Get me outa this cave!

Christmas is right around the corner. Churchy, religious people call it Advent so that non-Christians won’t know what we’re talking about. After all, if they understood the true meaning of Christmas, they might turn to the Lord and be saved and then we’d have fewer people to feel superior to. (Yep, that’s another blog post – I’ll save it for another day….)

So, if non-Christians know anything about the biblical reasons for Christmas, they have learned that from “Christmas stories” whether on TV or in our churches. Maybe they even have come to a Christmas service just because it seemed like the right thing to do. Maybe they even heard the Nativity story there in church. But, did they hear it correctly? Or, did we take advantage of the opportunity to communicate God’s story by telling it wrongly? Maybe we have one part so messed up that it creates more confusion for Guests to the church and unfaithfulness in those in the family of faith.

One thing that’s generally jacked up in our Nativity story is the place where Jesus was born. Some have Him in a stable – the story says He was laid in a manger. Others have Him in a cave – that’s where you’re told He was if you tour Israel. And the villain of the story is the evil innkeeper who threw a pregnant mother out into the cold December night, leaving her to bed with animals. And maybe that’s where the error creeps into the story, with a terrible translation of a single word and a Western interpretation filled in around that poorly-translated word.

The word in Greek is kataluma. In nearly all of our English translations, kataluma in Luke 2:7 is translated “inn.” And Westerners, especially Americans think “motel.” So we are left with a young couple in desperate need of a place to sleep and an evil, money-grubbing innkeeper who took the last of their money and made them sleep with the animals. Isn’t that the story pretty much as we tell it?

But kataluma is used in another place in Luke. Sound biblical interpretation says that you should look for other occurrences of difficult words, especially if the same author uses that word in another place. And where is kataluma used again by Luke? Well, if “inn” is the right understanding, then you might think that it’s in the story of the Good Samaritan who took the injured man to an inn for his recovery. But the word Luke uses in 10:34 is pandoxion, not kataluma. So, where is the other usage of kataluma? It’s in 22:11:

“and say to the owner of the house, ‘The Teacher asks: Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’”

In fact, Mark also uses kataluma in his account of the upper room where the Lord and His disciples shared in the Passover meal.

And this may seem like an insignificant point, but I’m going to try to convince you otherwise. You see, Joseph was going to his city of origin, Bethlehem. It’s the place that his family called home. He would have been going to stay with family, not at some motel. There probably would have been no inns in Bethlehem; it was too small and insignificant. But there would have been kin. And Joseph would have gone to the patriarch of the family trusting that hospitality would assure him of lodging in the upper room, the guest room. And the story tells us that the guest room was occupied, probably by other family who had come “home” to be counted in the census. And so they were lodged in the main level, with the family. And the reference to a manger? Well, that would have been at the rear of the main level because livestock were brought into the rear of the home to keep them warm in cold weather and also to provide heat for the house. We know this from archeological evidence.

So what? Well, the Middle Eastern concept of hospitality is huge. And while misunderstanding this part of the Nativity story doesn’t impact Christology (theology pertaining to Jesus), it greatly affects an understanding of our obligation to community. In truth, if we were to be honest about our gospel, there is a huge communal component that we, as Americans, have really missed. And what about that person who knows nothing of the gospel, that Christmas Guest in our church? Well, there’s a good chance that the story sounds like a fairy tale. And if they do happen to hear about God Incarnate, they will probably miss altogether the responsibility we have toward one another. We have…