It is now 12 days before Christmas and Suzanne and I are looking toward our kids coming home from college and we’re looking at our house, which is the smallest we had since they have become full sized, and we’re wondering how are we all going to fit? There is not so much room in the inn, so I might be coming to asking, Do you have a guest room in your house?
In the Christmas Lore that has evolved over the years, these would be the ones that are not in scripture, like the names of the Magi or Wise Men or even that there were three, there is another one, Innkeeper. He’s gotten a rather raw deal it seems to me. If you’re like me you have this image of a Bethlehem Hotel 6 and its one of those places that maybe would not be your first choice early in the night, but the later it gets…
Do you remember what it was like before Cell Phones, and Smart Phones, going from hotel to hotel late at night, looking for a room. Each hotel interaction would take about a half hour, to find it, and then go in to ask for a room, and anymore it seems like always have VACANCY signs even when there is no room in the inn. All the while you’re kicking yourself for not calling ahead, and it gets later and later, the kids are asleep in the back seat, the parents are tired and road weary and all you want it is place to rest for the night. As the night drags on your standards drop, it really doesn’t need cable or a swimming pool or even a comfortable bed. You’re so tired you’ll take anything.
You feel like you are in the wilderness that Isaiah spoke about in today’s reading, and yet, Isaiah says: “The arid desert shall be glad, the wilderness shall be rejoice” (Isa 35:1, Tanakh)
I got to tell you, that is not what Suzanne would say on those late night jaunts finding a hotel, there is no one glad, there is no rejoicing. We’ve finally come to the last hotel in town, our standards are zero. We drive up and the turn signal starts making that special sound that it only makes really late at night.
We turn in, I get out, Suzanne stays in the car, her face reveals anxiety and distress that late night travel brings on. I’m at the front desk, ringing the bell, waking the night attendant who says “No, I am very sorry, but we filled up the last suitable place just a few minutes ago. There is no room. However there is a place out back where you can rest for the night, its not much…”
But that’s not how it was. The City of Bethlehem wouldn’t have had a Motel-6, or really any Inns to speak of. Those were usually on the Greek Trading Routes, The Interstate, and Bethlehem was far off the beaten track. What some houses did have, is roughly equivalent to what some of us have today: guestrooms. Rooms that are not generally used, but stay ready for visitors. If you look at the Greek word that is translated as Inn in our Bibles, you’ll see that it most often means guest chamber or inn as a lodging place or an eating room or dining room.
It is interesting to search the New Testament and find that word is used only in only one other place, and in that other place it is translated to mean “The Upper Room.” On the night of his betrayal, when Jesus gathered with his disciples for the Passover meal, we know they gathered an Upper Room, but it’s the same word used for Inn in the text that tells the story from Luke 2, and it means a large guest room. Which if you think about it, gives some almost perfect symmetry to the life of Jesus, that His first family and last meal could have been in the guest room, except there was no room in that Inn.
He was a guest in our world, but the guest room was full, and so he Mary and Joseph had to make do in the stable. There was no room in the Inn.
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