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Luke 2-3: Bethlehem Humiliation and Jordan Submission
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3. Luke 2-3: Humilation and Submission before God
As we’ve seen, the path of Jesus leads to God both at the start and end of our journey. The Beginning is the End and the End is the Beginning. We begin in the temple, and end in the temple, having learned who Jesus is as the Son of God, and committed to him as our way of life so that we can outlive our earthly life for an eternity in God’s presence.
This eternal return to devotion to God was the start of the journey, but it occurs not just with a focus on God, but also with a faith that trusts not in our own ability to find the Way, but entirely in God’s loving willingness to show us the way to him. The word for this type of faith is shocking at first: it is humiliation. Not abusive or undeserved debasing, but a lowering of ourselves that submits to God and acknowledges complete dependence on the divine. In his way our devotion to God should bring humility leading to obedience.
In the opening chapters of Luke’s Gospel we see Jesus moved from humiliation to submission in a way that is appropriate to his unique identify as the son of God -- one without sin -- but universally applicable to us, the readers, whose humiliation and submission come of a necessity given our sinful state.
Humiliation at Bethlehem
You have probably heard the Christmas Carol, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” We think of the song around December, but the importance of Bethlehem to understanding Jesus’ life and our lives is not limited to one month. It is a recurring reality of our life. Bethlehem is about humiliation, a weakness and lowliness that cries to God for help and confesses His power to help us.
Why is Bethlehem about humiliation? First, the size of Bethlehem makes it a humble place. We know Bethlehem was small because of how the Bible describes it. Micah’s assessment, made in the eighth-century BC, fits all the historical evidence that we have: “But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient day” (Micah 5:2, emphasis added; cf. Matt 2:6).
Similarly, in the New Testament, people referred to Bethlehem as a κώμη, what we would call a “bed-room community,” or a small town outside the main city. This reference to Bethlehem as a “village occurs as the crowd around Jesus debates whether he was the Messiah because they thought he was born in Galilee, at Nazareth: “Has not the Scripture said that the Christ comes from the offspring of David, and comes from Bethlehem, the village where David was (John 7:42 ESV)?”
The ancient town of Bethlehem was located five miles south of Jerusalem. All the archeological evidence that exists indicates that it was a small town of only a few hundred people. Although it is the ancestral home of king David (1 Sam 16:1; 20:6), it was far from the size and grandeur of the city that most Scriptures identify as the city of David: Jerusalem. So, Bethlehem was a village: a small and lowly place. And Jesus’ birth there was so humble that people didn’t even realize it had happened.
Second, not only was the place lowly, but the conditions of his birth were also humble, even humiliating: “And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7 ESV). The word (κατάλυμα) translated “inn” in most modern versions, is more appropriately translated “guest room,” (cf. Mark 14:14; Luke 22:11), which is where family or other inhabitants would traditionally show hospitality to travelers.
Luke’s Gospel does not specify the location of the feed trough in which Jesus was born. According to the second-century AD church father Justin Martyr, Jesus was born in cave (Dialogue with Trypho 78). But certainly, a place on the ground. A humiliating, humble place. The words humiliating, humble, and humility all come from the Latin word for earth, dirt. Humiliated means brought low to the ground, debased in the dirt.
Ancient Christian interpreters of Luke 2 recognized the humiliating conditions of Jesus’ birth and its significance for followers of Jesus. For example, Jerome in his work, On the Nativity of the Lord, observed that “He was not born in the midst of gold and riches, but in the midst of dung, in a stable where our sins were filthier than the dung. He is born on a dunghill in order to lift up those who come from it: ‘From the dunghill he lifts up the poor.’ (Psalm 113:7).”
Jerome highlights that Jesus came into this world in humiliating circumstances signifying that we all live in Bethlehem. Bethlehem is our place of weakness, smallness, sinfulness. But Bethlehem also shows us that God works through Jesus’s humble circumstances and through our humiliation. In Luke 2:10-12, Jesus has been born in Bethlehem and an angel comes with a confession of both great power and great paradox.
10 And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. 11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. 12 And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.”
As with Jesus in Bethlehem, our poverty in swaddling clothes of the spirit is a sign of the gospel and the joy it brings. God works through our sinfulness and weakness to show his strength. God sees us in our sinful situations, and our confession of our humiliation is the second step with Jesus on the Way. All of us when we confess our weakness and sin return to Bethlehem, and acknowledge how small and shameful we are, but do so in a humiliation that does not despair or deny, but that seeks and praises God for his saving presence and power in the small and shameful places of our lives.
What do the following verses teach us about humiliation?
Psalm 138:6
Acts 8:33
1 Cor 1:28–29
2 Cor 12:9
Phil 2:8
James 1:9
When have you found yourself in Bethlehem in your life? What led to it? Where did it lead?
Submission at the Jordan (Luke 3)
The Jordan River is a place visited by Jesus early in his ministry that had spiritual significance in his day, as in the day of ancient Israel. It was a place that was more than a river, it was a sacred symbol of God’s covenant and commands and the submission of God’s people to the plan for their lives. Today we follow Jesus, and the Jordan is a not a literal place that we need to go, but is has spiritual significance for us all because it represents a spiritual step in our inner lives that we must first take in order to obey God. It is a place in our mind and hearts that we must keep going to in order to stay in step with God. Let’s focus the importance of the Jordan in the life of Israel, Jesus, and the Christian, and see how we can visit it in our hearts and minds to find God and to fulfill our Christian service.
What do you need to submit to in your life? The need for submission to God is represented by the Jordan River in the OT and in the Gospel. The Jordan is a barrier that is both obstacle and opportunity to cross over in submission to God in order to get to what God wants. Abraham crosses the Jordan with Lot in submission to God, and later, the Israelites needed to obey God in crossing the Jordan. The tribes who settled to the east of the Jordan obeyed God in passing over the river (Num 32:21-29). For all the tribes the Jordan’s crossing meant submission to the command to subdue the inhabitants and destroy their idols (Num 33:50-52). The act of crossing with the ark of the covenant and placing a pile of stones in the dried river bed were acts of obedience to the will of God. (Josh 4:10). And to the contrary, Moses’ failure to submit to God meant he could not cross over the Jordan (Deut 3:27; 4:21). Unlike Moses, Naaman submitted to be whom God wanted them to be in 2 Kings 5. He didn’t receive healing until he submitted to washing in the Jordan even times. And it worked (2 Kings 5:17) because the Jordan was where the will and word of God was.
In Luke 3, we are introduced to John the Baptist who is in the region of the Jordan calling people to repentance: “And he went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” (Luke 3:3)
We see that the Jordan is a place of repentance, which is more than feeling sorry for sin; it is a change of mind and life. Literally, the Greek word metanoia means "after-mind” and signifies a change of mind: thinking one way, but then afterwards thinking another. And repentance is practical: John says that the people need to “bear fruits in keeping with repentance” (Luke 3:18). The Jordan was a place for changing the concrete, everyday practices of their life. In Luke 3:10-14, the people hear John’s proclamation and his return to their ongoing need for repentance. And it clearly dawns on them that the Jordan is a place they should never fully leave, but it is a contrition and commitment they take with them. They must live wet from the Jordan. And their question is: "what then shall we do?” (Luke 3:10).
Though Jesus was without sin, the Jordan was where he submitted to the will of God. In Matthew’s account of the baptism, Jesus explains that he would be baptized in order to “fulfill all righteousness,” i.e., to submit what God says is right (Matt 3:15). His obedience to the form of right action in baptism results in heaven’s acclamation: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matt 3:17).
If you have not submitted yourself to God in baptism, the go to the Jordan in your heart and obey God in baptism just as Jesus did, because it is the right and required thing to do.
Finally, the Jordan is where God’s will is in your life, if you’ve fallen back into bad habits, or find yourself needing to engage a new form of service, go to the Jordan and cross into a place where you submit to and obey the will of God.
