One does not have to ride a donkey or walk, as Mary and Joseph did, to get to Bethlehem. I took a taxi from Damascus Gate in Jerusalem. But Bethlehem is still a little town—a cluster of stone houses on a hillside surrounded by olive groves and vineyards.
I didn’t want to be shown around by a tourist guide, nor to be told what I was supposed to think about what I saw, not this time. I wanted to go alone into the cave where Jesus is believed to have been born.
I had done some reading and learned that the church had been built during the reign of Constantine over “a certain cave near the village,” according to Justin Martyr. Origen said it was “well known even by those who were not Christians.” Surely a cave that had been used as a stable by the local inn would not have been forgotten, if there a baby had been born whom shepherds, bearing an astounding piece of information, had come from the fields to see. Saint Jerome did not question that this was the very place, but he expressed regret that the mud cradle had been replaced by a silver one and that the whole thing—by the fourth century!—was much too commercialized. Since his day there has been plenty more to see—silver, gold, silks, jewels, candelabra, altar screens—not the sorts of things one associates with a barn.
I went down the staircase into the dim grotto. There the place of Jesus’ birth was marked by a silver star inscribed Hic de Virgine Maria Jesus Christus natus est—“Here Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin Mary.”
Perhaps the unbelieving tourist can shuffle through the sunshine unchanged, hurriedly checking off another tourist attraction—“done.” But the visitor who believes the Latin words Christusnatus est (even if he cannot accept the word hic, which means “here”) cannot be the same.
In spite of the destruction and bitterness and commercialization and religious disputes and modern war, the overwhelming truth remains: The thing happened! It happened here in Bethlehem. “God became a human being and lived among us. We saw His splendor….There is a grace in our lives because of His grace” (John 1:14, 16, PHILLIPS)
**Excerpt originally published in The Elisabeth Elliot Newsletter November/December 2001