t’s a small detail in the Nativity story, easily overlooked. Today, while reading the story (Luke 2:7-20), I saw the manger and was moved to reflect on its meaning. Please, come with me to the manger.

According to Christian tradition the stable in which Jesus was born was a cave used as a stall. The word translated “manger” (phátne) could designate either a stable or a manger. But in Luke’s account it designates a manger, a feeding trough for animals. Mangers usually were rectangular boxes hewn out of limestone or cut from the natural stone of the cave used as a stall. Archaeologists have found them in such ancient cities as Megiddo and Lachish. Their size was about three feet long, 18 inches wide, and two feet deep.

The manger of Jesus! The three references to it in this nativity story intrigued me. They keep the story focused by providing for it a literary axis, a center of orientation. So I asked myself Why a manger? I wondered whether the manger was indispensable. Was there an intrinsic need for it?

Those waiting for the Messiah should have prepared a place, a nice cradle into which Mary could have laid the body of God incarnated. God gave His people a mission and endowed them with wisdom in order to accomplish it. But when the Child was born, there was no room for Him in the human family. Luke seems to apologize for this unbelievable failure. As a result of the decree issued by the emperor, he says, there were too many people in town (verse 7). They occupied the place where Jesus could have been placed. They left for Him an insignificant manger.

Of course, the manger was not actually intended for Jesus, but for the animals. Jesus used what was theirs because humans had taken what should have been His. The manger signifies that Jesus was born outside the realm of human interaction. At birth He was rejected. Later He identified Himself with the poor and the needy.

The narrative appears to contrast the power and opulence of Augustus Caesar with the helplessness and simplicity of the newborn Messiah. His childlike simplicity followed Him the rest of His life. He exchanged “the throne of heaven for the manger, and the companionship of adoring angels for the beasts of the stall.”* Apparently nobody cooperated with God to have a place   ready for the Child. Yet the reference  to the manger suggests the opposite.

The manger! The person who made it never imagined the glorious future of this particular manger. When building it, he was simply performing an assigned task. Had he only known, quite possibly he would have added some special features to make it more elegant and comfortable. Perhaps he hewed it out of the stone wall of the cave, or went out to find a rock, then worked on it and transformed it into a manger. He took that which God had created—the stone—and from it crafted a manger. God and this individual worked together to prepare the manger for the Son of God. This man performed this task without realizing that God was using him in a very special project. Awesome thought!

Yes, a place was ready for the Son of God. He was born, and Mary “wrapped him in cloths and placed him in the manger” (verse 7, NIV), inside a stone.

Again in Stone
The coming of the Messiah to the world prefigured His end; His life on earth began the way it would end. Here lies part of the significance of the manger.

Mary followed the common practice of using strips of cloth, similar to bandages, to wrap them around the Child in order to keep His limbs straight. Then, in the absence of a crib, she placed Him in the manger.

Jesus would go through that experience once more. In the future He would again be wrapped in cloths and placed inside a rock: “Then he took it [Jesus’ body] down [from the cross], wrapped it in linen cloth and placed it in a tomb cut in the rock” (Luke 23:53, NIV). Born in loneliness, separated from the world of humans, He died rejected by them, still in loneliness. The rock in the form of a manger and the rock in the form of a tomb seem to mirror each other across the ministry of the Child. He moved from one to the other in order to fulfill the mission the Father entrusted to Him. The manger anticipates the tomb.

The second reference to the manger in the story takes us to a scene away from the stall where the Child was born to the beauty of the night on the hills of Bethlehem. The shepherds are faithfully performing their responsibilities when a choir of angels interrupts them.

“The Messiah,” they say, “has been born today, tonight, in the city of David!”

Bethlehem was a small village. It wouldn’t take long for the shepherds to go through it. But how would they be able to identify the Child, the Messiah?

“This is the sign,” the angels say. “You will find him wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger” (see Luke 2:12).

The manger was indeed a sign, not only in the sense that it confirmed what the angels said, but also in that it pointed to the mission of the Child.

The shepherds knew about mangers. They spent their lives around mangers. Perhaps they themselves even made them or saw others making them. They trained animals to go to the manger to find their food. In fact, the manger was the table from which the animals fed themselves. Hay was placed in it for them to eat.

No doubt the shepherds knew every place in town where there was a manger. But this particular manger was unique because the Messiah was lying in it. It was filled with the life-giving, life-sustaining presence of the Son of God. In the manger God was offering to His creation and to the human race the only means by which their lives could be sustained, namely, the body of His beloved Son. There was no hay in this manger! God placed Himself there as a gift of life. Yes, the manger was a sign—a sign of the life-giving power of God through the Messiah.

Hunger at the Manger
Now the story takes a new twist, an unexpected turn. There seems to be in it an element of irony. The truth is that shepherds never had to look for mangers. The animals were the ones who raised their heads when they were hungry and looked around for the manger. Isaiah wrote, “The ox knows his master, the donkey his owner’s manger” (Isa. 1:3). But in this story the ones who hunger are not the animals, but the shepherds. During the long nights they probably talked among themselves about the coming of the Messiah, and their hearts burned inside them with the urge to see Him. There was a deep spiritual hunger in their very beings.

They left the hills and went in search of the manger—the mysterious manger no one knew about. The shepherds became like the ox or the sheep, looking for the manger, in search of heavenly food. And they found it!

In the eyes of the educated the shepherds belonged to the lower social stratum; they were usually relegated to the realm of the animals. The Child in the manger was offered first to the despised and rejected of society. The Messiah particularly identified Himself with those at the bottom. He became one of them. He was counted among them (see Isa. 53). In this life-giving manger the shepherds would always find the food of life.

The third time the manger is mentioned in the Nativity story returns us to the stable where the Child was born. The shepherds found the manger and discovered the Child, the Messiah. They glorified God and praised Him for the wonders He had done for them, for what they had heard and for what they had seen—the Child in the manger.

At this point in the narrative something glorious happened to the manger. It became a center of worship and adoration. It became an altar. On it was a sacrificial victim. Jesus was born, like most sacrificial victims, in a stall.

We usually overlook the fact that animals were used as types of the Messiah. The Bible often describes Christ in theriomorphic terms. He is represented by the serpent raised by Moses in the wilderness, by the lion and the lamb. That night in Bethlehem the Lamb was born among lambs. Before He was recognized as the Son of man, He was the Lamb born in a stall and placed in a manger.

Yes, lambs were born in stalls—but they were never placed inside mangers! They learned early to go to the manger to eat from it. The stall and the manger testify to the fact that a unique sacrificial victim had been born among the lambs.

The Manger Altar
In the Nativity story the most important place is not the inn, the stall, or the hills of Bethlehem, but the manger. We learn that we must move away from the hills, from the place where we try to preserve our well-being through our own efforts, to the manger—the place where God provided what we needed.

In the presence of the Child lying in the manger the response is adoration. In worship and adoration we appropriate what the Lord placed for us in the manger. He was placed there for all of us and for the rest of creation. He was the greatest gift that the Father could have provided for the world—the heavenly food. The shepherds knew the manger had a message of salvation for all; they were able to understand the mystery of the manger, and they worshiped at this altar.

From the manger this Lamb will go to the cross as God’s sacrifice on behalf of the human race. Indeed, the manger prefigures the cross as the altar where the Son of God offered Himself, His body and His blood, for the preservation of life on this planet. Allow me to reverently say it: He is the true “hay” from heaven placed in the manger to nourish all. No longer simply the table from which the animals eat, the manger is God’s table from which all creation may eat and live. It is the altar around which we as Christians can come together to worship, to feed our souls with the divine manna.

But we must remember that the Child did not remain in the manger. His Father placed Him on the throne of the universe. He moved from the manger to the throne of God! He was born to be king, and He became king. Next time we see Him—and believe me, we shall see Him—He will not be wrapped in swaddling clothes, but in the most glorious kingly outfit that we could ever imagine. Not in the company of animals, but surrounded by innumerable glorious angels. Not in a manger, but on the throne of the King of the universe.

But before we see Him again and enjoy the fullness of His presence, we must first go to the stall. We must see Him in the manger, offering Himself for all.

Have you been to the manger recently?

*Ellen G. White, The Desire of Ages, pp. 48, 49.

_________________________
Angel Manuel Rodríguez is an associate director of the Biblical Research Institute at the world headquarters of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in ilver Spring, Maryland.