By Jim Denison
I am traveling in the Holy Land as you read this column. Taking study tours to Israel is one of the highlights of my work. Our group will visit Bethlehem, where we will see the site of Jesus’ birth — a dark, dank cave beneath an ancient church.
By contrast, the Emirates Palace hotel in Abu Dhabi has asked the Guinness Book of World Records to verify that they have erected the most expensive Christmas tree ever recorded. The 43-foot tree is decorated with over $11 million worth of jewels and gold. Its owners want to demonstrate the safety of their hotel and increase publicity.
The contrast between Christmas today and the first Nativity continues to grow.
Bethlehem, “house of bread,” was named for the fertile fields of its surrounding valleys. The tribe of Judah settled the region. A man named Salma, descended from the family of Caleb, founded the town itself (I Chron. 2:51). A road linking Jerusalem with Hebron to the north and Egypt to the south gave the town significance.
Rachel, the mother of Joseph and Benjamin, died and was buried in Bethlehem. Her shrine is a holy site to the Jewish people to this day (Gen. 35:19; 48:7). Generations later, Ruth moved to Bethlehem, where she met and married Boaz. Her great-grandson grew up in the town, so that Bethlehem will be known forever as the “city of David.”
Imagine yourself in the Bethlehem cave at night. There’s no light except the fire you build inside, and the smoke stings your eyes and fills your lungs. There’s no circulation, so the air feels damp and musty. Animals were stabled here. Imagine the smell of a barn, multiplied many times.
Jesus was laid not in a nice wooden crib but in a stone feed trough two feet off the ground, chiseled out for feeding animals. Where donkeys and mules and sheep had been licking up barley and oats, the Lord of the universe made his first throne on Earth.
The wonder of it all is that Jesus chose to be born here. He was the only baby ever to choose his birthplace. He could have chosen Jerusalem, or Athens, or Rome, but he chose Bethlehem. He could have chosen a palace, but he chose to be born in a cave.
What happened to the cave of Christmas?
First the Romans attempted to eliminate the memory of Jesus’ birth here by planting a grove dedicated to their pagan god Adonis, the lover of Venus. They wanted their subjects to use the cave for pagan worship.
When Constantine the Great became a Christian, he and his mother built churches to commemorate holy sites and clear away pagan rituals. They began with this cave. In A.D. 330 they constructed the oldest church building in Christendom, the Church of the Nativity, directly above the cave of Christmas.
As a result, visitors the world over came to this humble site to remember what Jesus had done here. Justinian I performed further remodeling in the 6th century, and the Crusaders in the 12th. This church is today the most visited site in all of Israel, bringing millions of pilgrims from across the world to the place of our Lord’s birth.
Why was it so important that all this happen in a cave? Not in a house, or a palace, or a field, but in a cave? For this simple reason: you stoop to enter a cave, if its ceiling is low like the Bethlehem cave. You come in humility.
That’s how the shepherds came in worship — on their knees. Eventually the door to the Church of the Nativity was lowered as well, so that pilgrims today must enter it stooped over in humility. This is as it should be.
Just as Jesus made a subterranean cavern his temple, so he chooses to make our lives his dwelling: “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you?” (I Cor. 3:16). We are the cave of Christmas today.
The shepherds found the Son of God in a Bethlehem cave. Who will see him in you?