Cooking for Jesus: Celebrating the Christian Year

The Shepherd

Up in the hills behind the stable were shepherds and their flocks of sheep.  Sheep are very useful animals and rather endearing, but they are not very bright.  They like to run all over the place, baahing with all their might and not looking where they are going.  So sheep get lost. Sheep get lost a LOT. They are also very tasty, and many things (including, so I am told, small girls named Juliette) like to eat them.

The shepherds cared for the sheep.  It was not easy.  What with animals trying to eat the sheep and sheep running around like crazy small girls and getting lost, the shepherds had a hard time.  They even had to stay up all night to make sure that nothing ate the sheep.

So as the sheep snored and dreamed of a world filled with tasty plants and no lions, the shepherds sat alone on the hillside in the dark and cold watching and protecting the sheep. They waited, though it was really no longer necessary, but sometimes we do that.

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Jesus

And Mary gave birth to her firstborn son.  She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in the manger, for there was no room in the inn.

The son did not wait, for the son is and was and had always been and will ever be.   The son did not worry about glory, for the son is glory.

But for now, the son slept.  It is very tiring to be born, even for God.

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Mary

Mary rode the donkey to Bethlehem. When Mary and Joseph got to Bethlehem, the town was very crowded. They could find nowhere to sleep but in the innkeeper’s stable with ox and the manger and the silly sheep and their donkey.

Most people would have been upset, but Mary just waited, in glory and full of grace.

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“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined.” Isaiah 9:2.

O Oriens,

splendor lucis aeternae, et sol justitiae:

veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis

O Rising Sun,

splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness:

Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

From “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”

O come, Thou Day-spring, come and cheer

Our spirits by Thine advent here;

Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,

And death’s dark shadows put to flight.

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The Lamb

Another animal occasionally ate from the manger. A silly little sheep snuck snacks from the manger when he trotted by the stable on his way the nearby fields. The manger was there. The sheep was hungry. HE didn’t see anything wrong with sneaking food from it. Of course, when the shepherd caught him eating from the manger and whacked him with a crook, the sheep was sorry…sort of. (Just as you are sorry…sort of…when your father catches you doing something you’re not supposed to be doing.)

The sheep was too little and silly to have had any days of glory. He was convinced he would have them though, so he waited—impatiently.

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When he was hungry, the ox ate his food from a manger. It was not lovely this manger, but it was useful. It was made from the stump of a large old olive tree that the innkeeper’s grandfather had cut down to build the first inn. It may seem very disappointing to become a manger, a bin that animals eat from, in a dark and dusty stable after having been a beautiful, living olive tree, with leaves that dance in the wind and shine in the sunlight. But the manger, if it could have thought, would have been philosophical about such things, as olive trees always are in the face of eternity.

The olive tree’s days of glory were past. But the manger waited.

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