The Manger

A manger is a table where we lay out food for our animals.

An altar is a table where we lay out food for our god.

If you're a Christian, an altar is where God lays out food for you.

Because we package Christmas for children, we can easily miss some of the more challenging but essential aspects of the Nativity story.  It begins with the Roman oppression of the world by taxation.   In later chapters, Roman taxes and tax collectors would become integral to the Jesus story.  Seventy years after the birth of Christ, Rome burned the temple in Jerusalem and the rest of the city to the ground and dispersed the children of Abraham throughout the world.  The story begins with oppression and ends with the holy family hiding in Egypt to escape the mass infanticide ordered by Harrod the Great in his attempt to destroy the Christ.  That's a lot of negative feelings for a child, so we tend to omit those ideas from the Christmas story.  

I start the Christmas story not with the birth of Jesus but with the birth of Isaac many years before.  To prove his devotion to God, Abraham moves to sacrifice his own son and builds an altar to offer Isaac to the Godhead.  God stops the hand of Abraham and provides him with a perfect ram for sacrifice, setting a new standard between the people and God.  

Today, we think Abraham's actions were horrific, but human sacrifice was common among ancient peoples.  All over the world, there are stories of royal and tribal people offering a non-heir child as a human sacrifice.  Agamemnon provides the sacrifice of his daughter, Iphigenia, to Artemis so that the she will provide him fair winds on the way to Troy.  By stopping Abraham, God began a new paradigm among his people, who no longer were expected to make a human sacrifice to please their god.   

An altar is a table where people lay out food for their god to eat.  Agamemnon lays out a table where he offers his daughter's blood to the Goddess Artemis to drink.  In return, she forgave Agamemnon and allowed him fair winds.  In Abraham's case, he built a table, an altar, for the lord where the food was to be the meat of his son Isaac, but it ended up being the meat of a ram.

In French, the word "manger" means to eat.  A manger is an archaic term for a table laid out with food for animals to eat.  It is a humble altar dressed so that we sacrifice food for our humble servants: the beasts of the field.  

There is very little in the Bible that isn't a symbol for something else.   In time, we learn that God flips the dynamic between himself and his people, and instead of our offering sacrifices to him, he sacrifices his own son to us.  Laying the newborn Christ child in a manger doesn't just mean that he was born of humble surroundings; it means that God puts his own son on the humblest of all altars and offers him as sacrificial food for us. 

Later, in the Jesus story, Jesus says, "Hoc est corpus meum pro vobis; hoc facite in meam--Take, eat; this is My body."  God reverses the story of Abraham.  We no longer offer our children as food for gods; God offers his child as food for us.  

A manger might begin as the humblest of all altars, fit only for beasts, but the nature of God's offering on it elevates the manger to the greatest of all altars.  On a manger, God offers food for all humanity.