The God Who Stoops

The Story of Advent

In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that the whole empire should be registered. ² This first registration took place while Quirinius was governing Syria. ³ So everyone went to be registered, each to his own town. ⁴ Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family line of David, ⁵ to be registered along with Mary, who was engaged to him and was pregnant. ⁶ While they were there, the time came for her to give birth. ⁷ Then she gave birth to her firstborn son, and she wrapped him tightly in cloth and laid him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.

Luke 2:1-7 (CSB)

There’s a reason many of the stories we love today begin the same way. A child found in obscurity. Small, overlooked but somehow carrying something no one would expect: destiny.

Luke Skywalker. Harry Potter. Frodo Baggins.

It’s why The Mandalorian made Baby Yoda a cultural icon¹. People who had never watched a single episode suddenly owned plush dolls and stickers. You couldn’t escape him, he was on the back of Kia Souls and Christmas trees alike.

But maybe the deeper reason is that modern stories still borrow their power from the oldest one.

Peering behind the scenes of Advent, we are met by the God who stoops.

The Little Town of Bethlehem

Bethlehem was small, a rural village. The kind of town near your own city where if while driving by, you blink, you miss it.

Home to a few hundred people, the only economy was agriculture. Bethlehem had no political clout, was of no strategic importance, but sat around six miles south of Jerusalem; close enough to be overshadowed but far enough to have no influence².

In the ancient world when people thought about places of power, influence, or prestige they thought of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Ephesus no one was thinking about Bethlehem.

While Bethlehem held no clout or relevance in the first century it was known for a key piece of religious history.

History that mattered not to Romans, Greeks, or the rest of the Ancient Near East, but history significant to the people of God. Bethlehem was David’s hometown, the great king of the Old Testament, one who slayed Goliath, this was the place Samuel anointed David as king. Bethlehem was the birthplace of Israel’s Golden Age monarchy. The messiah was to come through his bloodline.

Bethlehem was a painful reminder of what was. A backwater town, an aging prophecy, yet not forgotten by God; would be the place Jesus would enter.

The irony is the point.

Jesus was not born in Rome representing power. Jesus was not born in Jerusalem representing religious authority. He was born in a forgotten town holding God’s promise. The stage was set for the characters to enter into.

In most origin stories after location is a father or father figure. Uncle Owen in Star Wars, Mr. Miyagi in the Karate Kid, Uncle Phil in the Fresh Prince, Mike Ditka and the 85 Bears, Advent gives us Joseph.

Joseph was not a carpenter, at least not in the way people tend to think of it. We’re told Joseph was a tekton³. While we love the imagery of Jesus as a carpenter making wood tables someday dying on a wooden cross; that’s probably not what He built.

Joseph was a builder, a construction laborer and in Galilee, stones were far more common than workable lumber. Joseph was likely doing stone work. He would have been hired for construction projects and repairs.

Joseph wasn’t poor nor elite, he wasn’t middle class because that category didn’t exist. He was in the working class. Joseph and Mary were able to travel and pay taxes, Joseph could support a family, but they didn’t live comfortably. In today’s vernacular they operated paycheck to paycheck. This is illustrated when Mary and Joseph present Jesus at the temple and offer two doves, the sacrificial alternative for those who couldn’t afford a lamb⁴.

When you think Joseph, think Jonathan Kent, Superman’s dad. Blue collar, unremarkable, easily overlooked in the social hierarchy.

Jesus enters history, when everything came from your father, your namesake, identity, and prestige. Joseph was not a priest, merchant, or political figure. He held no clout, what he held was humility and love.

Joseph wasn’t noticed by the religious elites, to Rome he was another cog in the laboring masses.

However, he had a badge of honor. Covered in dust, a relic of the past, he was a descendant from David. That did not bring wealth, privilege, or power but did mean he carried Messianic lineage; he fulfilled Micah 5⁵ and 2 Samuel 7⁶. The blue-collar tekton brought Jesus into David’s family tree.

Jesus wasn’t born into an aristocratic, priestly, or wealthy merchant household. He was born into a working class home, one that lived close to the margins, endured suffering, knew the value of hard work, and had to trust in divine providence to survive.

Which leads to the manger, but to get there we have to start with the census. Jesus was born during a census, a Roman census wasn’t only about population counting. It was a reminder, a signal; you are a conquered people, you pay tribute, you belong to Caesar.

Into that humiliation a baby is born whose title will be Lord. It’s a political statement disguised as a birth announcement.

The manger in the first century wasn’t the rustic decoration you picked up at Hobby Lobby last week, it was a functional tool, ordinary and dirty. A manger was either stone or carved wood primarily used as a feeding trough, usually fixed to the wall of the lower room of a house. This was used for sheep, donkeys and whatever household animals were kept, which meant it was regularly filled with hay and animal saliva. A place of smells, moisture, and bacteria; nothing soft or comforting.

The most unroyal birthplace imaginable.

But that’s not the only angle of scandal, in Jewish culture anything associated with animals spaces was seen as ritually unclean⁷. Jesus’ first resting place isn’t only humble, but religiously problematic. The Messiah comes into the world touching what everyone else avoided.

Why a manger?

There was no room in the guest space. Bethlehem was in a census season which meant this small village of a few hundred residents would have suddenly swelled with travelers claiming lineage from David.

In a typical first century home there was a family room where everyone lived, cooked, and slept, then the upper guest room (where we get the idea of an “inn,” a medieval translation choice⁸, but a more accurate translation for κατάλυμα is guest room) was for relatives and travelers, then a lower level where animals were brought in on cold nights. This also protected them against predators.

The “wooden barn” imagery came much later through medieval and Renaissance art; artists painting what their world looked like, not the first century.

The biblical story is one of a simple, crowded house in a tiny village overflowing with travelers. With no space in the upper level, Mary and Joseph stayed in the lower level, placing Jesus into the manger.

Luke is showing us something significant.

Birth customs in the ancient world were symbolic, your birth declared your social class before you ever spoke a word⁹. A royal birth happened in a palace with servants and midwives. An elite birth was in private clean quarters with midwives. An ordinary birth was in a home with the village midwife.

But emergency births or births of scandal happened wherever you could manage. As far as we can tell from the text there was no midwife, no extended family assistance, and certainly no private room¹⁰.

The manger shouts the Messiah will not descend down through privilege, but will descend into poverty, the cold, dark, and forgotten. Jesus laid in a manger is God declaring there is no heart too dark or dirty for Me. No one is beyond the grace of My Son.

The first century was a culture of honor and shame¹¹. A king was expected to enter in honor and yet in the paradox of the Gospel, the story begins with a reversal.

Then in the midst of this reversal we come to the first witnesses: shepherds.

Shepherds were not the sentimentalized figures imagined today. In first century Judea they were low status laborers. Rabbinic tradition often regarded shepherds as socially disreputable and unreliable, placing them among occupations whose testimony was commonly distrusted¹². They were social outsiders, living on the margins.

If Jesus had been born in a palace, the shepherds would not have been allowed to cross the threshold, but a birth in a space reserved for animals, the baby lying in a trough, was a scene shepherds knew all too well.

Jesus born in the manger becomes an open invitation to the least respected people. A statement that the Messiah is not guarded by priests or elites and only accessible by a few—all can cross the threshold.

The Incarnation of Jesus begins in the least religiously, and socially appropriate way possible. Revealing a Messiah who embraces vulnerability, chooses obscurity, enters poverty, foreshadowing His entire ministry.

The king who washes feet, the teacher who touches lepers, the Messiah who rides a borrowed donkey, and the Savior who dies on a criminal cross. The manger is the first wooden object that holds his body; the cross will be the last.

And let us not forget Mary.

We often imagine Mary as this serene 20-something woman in robes, but historically that’s not even close. In first century Jewish culture girls were normally betrothed soon after puberty, marriage often occurred between 13 to 15 for girls and mid teens to early twenties for boys. This was how life worked in an agrarian survival driven context¹³.

When the scriptures introduce us to Mary, we are not meeting a grown woman. We’re meeting a teenage girl from an obscure village with zero social power. She couldn’t own property, initiate legal action, testify in most courts, or even make independent social or economic decisions. Her entire life was defined by her relationship to a male guardian, first her father and eventually her husband.

When Gabriel appears and tells Mary she’ll bear the Messiah, she’s not making a free or empowered modern choice. She made a choice from one of the most powerless positions a person could hold in culture. This wasn’t her evaluating options in life, it was the courage to say; I will probably lose everything, I have no safety net, I am fully dependent on God.

God didn’t use a queen, a priest’s daughter, or someone of wealth. He chose a teenage girl in a backwater town, whose voice held no sway and name no one recognized. The most important role in history is given to someone who’s entire worth in that society was secondhand.

Through the narrative of Advent, the whole story is intentionally upside down, not by accident or misfortune. God is making his point clear, He does His greatest work where human greatness is absent.

The nativity is a wrecking ball crashing to the ground every expectation of what a king, a messiah, or a savior is supposed to look like.

A king is supposed to be born in a palace surrounded by luxury, protected by an army, announced with ceremony. The king of the universe is placed in a feeding trough. The first throne Jesus sat on was a manger.

For this long awaited birth there are no private chambers, no midwife, not even a guest room, only a lower level with animals, smells, and dirt. Jesus enters into the mess both literally and symbolically.

The first witnesses’ were not royalty, but shepherds; social outsiders, unreliable witnesses, ceremonially unclean; rough, uneducated, and suspect. I guess it’s true what they say, blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.

While Joseph is a descendant of David, by the time of the first century, thousands of people were of David’s lineage. This was no longer a line of Princes, but a line of peasants. God’s way of saying, “I hide royal glory in ordinary people.”

Jesus doesn’t begin among the religious educated, wealthy, or powerful; He starts in an unimpressive nation, a village nobody respects, a family with no political influence, surrounded by people stuck on the bottom rung of the honor and shame ladder.

God looks down from His Heavenly throne and casts the light of the world into the darkest corner of society. The Incarnation is God’s central point, My power is made perfect in weakness, the last will be first, the humble will be exalted.

The story of Advent is the story of the God who stoops, who steps low to redeem the people He loves.

1. Loved Rich Villodas reflection on this in his Advent book, you can pick it up here: https://amzn.to/493M3e9

2. Bailey, K. E. (2008). Jesus through Middle Eastern eyes: Cultural studies in the Gospels. InterVarsity Press.

3. Keener, C. S. (1993). The IVP Bible background commentary: New Testament. InterVarsity Press.

4. Brown, R. E. (1993). The birth of the Messiah. Doubleday.

5. Bethlehem Ephrathah, you are small among the clans of Judah; one will come from you
to be ruler over Israel for me. His origin is from antiquity, from ancient times. (Micah 5:2)

6. When your time comes and you rest with your ancestors, I will raise up after you your descendant, who will come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. ¹³ He is the one who will build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. (2nd Samuel 7:12-13)

7. For further clarification, in Second Temple Judaism, Animals were not sinful, but animal spaces, that would had blood, dung, bodily fluids, or carcasses were ritually impure.

8. In medieval Europe, ‘guest lodgings’ were conceptualized as inns, so translators picked the word audiences would understand and hundreds of years later it ended up on children church flannel graphs.

9. Malina, B. J., & Pilch, J. J. (2006). Social-science commentary on the Synoptic Gospels. Fortress Press.

10. Luke normally includes supporting characters when they matter, their absence here seems to follow the narrative arc of a birth account that is stark, stripped down, and exposed.

11. Malina, B. J. (2001). The New Testament world: Insights from cultural anthropology (3rd ed.). Westminster John Knox Press.

12. Jeremias, J. (1969). Jerusalem in the time of Jesus: An investigation into economic and social conditions during the New Testament period. Fortress Press.

13. Meyers, C. (2013). Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite women in context (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.