I'm writing a series of theological reflections on key Christian pilgrimage sites in the Holy Land. Here is an attempt at a "Biblical theology" of Bethlehem.
Perhaps no other town
is as strongly associated with Jesus in the Western Christian imagination as
the “little town of Bethlehem,” and this despite the fact that Jesus had
to be called a “Nazarene” (Matthew 2:23) and had to die in Jerusalem (Luke
13:33). The association is largely generated by the way the Western church
celebrates Christmas, which has developed a variety of rituals, songs, and art
forms to commemorate the mysterious events of Bethlehem. But what do we discover
afresh if we lay aside popular piety for a moment—as valuable as it may be—, turn
once again to the plain sense of Scripture, and ask ourselves, “Is the town of Bethlehem
itself part of the message? And if so, what does it communicate?”?
As the following will
show, a glance at the key texts indicates that Bethlehem does develop a
distinctive theological profile within the Bible as a whole. Perhaps the best
avenue into the material is to start with the two most famous Bethlehem texts,
the birth narratives in Matthew (1:18—2:18) and Luke (2:1-21). There we will
identify two distinct perspectives on the meaning of Bethlehem. We will then
discover that these two perspectives have their roots in the Old Testament,
which provides a broader context for understanding their significance. In the
final step, we will attempt to synthesize these two perspectives in order to
attain a more adequate, three-dimensional view on the meaning of Bethlehem.
Let us start with Luke
and see where he takes us.
Luke: Bethlehem as the City of David
The emphasis of Luke’s
opening chapters is on the Davidic lineage of Jesus. He stresses
that Joseph is “of the house of David” (1:27); Joseph is forced to register in
the Davidic town of Bethlehem because he is “of the house and
lineage of David” (2:4). Indeed, Luke first identifies the city as “the city of
David” before adding as an afterthought that its name is “Bethlehem” (2:4). It
is thus clear that in Luke’s mind the primary significance of Bethlehem as the
birthplace of Jesus is that it associates him with the town’s most famous
inhabitant and Jesus’ most famous ancestor. But Jesus’ association with David
through Bethlehem seems to be more than just a matter of genealogy. As one born
“in the house of [God’s] servant David” (Luke 1:69), he did not actually have
to be physically born in Bethlehem in order to make a dynastic claim to the
Davidic throne (2 Samuel 7:13-14). After all, all of David’s sons after him
were born in that other city of David, namely “Jerusalem,” the city that
David conquered and in which he established his royal house (2 Samuel 5:7). So
why couldn’t Jesus be born there? Why did God have to move a Roman emperor to
force his subjects to register in their ancestral homes (Luke 2:1-3) so that
Jesus could be born where the story of David began?
The answer is surely that part of Jesus’ mission was not just to ascend
the Davidic throne but to re-live and re-do what David did, albeit in greater
perfection and universality of scope. In
other words, Jesus had to retrace David’s steps from Bethlehem to Jerusalem,
so that his kingdom in Jerusalem could be more perfectly established. The
Davidic patterning of Jesus’ ministry can be seen when the two stories are
compared: Both Davids, new and old, were men after God’s own heart (1 Samuel 13:14; 16:7), born in obscurity in
Bethlehem (1 Samuel 16:11), associated with literal shepherds (David was a
shepherd boy; Jesus was visited by shepherds [Luke 2:8-20]) yet called to be
shepherds of God’s people; they were secretly anointed in Bethlehem to rule (1 Samuel 16:13), became victorious over
Israel’s greatest enemy due to their trust in God (1 Samuel 18), and yet they
faced constant conflict with their own people (1 Samuel 19—2 Samuel 1; 12—18); both
were rejected, persecuted and exiled before returning to establishing a kingdom
of peace, one that has its epicentre in Zion but which extends beyond the borders
of Israel (2 Samuel 5—10; 19).
An initial answer to
the question of the meaning of Bethlehem, then, is that it marks the place of Davidic beginnings, the
opening scene of a narrative plot comprising humility and greatness, faith and
victory, rejection and acceptance, a plot that finds its resolution in another
city of David, Jerusalem, with the conclusion of redemption for all. Jesus’
birth there casts him as a second David.
Now Jesus’ Davidic
identity does not exhaust all that Luke wishes to communicate about who Jesus
is. There is another aspect, again presented in terms of genealogy, which casts
Jesus not only as a son of David but also the son of a far more ancient
ancestor, namely “Adam, the son of God” (3:8). This connection is made at the
end of a long genealogy that spans the entirety of human history, bringing us
right back to its roots in the Garden of Eden. And by bringing us to the roots
of human history, it also brings us to the root problem of that, humanity’s
failure to truly be that Adamic “son of God.” In this connection, Jesus did not
just come to do what David did (but better), as a second Adam he came to do
what Adam ought to have done but failed.
A review of the Old
Testament story from Adam to David (Genesis—Kings/Chronicles) reveals the true
nature of the problem and the kind of solution sought by God. Yet at this point
we might ask whether we runs the risk of leaving our theme behind us, for what
does Adam have to do with Bethlehem? Interestingly, quite a lot. For in two
sets of stories set at a critical junction of that Old Testament narrative,
Bethlehem becomes a stage upon which both the problem and the solution of
Adam’s condition are enacted with paradigmatic clarity. So let retrace the
story from Eden to Bethlehem:
In Eden we catch a
glimpse of the purpose of creation: communion in paradise between God and the
human creatures created in his “image” (Genesis 1:26; 3:8). As his creatures they
are to love, trust, and depend on him for all things. But something goes wrong:
the relationship is undermined when Adam attempts to switch roles and himself
become “like God” (3:5) by eating from the tree that promises divine “wisdom”
(2:17; 3:22; see Proverbs 8); yet as a creature he cannot take on this role,
and so his misplaced wisdom becomes a tool for destruction and alienation. The
only solution is to practice his wisdom as a creature, and that means in
an attitude grounded in the “fear of the Lord”
(Proverbs 1:7).
Rather than destroying
his children, God makes provision for them by promising the coming of new
offspring, the “seed” of Eve (3:15) created in the likeness of Adam (5:3), a
humanity that would re-enact the divine-human relationship as it should have
been, thereby restoring Adam’s likeness
to God (5:1) and thus destroying his satanic accuser (Job 1:9; Genesis 3:15). This
new seed is the hope of both humanity and the cosmos.
The ensuing drama of
humanity and, in more concentrated form, that of Israel can be read as the
story of the tortuous struggle for this “seed” to appear on the stage of
history in the face of a now-inherent human impulse to fear anything but the Lord, with disastrous consequences
(Genesis 20:11). Generations come and go but their behaviour consistently
brings divine judgement followed by God’s merciful granting of new chances
(Genesis 6—11). Through the seed of Abraham a particular slice of humanity is
carved out, given the task to truly know God through his word and deed and thus
respond to him the way that is appropriate (Genesis 12—Deuteronomy). The early
career of this new covenant community had its ups (Joshua) and its downs
(Judges), but the overall trajectory was so far down that a prophet could
summarize the behaviour of these first generations with the following words: “Everyone did what was right in his
own eyes” (Judges 21:25).
We here come to that
critical juncture in Israel’s history, and thus a step closer to Bethlehem. Given
Israel’s failure, a new act of divine intervention was necessary. Israel needed
a king (Judges 21:25), someone who would represent the people (as Israel should
have represented humanity) and embody the faith and obedience needed to
overcome their alienation from God, bringing them back into the fullness of his
presence. During this period of the “judges,” Bethlehem is the place where both
the failure of Israel and its future hope is dramatized.
In terms of failure,
Bethlehem is one of a number of key regions chosen to illustrate in
paradigmatic manner the depravity of Israel and thus its distance from becoming
the true “seed” of Eve. These stories are bundled together at the end of the
book of Judges (17—21). In one, Bethlehem is home to a renegade Levite, a
member of an elite tribe charged with teaching and guiding Israel in the truth.
He establishes an idolatrous cult in Ephraim and then joins a band of murderous
thugs (the tribe of Dan) in order to start a new colony by wiping out an
innocent city (Judges 17—18). In another, Bethlehem is the home to a concubine
belonging to a man from Ephraim. She flees to her father’s house. After
consenting to return, her master delivers her to a gang of rapists from
Benjamin who abuse her to death (Judges 19). This triggers a civil war in which
Benjamin is almost wiped out, necessitating the kidnapping of more women to
stop the tribe becoming extinct (20—21). Here Bethlehem provides a snapshot of
the “kingdom of Adam” when Adam himself takes on the role of God.
In terms of hope, during
this same period (Ruth 1:1) Bethlehem also sets the stage for the emergence of an
alternative kingdom—one headed by a second Adam whose life conforms more to his
true identity as a creature in the image of God. This development is found in
the book of Ruth, a short novella telling a heart-warming story of tragedy and
loss reversed by divine providence at work through the loyalty, boldness, and nobility
of a Moabite woman, Ruth, and a Bethlehemite farmer, Boaz. In this narrative we
see how the divine virtues of Ruth and Boaz redeem the life of the widow Naomi.
But their actions have a redemptive significance that goes beyond the life of
this one widow. This is made clear by a genealogy that is tacked on to the end
of this story (4:18-22). Here we see that the fruit of their marriage union
will issue into a future seed who will display the same moral characteristics
and thus become God’s vehicle for establishing a kingdom more in line with one
original envisioned in the Garden of Eden. This future seed, is of course,
David, Bethlehem’s most famous son until the birth of Christ.
But if David is the
redeemer, why the prophetic hope that a new David will have to arise? The rest
of the history of Israel from the middle of David’s career until the exile and
beyond (see the books of Samuel; Kings) make the reason clear: though Israel’s
greatest role model (see especially the Psalms and Chronicles), David was not
ultimately above grasping at god-like power and usurping the throne of Israel’s
true king (the story with Bathsheba is paradigmatic for this: 2 Samuel 11).
Almost all of his sons did worse (see the books of Kings and virtually all the
prophets). Israel’s prophets saw only one solution: another David would have to
arise, one that would truly enact the drama of Eve’s seed and thus as a true
Adam more perfectly establish the kingdom of God (e.g. Isaiah 9:7; Jeremiah
30:9; 33:15; Ezekiel 34:23-24).
This brings us back to
Bethlehem in the gospel of Luke. Once again a critical juncture in the history
of Israel and the world has been reached. The seed of Eve is still waiting to
be born and do his work. Bethlehem’s previous inhabitants made a good start,
though ultimately failed. In Jesus, the story will be re-enacted and brought to
perfection.
Matthew: Bethlehem as the other
City of David
There is one last
twist to this tale of the emergence of a Seed in Bethlehem. If Luke and the Old
Testament texts discussed above highlight the continuity of the seed
from Adam and David, Matthew and two key Old Testament prophecies point out the
need for discontinuity. In a paradox difficult to grasp, the future
redeemer of Israel and the world must be from David but yet, at the same
time, not of him … This becomes clearer if we move from prophecy to
fulfilment. In the process we will see that the image of the town of Bethlehem
is central to the way the message is rendered.
We noted above that
the Bible knows of two cities of David: Bethlehem and Jerusalem. The one marks
the beginning of David’s career, the latter its climax and resolution. David of
Bethlehem saved his people and consolidated his empire by creating Jerusalem as
the centre from which he, ideally as God’s vehicle, would rule a kingdom of
peace. Jerusalem thus became the source of Israel’s blessings and greatest joy
as well as object of greatest hope (e.g. Psalms 68; 122; 128; 147).
But what happens when
Jerusalem’s Davidic rulers chronically fail to be what they need to be so that
Jerusalem can become what it ought to? What if the problem is located in the
genes of the genealogy itself, in the Davidic and Adamic bloodline? We’ve already noted the prophetic promise of a
new David to rule on the throne, one different in kind from all the
Davids before, one who will have a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 11:19), upon which
is written the law of God (Jeremiah 31:31). Two unique prophecies push this
element of difference further, making clear that the one to come will
have a source both somehow within yet also without David.
The first announcement
is made by Isaiah, who talks of God’s complete destruction of the Davidic line.
It will be like a tree that has been felled and then burnt for good measure;
all that remains is a stump (6:13). And then, miraculously, hope nevertheless
sprouts:
There
shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit (Isaiah 11:1).
At first glance this
may look like a simple reaffirmation of the Davidic covenant, but notice how
Isaiah interrupts the linear genealogy of DavidàMessiah that the Davidic covenant would lead us
to expect (2 Samuel 7:12). Jesse is the father of David, he precedes
him genealogically. This is one metaphorical way of saying that the Messianic
“branch” will have its source in the historical David but it will also
have its source beyond him—or to put it differently, as our next text
does, “his coming forth is from of old, from ancient days” (Micah 5:2; English
version [Hebrew 5:1]).
The prophet Micah develops
a similar idea using different imagery, the imagery of David’s two cities:
Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The logic of their relationship is that of the role
they play in David’s career: Bethlehem is the source of the dynasty, Jerusalem its
final home. Jerusalem is the city of Israel’s salvation; Bethlehem is the city
of the means to get there. In 4:8—5:6 Micah picks up this configuration and re-applies
it in his own day, a time when Jerusalem has already long had a Davidic king on
its throne but desperately needs a new one from a different stock. His message
is packed into a series of juxtaposed messages that, when read together,
generate a pattern. This pattern can be summarized as follows:
1.
The focus is the salvation of Jerusalem (4:8, 10b, 12-13), which
matters because Jerusalem is the epicentre of the salvation of “the ends of the
earth” (5:4).
2.
As Micah speaks, however, Jerusalem is in the process of being judged: “Writhe
and groan, O daughter of Zion, … you shall go to Babylon” (4:10). God’s
instrument of judgement are “many nations” which he has brought upon her to lay
“siege against” her (4:11; 5:1); Jerusalem’s current Davidic king has been
humiliated and rejected (“with a rod they strike the judge of Israel on the
cheek,” 5:1; see 2 Kings 25:4-7). The cause is the rebellion against God of
both king and nation.
3.
Yet there is hope. In a mysterious way, Jerusalem’s destruction is
actually for its good. The evil empires “do not understand [God’s] plan” (4:12);
they “assemble against” her to “defile” her, but through the destruction they
wreak they both judge themselves (4:12) and pave the way for the redemption of
the city of David (4:13). And so God can address Jerusalem directly with the
promise:
“to you shall it come,
the former
dominion shall come,
kingship for the
daughter of Jerusalem” (4:8).
What
was lost shall be restored. But where shall it be restored from?
4.
The kingship cannot come from the current, humiliated dynasty (5:1)
which has been felled like a tree (Isaiah 6:13; see Jeremiah 22:30). Instead,
God must go back behind it in order to make a new start. This new
king’s source will be “from of old, from ancient days” (5:2), a primordial beginning
not symbolized by ancestry, as with Jesse in Isaiah’s prophecy, but by social geography: “Bethlehem Ephrathah” (5:2;), the place of
David’s roots from which now a different David will come to replace the current
David sitting on the throne.
5.
This new shepherd will recapitulate a central quality of the original
David, and indeed his grandparents Ruth and Boaz, but which was forgotten by
his descendants: he will be weak and dependent on God (1 Samuel 16:7, 11; see Genesis
3:5). This quality is symbolized by “Bethlehem Ephrathah” itself, “Ephrathah” referring
to the Davidic clan of the Ephrathites, which is “too little to be among the
clans of Judah” (5:2). Like other leaders from weak clans chosen by God in the
past (Gideon [Judges 6:15]; Saul [1 Samuel 9:21]), this new David will be a
true “ruler in Israel” (5:2), precisely because he knows where his true
strength lies: outside himself and within his Creator. If we set this image
within Biblical story outlined above, we can say that this new David will
re-enact the drama of Adam in Eden and succeed in not “grasping” at “equality
with God” (Philippians 2:6).
How is this particular
version of the Messianic promise taken up in the Gospel of Matthew? In the
first instance we can simply note that Micah 5:2 is explicitly cited in Matthew
2:6 as an explanation for Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem (the changes in wording do
not change the message). The immediate function of the prophecy is to provide
straightforward evidence of the fulfilment of an ancient promise: the Christ
will be born in “Bethlehem
of Judea, for so it is written by the prophet …” (2:5). As it was predicted, so it came to pass. At
first glance, there seems to be nothing more to it, no symbolism or deeper
layers of meaning, just a piece of predicted geography that could be used
hundreds of years later by local “Biblical scholars” to guide foreign pilgrims
to the Messiah’s expected birthplace.
But when we look at
the structure of the birth narrative as a whole in light of the broader context
of the prophetic citation (Micah 4:8—5:9), it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that something more is
going on than just proof-from-prophecy: as in Micah, the significance of
Bethlehem as the place of Jesus’ birth only comes to light through its unique
relationship to that other city of David, Jerusalem. In short, Jesus’
birth in Bethlehem not only marks him as the predicted Messiah, as a second or
new David, it marks him as an alternative David, one whose mission is to
enact judgement on the current ruling dynasty and replace it with something
entirely new. Let us unpack the correlations:
For start,
as with Micah (4:8), the initial focus of the Christmas story is not on
Bethlehem but on Jerusalem. This is where the magi from the East first arrive,
and the reason they choose to go to Jerusalem is that the star they had seen
portended the birth of a Jewish king. Where else does one go than Jerusalem if
one is looking for the “king of the Jews”? The search for the true king of
Jerusalem thus sets the tone for the rest of the narrative.
Upon
arrival in this city we encounter another Micah motif: the rebellious nature of
its inhabitants. The magi do indeed meet a king of the Jews, “Herod the king”
(2:1), but as will become clear in his slaughter of the innocents in order to
remain in power (2:16-18), this evil figure is far removed from the figure these
Gentiles wished to submit to. And it is not just the king who is the problem,
“all Jerusalem” is troubled with him (2:3), including the chief priests and the
scribes (2:4), who know their Bible’s well enough to locate the birthplace of
their true king yet show no interest in going to see him.
Again, Jesus
shares the same context that occasioned Micah’s prophecy: not only is Jerusalem
currently in rebellion against God, God’s judgement of the nation is already underway.
The occupiers are now the Romans rather than the Assyrians (Micah 5:5) or
Babylonians (4:10), but the cause and the effect are the same. Already “the axe
is laid to the root” (Matthew 3:10), the final destruction is yet to come
(Matthew 24). And yet, of course, there is also hope for Jerusalem, for God has
provided her with a true king who will finally bring back “the former dominion
… , kingship for Daughter Jerusalem” (Micah 4:8). Yet this king is unlike the
current pretender to the Davidic throne. He is of Davidic stock (Matthew 1;
Luke 3), yet at the same time his roots go way back before David, they are
“from ancient days” (Micah 5:2), indeed they are also located in God himself
(Matthew 1:18, 20). And so for this reason the magi cannot remain content with
the current order reigning in Jerusalem, they need to go to Bethlehem, the place
where the whole history once began and is now about to begin anew, albeit in a
different key.
This brings
us to a final observation: the character of this new son of David, son
of Adam, yet also son of God. We have noted above that since Adam’s attempt to
“be like God” (Genesis 3:5), God has sought for a human response that lets God
be God. With this new beginning in Bethlehem, he gets what he was looking for. Jesus
Christ, precisely as one who was “in the form of God,” “did not count equality
with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a
servant” (Philippians 2:6-7). It
is through this weakness that he fulfils the promise of a seed to Eve and thus earns
to right to bear the name to which every knee will bow (Philippians 2:10). The
whole of Matthew’s gospel provides a vivid illustration of what this embodiment
looks like in the life of Jesus.
In conclusion, how can
we summarize Matthew and Micah’s contribution to a “theology of Bethlehem”? If
Luke and the traditions he draws on use Bethlehem to focus on the linear
continuity of the seed from Adam through David to Christ, Matthew and Micah use
Bethlehem to testify to a deeper problem with the fallen constitution of that
seed and the need for vertical divine intervention. The paradox is that both views are true: the
Messiah is both of the seed of Eve through Mary yet also born from above
through the Holy Spirit. John the Seer captures both aspects in his
contradictory image: Jesus is both “the root and the descendant of David” (Revelation 22:16). Bethlehem is used to symbolize both.
The path to Jerusalem still passes
through Bethlehem
A final question may
be asked: what does this have to do with us today? As is often the case in
Biblical theology, the answer as to do with the “already” and the “not-yet.”
In one sense, the Christ
of Bethlehem has already completed his entry into Jerusalem, riding on
the back of a donkey, where he was greeted with “hosannas!” by the inhabitants
(Matthew 21:1-11; Mark 11:1-10; Luke 19:29-38; John 12:12-15). Here he waged
his decisive battle to claim the throne of the city and thus the keys of the
kingdom. His enemy, however, was not the flesh and blood enemy of Jerusalem’s
Jewish inhabitants and Gentile occupiers but the enemy of all humanity, the “ancient serpent, who is called the
devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world” (Revelation 12:9; Genesis 3:1).
His battle tactic was to take Jerusalem’s punishment as prophesied by Micah
upon himself: it was his cheek that was struck and humiliated; he was the one driven
out of the city and caused to descend to his spiritual Babylon. And just as
Micah had predicted regarding Jerusalem, this act of defilement of Christ by
his enemies turned out to be the means of their own redemption (Micah 4:11-12;
Isaiah 53). Only in this way could the gates of Jerusalem be opened for all to
enter and find peace.
And yet the pilgrimage
of King Jesus’ people to his city has not yet been completed. We are
still on the way, waiting to cross the threshold of the heavenly Zion to be
fully re-united there with our Lord (Hebrews 12:22; Revelation 21—22). When we
arrive, the entry requirements will be the same as those imposed upon Adam and
Eve in the garden: do not grasp at equality with God; reflect his image as his
creature and entrust your life to him. Or, if you cannot do this (Romans
3:23!), make sure you pass through Bethlehem first and meet the one who did
this in your stead. From there he will lead us to his new city, open the gates,
and take us through (Psalm 24).
