Categories: uncategorized
Date: 23 December 2005 21:21:58
A readers digest biography titled “Life of Christ” jumped out at me from a pile of old books at a garage sale many years ago. (I usually only look for old atlases) The story was written in 1921 by Giovanni Papini and translated from italian. The story is obviously based on the gospels but the author has added background description, colour etc that is left to the imagination in the original. I found the book enthralling and each Christmas I read the passage on Christ's birth.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I...
Jesus was born in a stable, a real stable, not the modern Christmas Eve “Holy Stable”, made of plaster of paris, with little candylike statuettes, prettily painted, with a neat, tidy manger, an ecstatic ass, a contrite ox, and angels fluttering their wreaths on the roof.
A real stable is the prison of the animals who work for man. The poor, old stable of Christ's old, poor country is only four rough walls, a dirty pavement, a roof of beams and slate. It is dark, reeking. The only clean thing in it is the manger where the owner piles the hay and fodder.
Fresh in the clear morning, waving in the wind, sunny, lush, sweet-scented, the spring meadow was mown. The green grass, the long, slim blades were cut down by the scythe; and with the grass the beautiful flowers in full bloom - white, red, yellow, blue. They withered and dried and took on the dull colour of hay. Oxen dragged back to the barn the dead plunder of May and June. And now the grass has become dry hay and those flowers, still smelling sweet, are there in the manger. The animals take it slowly with their great black lips, and later the flowering fields, changed into moist dung, return to light on the litter which serves as bedding.
This is the real stable where Jesus was born. The Son of man had as His cradle the manger where the animals chewed the cud of the miraculous flowers of spring. There Jesus appeared one night, born of a stainless Virgin armed only with innocence.
First to worship Jesus were animals, not men. Among men He sought out the simplehearted; and among the simplehearted He sought out the children. Simpler than children, and milder, the beasts of burden welcomed Him.
Up to that time the kings of the earth and the populace craving material things had bowed before oxen and asses. Christ's own people, the chosen people whom Jehovah had freed from Egyptian slavery, when their leader left them alone in the desert to go up and talk with the Eternal, did they not force Aaron to make them a golden calf to worship? In Greece the ass was sacred to Ares, to Dionysius, to Hyperborean Apollo.
But Jesus was to bring to an end the bowing down before beasts. In the meantime the beasts of Bethlehem warm Him with their breath.