Away with a manger: My beef with the Baby Jesus

I hate "Away in a Manger".  There.  I said it.



I'm not too fond of "Silent Night" or "O Little Town of Bethlehem" either.  To a certain extent, the whole genre of "Baby Jesus" songs gets up my nose something fierce.  Part of it is the monotony of hearing the same songs year after year after year.  Part is the fact that when artists try to come up with new ways to sing them -- because they've been recorded so many times before -- the results are always more about showing off than about creating a good song.

But both of those reasons could -- and indeed do -- apply to plenty of other kinds of music.  The real reason I dislike "Baby Jesus" songs so much is that I believe they are actually harmful to the Church.

Not the songs themselves, exactly.  "Away in a Manger" is silly, but not actually blasphemous.  What's dangerous are the attitudes they breed within us.  They can cause us to focus on a particular aspect of Christ's incarnation at the expense of the rest.

It's common to think of Jesus as God's gift to a lost and dying world, and that's true as far as it goes.  It's normal to see the images of a helpless child in a manger -- a word we only use at Christmas time, of course -- and think of the incredible love of the Father and the Son in coming to us in that way.  Again, it's true and necessary ... but it's not a complete picture.

I think it was Philip Yancey in The Jesus I Never Knew who said he'd like to see a Christmas card depicting the war in the heavens that accompanied Jesus' birth.  We need to remember that:  it was war.  Jesus wasn't just a cute little present that God gave us just in time for Christmas; his birth was the universal D-Day.  It was the beginning of the end for Satan's rule on the earth.  And though Satan will fall -- has fallen -- he won't go quietly.

That one "holy infant so tender and mild" sparked a genocide.  Herod the King had every male baby in Bethlehem slaughtered in an effort to destroy him.  "The little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head" as a refugee in Egypt for several years.  It was war.  When we think of the wise men bringing gifts, we should also remember the carnage they unwittingly brought with them.  And in a way, it was fitting that Christ's life began with the death of the innocent, because it certainly ended that way.

On those rare occasions I've tried to explain this to people, I've generally gotten looks of disgust and been told that people don't like to think about that sort of thing at Christmas.  That's true, of course; the problem is that many people don't like to think about that sort of thing at all.  That's part of the powerful appeal of Baby Jesus religion:  it brings the warm-fuzzies without all that bloody stuff.  It lets us feel good without demanding anything of us.  It's a lot like much else in modern American evangelicalism:  it's sentimental rather than biblical.

Don't get me wrong; I'm no fan of gore.  I'd rather think about a happy family enjoying its new baby than about violence and murder.  But the Gospel is a violent thing.  It's a story of war, culminating in glorious victory.  It tears families apart.  It tears individuals apart, offering no option other than surrender to God and death at his hands.  But he calls us to die only so that we might truly live, as his sons and daughters rather than as rebels against him.

But there's no rebellion in Baby Jesus religion.  There's no cosmic struggle.  There's the occasional mention of sin, but only as a vague threat that his coming saved us from.  There's no real victory, because there's nothing to gain victory over.  There's only the warm-fuzzies.  Baby Jesus religion is all about feeling good, which is why I think so many of the songs are quiet lullabies that insist that all was calm, all is peaceful, and even babies don't cry when they wake up.  It fits in well with all the Roman Catholic mythology about the Child Jesus.  It's a relic of the weird Victorian mythologizing of children, perhaps the only such relic to which we still cling.  Indeed, many of these songs were written specifically for children, only to have been adopted by adults over the years.

There are other ways in which Baby Jesus religion is dangerous.  It drives away some who desperately need the Gospel but can't see devoting their lives to a sweet little baby, while at the same time drawing others in who would love a faith that calls for adoration of cuteness but little else.  It covers the shame and scandal of the Gospel in swaddling clothes -- another Christmas-only term -- and encourages its adherents to remain as infantile as its picture of the Savior.

I may be completely wrong.  I may be ranting about nothing, or worse.  As I look around the modern church, though, I see a huge number of professing believers who never seem to move beyond loving Baby Jesus to worshiping the crucified and risen Lord and Savior.  In choosing to focus on this one picture of Christ, we shut our eyes to the rest and layer on traditions and mythology until our picture of Jesus no longer resembles the one found in Scripture.

This Christmas, let's be thankful to God for the gift of his Son, and remember that while he was indeed born poor and helpless in a stable, he didn't remain there.  After all, Hades itself couldn't hold him; what chance would a manger have?

Grace and mercy upon us all this Christmas.