Happy Boxing Day, all you labourers going from house to house for your Christmas boxes! Yes, very nice, thank you, driving over to Sussex to our daughter’s family. Missing our turning off the A30 in thick fog was a bit of a bummer, though.
Searching for a suitable Nativity scene for my Christmas Eve blog, I was struck by how mediaeval Nativities seem, virtually universally, to feature an ox and and an ass, usually standing shoulder to shoulder and smiling benignly at the crib. I found myself thinking of the line “ox and ass before him bow” from J. M. Neale’s version of the 16th century In Dulce Jubilo, and coming to the conclusion that they probably meant something.
I was surprised, having always assumed that a stable full of animals was just modern sentimentality, Mary’s (unscriptural) donkey needing some space, together with a displaced cow, any sheep forgetfully brought along by the shepherds, and (in all likelihood nowadays) the Easter Bunny too. The traditional plaster crib I bought on e-Bay for the grandchildren has them (the ox and ass, that is, not the Easter Bunny), as also do many Christmas cards on our mantlepiece that don’t major on Santa, robins or rabbits in the snow.
Yet it turns out that, not counting the fresco of the virgin, child, prophet Balaam and star (see Numbers 24:17-19 – a crucial Messianic prophecy) that I eventually used, from the catacomb of Priscilla in Rome, the very earliest nativity scene, from AD400, includes the ox and ass with the swaddled Saviour, but otherwise not even Mary:
The reason reveals itself when one realises (in my case after cribbing [sic] from Wikipedia) that the Greek φατνε, which Luke uses for “manger” in his account, occurs only three times in the Greek Old Testament (representing Hebrew ebus). One of these occurrences – possibly even two – have Messianic implications that were obviously picked up by the early Church.
The “possible” reference is in Job 39, where God presents a menagerie of his wild beasts, untameable by man but subject to God. In verse 5ff he describes the wild ass:
“Who sent out the wild donkey free?
And who loosed the bonds of the swift donkey,
6 To whom I gave the wilderness for a home
And the salt land for his dwelling place?
7 “He scorns the tumult of the city,
The shoutings of the driver he does not hear.
8 “He explores the mountains for his pasture
And searches after every green thing.
Then he immediately goes on to the wild ox, which we should understand as the now-extinct aurochs, huge and fierce, as hunted by Paleolithic hunters:
9 “Will the wild ox consent to serve you,
Or will he spend the night at your manger?
Well, the answer is that, if the manger contains God in human form, the mediaeval artists reckoned that he certainly will.
The second, even more significant, passage is the word that introduces Isaiah 1:
2 Listen, O heavens, and hear, O earth;
For the Lord speaks,
“Sons I have reared and brought up,
But they have revolted against Me.
3 “An ox knows its owner,
And a donkey its master’s manger,
But Israel does not know,
My people do not understand.”
By this passage the salutary meaning of the presence of the ox and ass in the AD400 image, and all those subsequent, is made clear, as is the absence of any human figures. As John’s gospel states:
11 He came to his own, and those who were his own did not receive him.
Remember that when the angel spoke to the shepherds, he said that finding a baby, wrapped in swaddling clothes, and lying in a manger, would be a sign to them. We usually assume that merely means that they would know they’d come to the right baby, but that is not so. A sign, in Scripture, is always significant. At the least, if the shepherds remembered their lesson long enough to benefit from the Passion of Christ decades later, they would come to understand that this Saviour-baby was actually God incarnate, constrained by flesh just as the baby was by swathing bands, and in John’s narrative, “the living bread that came down out of heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread also which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh.” And if you want Luke’s own take on it, look up Luke 22:19.
But who knows if, taught by the apostles, those same shepherds might also have learned the prophetic significance of the manger from Isaiah and Job? Our scene from AD 400 does, focusing entirely on the ox, the ass, the manger and the swaddling clothes (but are those not doves of peace on earth on either side?). Many generations of Christians, who also understood the symbolism of their Nativity scenes, did so with the ubiquitous pair of animals.
But somehow our enlightened generation seems to have little appreciation of the rich tapestry of Messianic prophecy. Cue Little Donkey 🙁
