Wednesday, 10 December 2008 00:00 | and posted in Jesus & the Gospels
Father God closed his eyes, stretched out his hand and waved his pointed index finger over a map of Israel.
“Jesus can be born…. There!” he said as he dropped his finger on to the map.
Lifting up his finger and peering underneath he found the name Bethlehem.
“Bethlehem. Hmmmm, that’ll do,” Father God mused.
OK, so we’re all agreed that it is extremely unlikely that things happened this way, but of all the places Jesus could have been born why on earth did Father God choose Bethlehem?
For God to have chosen Bethlehem as the birth place of his only son I believe there must be something significant that this town communicates to us from within the Christmas story. Over the next four weeks of this 2008 Christmas season we’re going to explore what this significance is.
A good place to start exploring Bethlehem’s significance is to consider the meaning of its name. The literal translation of Bethlehem is “house of bread.” This meaning gives the beginning of the book of Ruth a sad irony. If you remember, in Ruth 1:1, we are told that a man named Elimelech, his wife Naomi and their two sons leave their home in Bethlehem to live in the neighbouring country of Moab because there was a famine in Bethlehem. The reason Elimelech and Naomi leave the house of bread is because there was no bread in the house.
In the ancient world of the Middle East bread was central to life. Without bread there simply was no life. It is no coincidence that God used bread as an indicator of his presence. For example, in Numbers 4:7 God tells the Jews that bread was to remain continually on the table of the Presence within the Tent of Meeting as a sign that he was constantly in the house! Maybe we could therefore translate Bethlehem as the house of God’s presence…
Jesus in John 6:32-33 says to a crowd, “the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” How cool (and appropriate) is it that the one who said he was the bread of life (John 6:35) was born in the house of bread - Bethlehem!?! Do you think God is trying to communicate something to us through this?