“She gave birth to her firstborn son, and she wrapped him snugly in cloth and laid him in a feeding trough — because there was no room for them at the lodging place.” (Luke 2:7)
I remember holding my son right after his birth. First, there was crying — proof of new life, which seems miraculous even when angels didn’t announce it. After quickly measuring and weighing him while he wailed, a nurse wrapped him snugly in cloth and handed him to me. Walking around the room, I gently rocked him in my arms and whispered. And he stopped crying.
Before long, however, he started making noises again. He was hungry, and the doula was there to help my wife with the process. Soon, we’d come to recognize those cries for feeding time.
The remarkable part of the Christmas story is that God decided to come as one of us. The incarnation means Jesus cried out at birth, announcing the breath of life in the one who breathes life into us. I suspect he calmed down after Mary and a relative or doula wrapped him tightly and fastened a makeshift bed for him in the animal feeding trough. But unlike what the hymn suggests, crying he does make. When he’s hungry or needs a new swaddling cloth. He is fully human, hungry for his mother’s breasts.
I’m sure Mary and Joseph did all they could to care for him. Joseph probably found himself the next morning driving his donkey slower than usual, hyperaware of the new cargo. They both jumped and looked concerned when he sneezed or had diarrhea. They loved him, even when crying shone through the night.
But there were times when Jesus cried that I suspect they felt something I didn’t. They worried about having too little to give him. Perhaps Mary felt herself too malnourished to produce as much as she wanted. Later, perhaps they cut their portions to give him a bit more. In that part of the Roman Empire, many people lived below the subsistence level, even while those in the palaces of Herod and Augustus tossed away excess food as sport.
An unhoused woman warms herself and her child by a fire on a cold winter evening in Gurugram, India, on Dec. 30, 2024. (Parveen Kumar/Sipa USA/Alamy)
While I can’t relate to that part of the story, many across the world today can. Right now, a baby in India, a baby in Nigeria, a baby in Venezuela, a baby in Ukraine, a baby in Gaza, a baby in Mississippi is crying out with hunger pains. And a parent is rocking them, whispering to them, trying to soothe them even though there is nothing to feed them.
The number of such moments is increasing this year because of the greed and heartlessness of modern Herods like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. But if we hang out at their lavish Christmas parties, we’ll miss Jesus. For he came as a hungry little baby to a poor family on the margin of the empire.
Brian Kaylor is president & editor-in-chief of Word&Way and author of The Bible According to Christian Nationalists.
NOTE: This is part of our Unsettling Advent devotionals running Nov. 30-Dec. 24. You can subscribe for free and receive them each morning in your inbox.
