Why Did Luke Skip Jesus' Biggest Sermon? The Literary Genius of Luke 5
Luke builds enormous anticipation for Jesus' first major sermon, only to skip it entirely in order to spring a literary trap on the reader.
Why Was Jesus Laid in a Manger (And Why Are There Two Josephs)?
Jesus being laid in a manger connects Isaiah's feeding trough with the patriarch Joseph, presenting Christ as bread offered to the world.
Why was Jesus laid in a manger? A manger is a feeding trough for animals. Luke mentions it three times in his account of Jesus’s birth: Mary lays Jesus there, the angel tells the shepherds they will find him there, and the shepherds arrive and find the baby lying in the manger.
So why the triple emphasis? I think that there are at least two reasons.
Isaiah and the Feeding Trough
The first reason takes us back to Isaiah chapter 1. In Isaiah 1, the prophet tells Israel that the ox knows its owner and the donkey knows where its feeding trough—its manger—is. It is the exact same word. But Israel does not know; that is, Israel does not know where her manger, her feeding trough, is.
Even dumb animals know their owner and their food, but Israel knows neither. Jesus is placed in an animal’s feeding trough, a manger, to show that Israel is in the exact same state as she was back in Isaiah’s day. In a beautiful combination, Jesus is both the food of Israel and her Master, but Israel does not know that. If she did, Jesus would not be lying in an animal’s feeding trough.
Bread for the World and the Two Josephs
Second, Jesus is food for the world. Not only is Jesus put into a feeding trough, symbolically portraying him as food, but at both his birth and his death, Jesus’s vulnerable body is attended to by a Joseph—someone named Joseph. At his birth, it was Joseph his adoptive father, and at his death, it was Joseph of Arimathea who prepared Jesus’s body for burial.
Why two Josephs, and why do they both tend to Jesus’s body at its most vulnerable moments of birth and death?
Joseph was one of the most well-known characters in the Old Testament, and one of his most famous actions was his feeding of the world. Joseph interpreted Pharaoh’s dream about seven years of famine, and then collected grain during the time of abundance so that Egypt and the surrounding nations would be sustained through the famine.
When Jesus is in the manger, it is because he is the food that Joseph is offering to the world: the vulnerable flesh of Jesus. Just as Joseph in the Old Testament fed the world, so Joseph in the New Testament feeds the world by placing his son in a manger, presenting the bread of the body of Jesus. The Gospel narrative is framed by Josephs feeding Jesus to the world, as if this encompasses his entire life.
And that, my friends, is why the Bible is art.