December 7, 2025

Bit-Players at the Nativity: #2 – The Donkey

Have you ever stopped to consider the foolishness of what we Christians proclaim at this time of year?  According to just about every standard and norm for rational, differentiated thought in our culture, you and I ought to be locked up in the psych unit for all this – the Christmas wreaths and candles and manger scene.  We have this story to tell at this time of year about how the almighty Lord of the Universe, the creator of the far-flung heavens, the perfect Idea whose Word gave birth to life itself, took on flesh and bones in the person of a newborn baby brought forth in a smelly cow-feeder in the back alley of a one-horse town on the outskirts of nowhere.

To a modern, scientific mind, the thought of the Almighty being manifest in human form is hard enough to swallow, but the clincher is the cow dung.  That’s what was there after all, in the stable where the manger was.  You don’t have an animal feeder to lay a baby in, you know, without the end product being present as well.

The cow dung is a problem because healthy, skeptical, twenty-first century Americans have come to know a little something about power, and how it works.  We know about power ties, and power lunches, and power shirts, and that 80% of success is appearances.  We know that the most powerful person in the world is supposed to be the President of the United States, and that one of the best ways to become President is to have the most flags behind you when you speak on television.  We know about dressing for success, and driving the right kind of car, and we know about smelling right!  If you’re going to be a person of power, you have to smell right!  There’s an entire shopping isle at the grocery store dedicated to colognes, under-arm deodorants, tropical fragrance shampoos, and scented hair sprays.  And there’s another whole isle devoted to nice smelling soaps, room deodorizers, and pine-scented toilet products.  So, if we know anything, we know that the Lord Almighty, Ruler of heaven and earth, wanting to impress upon humanity the breadth of divine power, would expressly not come into this world in a cow barn, with you-know-what lying all around.  It’s preposterous.

But that’s our story, and we’re sticking to it.  J. Barrie Shepherd calls it “the mystery and manure of Christmas.”  By all accounts, you see, there had to be animals there.

So, continuing with this Advent pulpit series, in which I am focusing on some of the unmentioned characters — the bit-players — at the nativity, I’m focusing today on the donkey.  Now, we don’t know for sure that there was a donkey at the manger; it’s not mentioned in the scriptural accounts, but we can assume that, Mary, being nine months pregnant, would have had to ride on a donkey to make the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, so the animal must have been tied up nearby.  Besides, we have rarely seen a creche without a donkey.

I never spent much time around donkeys, but when I was boy in Iowa, I sure spent some time around farm animals.  And in my limited experience, I can say that the beasts we house and feed to provide milk, and meat, and animal power are not the gentle, lovely creatures we see resting in the straw of our manger scenes.  They’re big, and coarse, and nasty and smelly, and generally not very intelligent.  So, the answer to the question, “what was the donkey thinking as he looked upon the holy child in the manger?” is, “he wasn’t thinking a blessed thing.”

Perhaps the more important question is, “What was the Lord Almighty thinking in choosing to break forth into the world in a cow-stall with a donkey looking on?”  I would not claim to know the mind of, or speak for the Almighty, but I do think there are clues in scripture.  We find this advice in the second chapter of Philippians, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself . . .”  Or, in 1 Corinthians, we find, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.”

In other words, maybe we don’t really know as much about power as we think we do.  Maybe the donkey was not only a bit-player — a beast of burden that just happened to be tied up nearby.  Maybe the donkey was one of the chief parts in this drama of “mystery and manure.”  Maybe it was intended that there be animals, and the smellier the better.

It’s almost as if the Lord were putting that unmistakable barnyard smell right in our faces, and making a point with it.  It’s almost as if we were supposed to be shocked, and the very moment of greatest wonder at the miracle of divine intervention was used to send an entirely earthly and profoundly important message to us.  It’s almost as if all the things we consider “beneath us” were chosen in order to mock our high-minded, squeaky clean, “I’m too sexy for my shirt,” bloated self-image.  It’s almost as if we were being told something about real power, that contrary to everything we have learned, power has almost nothing to do with appearances, or with odors.  True power – divine, eternal power – has nothing to do with what kind of tie you wear, what kind of car you drive, how many votes you can tally or dollars you can collect, how many bombs you can drop, how righteous are your positions, or how cogent your arguments.  It may be that, in the baby lying in the straw with the donkey looking on, we are being told that there is a kind of power that we don’t even understand, let alone have mastery of, a power that operates within the context of the human condition, but transcends human culture and convention, a power that is accessible, but can never be grasped, a power never earned or won, but only conferred as a gift.

I have always had a feeling – a hunch, I suppose – that there is a Divine partiality to animals.  I don’t know if it’s true, but to me, it fits.  Maybe that’s because I suspect the Lord knows something about existence that we don’t, something that puts us on a lot more equal footing with the animals than we’re generally comfortable acknowledging.

Anyway, I can’t help believing that the birth of Jesus had something to do with the order of things in the cosmos.  It had to do with priorities and values that are the same throughout the universe, and that incorporate all of God’s creation.  It had to do with the disclosure of the primary force at the heart of being, the mystery and power of Love.

That love – the kind of love that breaks through convention and goes to the heart of being – much to our consternation, is often best and most powerfully revealed among the people and in the circumstances that run most counter to our prideful assumptions about status and power and decency and culture.

Nancy Dahlberg told her personal story of being overtaken by that kind of love.¹  She and her husband and two small children spent Christmas Day driving between two cities on the West Coast.  It was a long trip, but the only way they could visit their families in the limited time they had.  They stopped for lunch at a kind of two-bit diner in a two-bit town, not the greatest place for Christmas dinner.  But even in her road-weariness, Nancy was aware of deep feelings of gratitude as she looked around the diner.  She was probably the most fortunate person in that whole depressing place.

As they waited to order, she saw her one-year-old son Erik’s face light up in excitement.  He began to wiggle all around in his high chair, and squealed with delight his baby version of his favorite new words, “Hi, there.”  He pounded his fat baby fists on the metal tray, giggling with joy so that everyone in the diner heard and looked.

His mother turned to see the object of his delight, and I quote:

“I saw a tattered rag of a coat, obviously bought by someone else eons ago, dirty, greasy, and worn, baggy pants, both they and the zipper at half-mast over a spindly body, toes that poked out of would-be shoes, a shirt that had ring-around-the-collar all over, and a face like none other, with gums as bare as Erik’s, hair uncombed, unwashed, whiskers too short to be a beard, but way, way beyond a shadow.  I was too far away to smell him, but I knew he smelled, and his hands were waving in the air.  ‘Hi there, baby.  Hi there, big boy.  I see ya, Buster.’

The exchange went on: “‘Do you know patty cake?  Atta boy.  Do you know peek-a-boo?  Hey look!  He knows peek-a-boo!’”

Nancy and her husband tried to eat in dismay and embarrassment as the old bum, a drunk and a disturbance, shouted across the room and created an awful scene with Erik’s ecstatic cooperation.  In despair they moved Erik’s chair so he could not see the man, but the baby’s howls just made things worse.

The parents gulped their food, grabbed the check, and Nancy carried Erik toward the exit, the old man’s chair right in her pathway.  As she got close to him, Erik leaned from her arms, and try as she did, she could not avoid the man’s eyes imploring her to let him hold the baby.  She didn’t really have a choice.  Again, I quote:

“. . . Erik propelled himself from my arms to the man . . . Erik, in an act of total trust, love and submission, laid his small head on the man’s ragged shoulder.  The man’s eyes closed and I saw tears hover on his lashes.  His aged hands, full of grime and apparent pain, gently, so gently cradled my baby’s bottom and stroked his back.

“No two beings have ever loved so deeply for so short a time.  I stood awestruck,” she wrote, “as the man rocked and cradled Erik in his arms, and then his eyes opened and set squarely on mine.  He said in a firm, commanding voice, ‘You take care of this baby.’  He pried Erik from his chest, unwillingly, as if in pain. I held my arms open to receive my son and again the gentleman addressed me, ‘God bless you, ma’am.  You’ve given me my Christmas . . .’”

The greatest power in the universe is the kind of love that is knit into the fabric of existence.  It is a kind of love that resides so deeply in the core of being that it transcends everything we associate with cultural standards and norms.  Real power is not found in pride, position, or possessions.  Real power is found, as Jesus demonstrated, in common cause and a common bond with all people regardless of station in life.  Real power is found, as Jesus demonstrated, in self-sacrificing love.  The heart of that love was given birth on a chilly night to an unmarried woman, in the back-waters of Palestine, and in a cow-feeder.

So, in my estimation, there had to be a donkey.  And it had to be a stubborn, smelly, slightly bedraggled beast, road weary and leaving plenty of mementoes around on the floor of the stable – one of those creatures that makes us wince, and that God adores.

¹ The American Baptist Magazine (Date unknown).