Wrapped in Rags

In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that the whole world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment, when Quirinius was governor of Syria. So all went to be enrolled, each to his own town. And Joseph too went up from Galilee from the town of Nazareth to Judea, to the city of David that is called Bethlehem because he was of the house and family of David, to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. While they were there, the time came for her to have her child, and she gave birth to her firstborn son. She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.” (Luke 2.1-7)

Oddly, the evangelist Luke begins his narrative about the birth of Jesus against the grand panorama of world history, using historical events on the world stage as anchors for an obscure birth–all things considered–in Bethlehem in Judea, a small country on the fringes of the Roman Empire, the boondocks, so to speak.

While subsequent scholarship has shown that Luke got some of his historical predicates wrong, nevertheless we do well to study Luke’s intentions for squeezing the birth of Jesus into the context of big world events. On the surface, it simply doesn’t make much sense, except to give an approximation of when Jesus was born.

But–as always happens in scripture–there is much beneath the surface. As a whole, Luke’s gospel is intent on making as its centerpiece the teaching of Rabbi Jesus that “the first shall be last and the last shall be first.” So, from this perspective, it makes perfect sense that Luke would begin the story of Jesus with the same interplay.

In situating Jesus’ birth during the reigns of  Caesar Augustus and Quirinius, Luke has presented us with some of the most powerful figures of the world, the elite, the first and foremost. They rule and dominate the world stage, or, at least, the western world. Their names are synonymous with important and impressive.

In the space of a few sentences, Luke presents the polar opposite, describing the birth of Jesus in far away Judea, the child born to simple people with little to no importance in the eyes of the world. In fact, Joseph and Mary, the newborn’s parents, are migrants on the road without a roof over their heads and with no place for them in the inn. 

Given those circumstances, the birth of Jesus was a non-event, unnoticed by and unimportant to those in the seat of power in Rome and in Syria. For Luke, this child personified and exemplified the least, the last, and the lowly–exactly the same people to whom the child–once grown–would call blessed and beloved by the Most High God.

Luke could not make the point any clearer when he describes the child as being wrapped in “swaddling clothes.” When the text was later translated from Greek into Latin, the word used was “rags.” The child was wrapped in rags, the same clothes worn by those that Rabbi Jesus healed and helped. So, for example, Lazarus, the poor man who slept on the stoop of the rich man’s house, was clothed in rags, while the rich man was clothed in purple and fine linen. The demoniac whom Rabbi Jesus heals does not even have the benefit of rags, but is naked. 

If we allow this translation, we end up with the image of the son of the Most High God dressed in rags at his birth, an image that reinforces the message and the ministry of Rabbi Jesus in the later texts. And, unsurprisingly, when he meets his death on the cross, he is stripped naked, a final act of humiliation inflicted on him by those in power, not even a ragged cloth wrapped around him.

Should we doubt Luke’s intentions at the start, he strengthens them for us in having shepherds become the first to lay eyes on the newborn in the crib, unlike Matthew, who has magi from afar come to behold the child. At the time, shepherds were on the lowest rung of the social ladder, their nights spent sleeping with their sheep, their foul smell preceding them wherever they went.

For Luke, if we are to understand the entrance of the son of God into the drama of human history, then we do not look for him in the high places, but in the low places, not among the richest of the rich, but among the poorest of the poor, not among the finely clothed, but among those clothed in rags. We waste our time looking for him anywhere but in a stable, asleep in the feed trough of farm animals, wrapped in rags. 

In our time, the equivalent is found in shabbily clad beggars on city sidewalks, in refugees without winter clothes, barricaded behind border walls, freezing and frightened in a foreign country that does not want them, and in runaway or cast-off teenagers hiding in makeshift cardboard shelters behind city high-rises, braving the cold in loose jackets and ragged hand-me-downs.

As Luke makes clear in his Christmas story, the presence of the Divine One in our midst goes unnoticed for the most part, unseen and unwanted because he is more often than not clothed in rags, unwashed and unattractive, while the attention of the world is focused on those wearing designer labels, boasting big bank accounts, and sitting down for dinner at tables covered with linen.

A number of years ago, the gifted storyteller Walter Wangerin wrote a short narrative  that he entitled “The Ragman.” It tells of “a young man, handsome and strong,” who walks through the back alleys of a city, pulling an old cart that held new and brightly-colored clothes. As the man walked along, he called out, “Rags! Rags! New rags for old. I take your tired rags!”

As the story progresses, the man exchanges all the rags of the poor and the suffering–whether a tear-drenched handkerchief or blood-soaked bandage–for a new piece of cloth or clothing from his cart. And, with each exchange, he becomes more wasted and worn, until, at the end of the day, he is “old and frail, weeping and bleeding, staggering and falling, his body wracked with pain, sorrow and disease.”

The story is intended as a portrayal of the life of Rabbi Jesus. Wangerin ends the narrative with these words, “And he did just that. Taking the old, tired rags of my existence that covered the griefs and wounds of a life sadly lived, he replaced them with the new clothes of a life spent following him. He put new rags on me and I am now a reflection of the hope he offers to us all. The Ragman. The Christ.”

A poetic and powerful portrayal, Wangerin’s story reminds us of the gospel message, especially that found in Luke who brought to the forefront all those lost in the background of life, shepherds, slaves, and servants, as well as peasants, prostitutes, and paralytics. It is found at the beginning when the Beloved Son is born in a barn, welcomed into the world by lowly shepherds, and wrapped in rags to keep him warm as the drafty winter winds blew between the slats in the barn walls.

For some reason, we want to scrub the stable of the smell of sheep and the sewage of steers, reimagining it as some bucolic scene, when, in fact, it was a brutal situation, far from a silent night as the song suggests, and closer to a sleepless night as tethered goats bleated and starving rats scurried across the dirt floor. Maybe the baby slumbered, but Mary and Joseph did not.

If we want to appreciate the depths of God’s love for humanity, then we cannot sanitize the surroundings in which he chose to become man, turning them into beautiful Christmas cards as we do, instead of staring into the shelter where few, if any of us, would dare to spend an hour, much less a full night.

Simply stated, when God sent his beloved son to live among us, he did not put him in a palace with the powerful, but put him in a shack with sparrows in the rafters and snakes in the corners; not in a comfy bed with Egyptian sheets, but in a animal trough with stalks of straw; not in a penthouse, but in a pen where animals were corralled.

All of which reminds us that the reason for his coming, as Rabbi Jesus himself would tell us later, was to announce the good news to the poor, to proclaim release to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to send off the oppressed with liberty, and to proclaim an acceptable year of the Lord.” In other words, he came to save those in desperate need of saving.

Today, as we recall that humble birth at Bethlehem, we want to see it as God saw it–not as a rags to riches story, but as a riches to rags story, or as Paul of Tarsus described it to the Philippians decades later,  “Christ Jesus, who existing in the form of God, did not deem equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being made in human likeness.”

That same Christ would not have us spend too much time in front of the creche today, snapping selfies as we smile into the camera, ignoring the ignoble truth of the first Christmas, but instead would ask us to look outside ourselves, opening our eyes to the faces of the lonely, the lost, the ragamuffins of the world, those who often have nothing to wear but rags, and find in them the face of the Beloved Son who cries out now as did the child in the crib then.

–Jeremy Myers