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BBefore we begin, let me tell you that I hate what I’m about to do. That’s because few things infuriate me more than people who Well, actually Christmas songs. It is true that there was no innkeeper in the Gospel stories of the Nativity. We I do not know how There were many wise men, but we know that they were not there at the same time as the shepherds. But no one wants to be under the mistletoe with a guy arguing about quantity Mary knew.
You probably know that the idea of a “Silent Night” is more Victorian sentimentalism than biblical reality. “Little Lord Jesus does not cry” assumes that a baby’s cries are a sin rather than part of the good human nature assumed by the Son of God. We shouldn’t stop singing these songs, but at the same time, maybe we should ask ourselves exactly why the cries of the manger are really important to us.
The Gospels reveal that the manger was in the middle of a war zone. Joseph was going to the City of David with Mary to participate in what was precisely a census for which God had repudiated David himself. And he was doing it at the behest of a pagan Roman government occupying David’s throne, seeming to invalidate the promise God had made to his people. The puppet bureaucrat warming this seat – King Herod – was so enraged by the Davidic prophecies that threatened his position that he, like the Pharaoh of old, ordered the killing of every baby boy in the area.
This mass murder was, Matthew reveals, a fulfillment of the words of the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more » (Jer. 31:15; Matthew 2:18). The little town of Bethlehem was, like the Hebrew territory of ancient Egypt, a place of lamentation and lamentation.
In the middle of it all, a baby was writhing in swaddling clothes. And if you had been there, you would undoubtedly have heard not only crying but also screams coming from this manger.
Part of the reason it is difficult for us to think this way is that it is difficult for us to imagine the mystery of the Incarnation, that the Word became flesh and took up residence among us ( John 1:14) in every state of human life. from embryo to adult. But much of what we miss is that we fail to see how crying is an essential aspect of both our created humanity and our redeemed humanity. As J. Gresham Machen said, almost a century ago now, in his defense of the virgin birth: “For this doctrine it is essential that the Son of God live a complete human life on this earth. But human life would only be complete if it began in the mother’s womb.
At one time or another, most of us accidentally and randomly convert to some kind of Zen Buddhism. Without thinking about it, we assume that the goal of the Christian life is that of a guru leading us to introspective, inner tranquility, detachment from desire, and quietude.
The Gospel, however, is accompanied by imagery of the loudest and most tumultuous moments of all life: birth and death. You must be born again, Jesus told us (John 3:3). We must take up our crosses and follow him to die to live, he revealed.
This reality is linked to one of the most important images that the Bible uses for the experience of faith: that of the cry.
The Apostle Paul wrote that the Spirit prompts those of us who are united with Christ to “cry out.”Abba, Father’” (Rom. 8:15). In fact, Paul writes, the experience of Abba’s cry is the Spirit of the Son of God, crying out from our hearts (Galatians 4:6). The life of the Spirit means, he affirmed, that we join in the groaning of the universe around us, a groaning he calls “the pains of childbirth” (Rom. 8:22).
For Paul, prayer looks much less like the carefully crafted prayers that Jesus criticized from the esteemed religious leaders around him and more like an inarticulate groping for words, whereby the Spirit himself “intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” (Rom. 8:26, ESV).
This cry of Abba is a reminder of a specific moment in the life of Jesus: a prayer that is not a silent night but a wail of anguish. Looking at the cup of wrath before him, crucifixion under the curse of the law, Jesus cried out, “Abba, Father” (Mark 14:36) in anguish, his sweat like drops of blood (Luke 22:44).
But the disciples who accompanied him did not cry out, asleep as they were on the hay. For them, everything was calm, everything was bright. That was the problem, not the solution.
The cross itself was a reminder of those days in the manger. Jesus, in horror at the execution, cried out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Mark 15:34). It was the words of an old song, meant to be all about it – a bit like if I said, “It fell at clear midnight”, most of you would know I was talking about Christmas.
Here Jesus was quoting Psalm 22, a song of David. The entire psalm speaks prophetically of the fullness of what happens at Golgotha, “the place of the skull” – from the experience of abandonment (v. 1) to thirst (v. 15) to the pierced hands and feet, lack of broken bones, and soldiers playing for clothes (vv. 16-18). The song, however, is not only a song of lament but also a song of hope in God’s faithfulness to his promises.
In the same psalm, David also sings that he learned to face the horrors of death as a baby. “Yet you brought me out of my mother’s womb; you made me trust you, even in my mother’s womb. From my birth, I turned to you; from my mother’s womb you are my God” (vv. 9-10). The dependence of birth and childhood was linked, David sang, to the experience of all God’s people: “In you our ancestors trusted; they trusted and you delivered them. To you they cried and were saved” (vv. 4-5).
And as Jesus looked down from the cross, he could see the very woman who had swaddled him near the manger: his mother.
Biologists, psychologists, and anthropologists all tell us that the interaction between a baby’s cry and a parent’s response is fundamental to how they attach to each other. An infant feels an existential need – for food, for protection, for comfort – and cries, realizing that when everything is as it is supposed to be, the child is not alone in the world; someone who loves it hears it. This is true in the life cycle of human beings because, ultimately, it is the even more primal desire for which we are all created: to trust in a fatherly God to nourish and protect us.
Jesus was the firstborn of the new humanity. Coupled with our common human nature, he lived the life of trust and faith from which we had been broken. When he teaches us to pray to “our Father”, to “give us this day our daily bread” and to “deliver us from evil”, he tells us what, in his humanity, he has learned since the manger from Bethlehem.
Christ calls us to become like little children again – dependent and vulnerable, attached and loved – not by cooing and gurgling but by screaming and moaning. And, like Jesus, even in these loud cries and tears, we are heard (Hebrews 5:7).
Everything is not always calm. Not everything is always bright. But because the manger and the cross are also our story, a not-so-silent night is still a holy night.
Russell Moore is the editor-in-chief of Christianity today and directs its public theology project.
