while other things are happening:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood . . .” (lines 1–8)

Bruegel’s painting itself portrays Mary and Joseph arriving unannounced in Bethlehem in the middle of the official registration; this might provide a useful visual anchor for a preacher’s reflections on this part of Luke’s text.

The child born in this passage is also “unregistered” in another sense: he is not named. In spite of the fact that the angel provides the name of the baby to Mary in the previous chapter (1:31), Luke allows the newborn to remain anonymous until 2:21, when Jesus is circumcised and named on the eighth day. The verses here initially refer to him only in relationship to Mary: “a child” (v. 5); “her child” (v. 6); “her firstborn son” (v. 7). As a newborn, he is simply his mother’s boy, another tiny infant wrapped up and beloved by a too young mother. Later, in v. 11, the angel declares to the shepherds that the one who has been born is “Savior” and “the Messiah, the Lord.” The heavenly hosts look upon this tiny infant and see something the world of Caesar cannot discern or yet name.
This anonymity raises a question about Jesus’ relationship to the world around. Are earthly powers unable to recognize or name Jesus? Can the birth of Jesus only be witnessed obliquely, or only with the help of heavenly intervention?

What sign is this?
When the angel appears to the shepherds in the second half of this text, she announces “to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior . . . ,” adding “this will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger” (vv. 11–12). The absence of a definite article in the Greek, reflected in the NRSV translation, draws attention to the oddness of this declaration. The text does not say “you will find the child” but “you will find a child.” In other words, there is no direct and obvious connection between the Savior proclaimed and the baby who is the sign. Instead, a Savior is born, and the sign is that you will find a homeless baby wrapped up, lying in an animal’s feed trough. What kind of sign is this?

“Sign” in this case does not mean miracle, as it does elsewhere in the gospel narratives. Here it means an indicator, like a road marker pointing the direction to follow. How can a homeless baby in a feed trough be like a road sign? Perhaps the significance lies in the act of recognition itself. The sign then is not just the baby himself, but the fact that the shepherds will find him. After all, the text reads, “This will be a sign for you: you will find a child . . .” Perhaps the point of the angel’s cryptic statement is that the shepherds will actually see, will actually find the swaddled baby outside the inn. They will not overlook or ignore the child, but will notice him and recognize him as the Lord.

Could it be that the sign is the event of recognition? The sign that the Savior has been born is that these scruffy sheepherders will have their eyes opened? If this reading is plausible, then it opens up interesting possibilities for reading the shepherds’ story together with the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24. In both cases, the crucial turn occurs when eyes are opened, when shepherds and disciples are enabled to recognize the identity of Jesus as Savior and Lord.

Gloria in excelsis?
How are the shepherds enabled to recognize the baby as Savior? The transformation of their vision occurs in the next movement of the story. After the cryptic proclamation of the single angel, a “multitude of the heavenly host” appears, singing words familiar to Christian worshipers since the earliest centuries of the church: “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!” (v. 14). Centuries before Linus and Charlie Brown, these words echoed through the Christian liturgy. This verse forms the first part of the “Gloria in excelsis,” the hymn dating back to the fourth century. The text has been set by composers from Palestrina to Handel to Rutter. Because it is inscribed in our memories, it is hard for us to experience with the shepherds the shock and awe of the angels’ song.

The shepherds are altered by the angelic encounter. After the heavenly choir withdraws, the shepherds leave their flocks and go to Bethlehem to see what has happened. There they see “Mary, and Joseph, and the child lying in a manger.” They then go away “glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen” (v. 20). But “what they had heard and seen” is not just the family in Bethlehem, but the angelic appearance that preceded it. It is the encounter with the angels that alters the shepherds’ vision so that they are able to recognize Jesus.

Could it be that the Gloria offers us a lens to see the wonder of the messiah’s birth? This would reverse our ordinary ordering. It is not that we recognize the birth of Jesus and then sing the Gloria, but that we hear and sing “Glory to God in the highest” and are thereby enabled to see the entrance of Jesus into our world.

Jesus enters the world outside of the ordered, official systems of imperial registration. He enters “unregistered”: not conformed to the social order, yet utterly ordinary, unrecognized, unnamed by the powers that be. It takes an angelic intervention to correct human vision, enabling people to recognize this tiny one as Savior of all.

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