The last CCD class before Christmas break, back when the DH and I were teaching 9th graders, I wrote this title on the blackboard. This, I told the ninth graders, is our topic for tonight.
“Things that stink?” one girl asked, a bit amused and perplexed. Other students giggled.
No, it’s about Christmas, I told them. This became one of several nights in CCD when they all had that look on their faces that said, “That’s it. She’s really lost it this time. Should we bolt out the door now, or wait to see what happens?” (They tried to mess with me, so I generally smiled and messed with them back. Like the time I brought the CD of the rapping priest. Or the Maronite chant music, which most Westerners would assume was Arabic/Islamic music.)
Cow slobber and poopy diapers.
The incredible, awesome, all powerful, all knowing God of the entire Creation becomes a tiny baby. Aww, how cute and sweet is that? Awesome, man!
Born in a stable. In an occupied country. To not-quite-married parents (Luke says they were betrothed, which was legally binding, but not quite marriage, yet).
Born to be placed in a food trough for animals.
Hmm. On second thought, not quite so cute… but much more awe-inspiring and humbling.
I don’t care how the card companies like to make it look. Or the people who design stained glass windows. They tend to thrive on lovely art, not harsh reality. So, we usually get the nicest, brightest, cleanest stable ever, surpassing even Martha Stewart’s. Which is almost certainly not what it was.
Cows, I pointed out to the CCD students, do not have good table manners, leading to the exasperated expression, “Did I raise you in a barn!?!?” Our moms didn’t mean it as a compliment to our good manners.
Hence, cow slobber enters the Christmas story. Yes, the stable would have been made beautiful in a sense by the holy event taking place in it. Yes, I would assume Joseph grabbed some fresh hay before tucking the baby in, but the fact remains, the trough had probably seen its share of slobber, and nary a steam-cleaner or bottle of disinfectant in sight. Not exactly an “appropriate” throne for the King of Kings.
However, reading a commentary recently (I unfortunately forgot where I heard or read this; if you saw it, let me know, because I hate to use someone’s idea without attributing it to them), the point was made that the manger was, in fact, the perfect throne.
Jesus gave himself to us in the Eucharist, as the Bread of Life. Sin turns us over to our passions, our animal instincts. So, maybe the manger (from the French: manger, to eat) was yet another instance of God’s foreshadowing: here is the food, placed before animals, worthy of worship. Just in case anybody missed the point, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the ”city of bread”.
(Also in the “cool foreshadowing” category is the fact that most stables in that region are caves, since wood is scarce, and a damp cave would’ve been fine for animals, if not fit for people. And Jesus was buried in a tomb cut out of the rock. In the first cave, Mary wraps Jesus in bands of swaddling cloth, traditional for infants at the time. In the second cave, Mary helps wrap Jesus in bands of burial cloth. And, just in case anyone missed those hints that the Messiah had come to die, the wise men show up bringing some really weird baby shower gifts, including myrrh, used to prepare bodies for burial.)
Poopy diapers, the second half of my title, should be a fairly obvious part of the story, but, again, we seem to kind of ignore it.
There are some traditions (small “t”, not official big “T” ones) within the Catholic Church which say Mary just sort of had a vision of the Christ child, then reached out and took him in her arms. Apparently, these stemmed from interpretations of mystics’ visions and the idea that, because Mary was conceived without sin, she was not subject to Eve’s punishment of “I [God] will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children…” (Gen 3:16, RSV), and therefore gave birth without pain, which must have meant she didn’t give birth the normal way. I would argue that Genesis does not say that there would have been no pain whatsoever without sin, only that it would have been much, much milder. So, while it is theologically defensible to argue that Mary had relatively minor pain, I do not think it can be argued from that that she did not give birth like everyone else does.
Besides, the Bible and the Church have been pretty clear that, yes, Mary carried the Second Person of the Trinity in her womb for nine months. What happens at the end of the nine months may not fit our ideas of “cute”, but birth is one of the normal parts of being human (sin is not; sin is an introduced defect). Skipping that would be like saying that Jesus skipped being hungry, tired, etc., all the messiness of being human.
He could have made things easier for Himself, as the devil suggested in the temptation in the desert, when he mocked Jesus and dared him to turn the rocks into bread to feed his hunger. But He didn’t. As St. Paul tells us, Jesus was tempted in every way that we were, but did not sin. He came to live our experience, not to understand us (He’s God. He didn’t need to live it to understand our reality), but so that we would understand His love for us. He didn’t take shortcuts, or else we could all say, “Sure, He didn’t sin, because He got to skip the hard stuff in life. I don’t get that, so my sin is inevitable.” No, Jesus came to prove that human nature was perfectable, that instructing us to “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mat 5:48) was not just an exercise in futility.
So, I think it is safe to assume that that lovely Divine Child had poopy diapers. And maybe even the occasional diaper rash.
And that’s profoundly awesome.








