I have a small piece of ochre-colored plaster on my desk that once formed part of a frescoed wall in the ancient site of Herodium in Israel.
Herodium was King Herod's summer palace, located on an artificially heightened plateau about three miles southeast of the town of Bethlehem. There's nothing there but rubble these days, but at the turn of the first century it was the location of a lavish royal residence that served as Herod's summer palace, district capital, fortress and monument to his penchant for self-aggrandizement.
According to Josephus the palace was encircled by two concentric walls with four defense towers that soared five stories or more above the complex. Two hundred polished marble steps led from the bottom of the mountain through the walls and into the interior to a villa with opulent apartments furnished for the royal family and their guests.
A lower campus, at the foot of the mountain, boasted a Roman bath with hot, cold and lukewarm pools, surrounded by colonnaded gardens. Not far from the bath there was an elaborate banquet hall with frescoed walls—from which my piece of plaster came—and exotic mosaic floors. This was a home for the rich and famous.
Herod built his palace to commemorate a victory in battle against a Hasmonean prince in 40 B.C., but he may have had another purpose in mind. Herod was not a Jew—he was an Edomite—but he knew the Jewish scriptures. He was aware that Israel's Messiah would be born in Bethlehem as Micah predicted: "But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times" (Micah 5:1). Perhaps Herod hoped that the Coming King would be born in his palace.
God, however, is not so grandiose. He announced his birth not to glitterati but to lowly shepherds, the outcasts of Israel. He chose to be born, not in a castle but in a cave. It was there in a hole in the ground into which shepherds drove their flocks at night that the little Lord Jesus was born.
I've written before that the Old Testament is replete with stories about God's desire to get next to us. German theologian Gerhard von Rad, whose thinking dominated Old Testament studies for fifty years or more, described these efforts as irruptions, a word that means "to break in." (It's the antonym of the more familiar word, eruption, "to break out.") Christmas, whatever else it may be, is God's supreme irruption—his effort to break into our world and show us the measure of his love.
One writer, Fredrick Buerchner, put it this way: "The child is born among beasts. The sweet breath and steaming dung of beasts. And nothing is ever the same again. Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear, or to what lengths he will go, or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of mankind... For those who believe in God his birth means that God himself is never safe from us, and maybe that is the dark side of Christmas, the terror of the silence. He comes in such a way that we can always turn him down, as we would crack a baby's skull like an eggshell or nail him up when he gets too big for that" (The Hungering Dark).
David Roper
