Can I admit that Bethlehem has been my least favorite place to visit in Israel? It’s crowded, dirty, and run by the Palestinian Authority.

Standing in Bethlehem that first time, I couldn’t help but think there had to be a hundred better places for the Messiah to have been born.

And as a father, I cannot help but believe Joseph had similar feelings that night so long ago, despite the angelic assurances he had received months earlier. His pregnant young bride was ready to pop (as my own wife’s OB/GYN so delicately described the last days of pregnancy). Joseph and Mary were far from home, in a manger cut into the side of a hill. With one glance, he knew his son’s first cradle would be a trough carved from stone. Braying donkeys would announce the birth.

While perhaps a “little town,” Bethlehem was hardly unknown. It is mentioned more than 50 times in the Bible, mostly in the Old Testament. For everyone who cared to know, which King Herod did not until he did, Bethlehem was where the Messiah had been prophesied to enter the world. But in a manger?

We have sanitized the scene; there are no animal droppings, no flies, no dirt, and no grime. But make no mistake, the scene in real life would have been incredibly unpleasant.

At Christmas, we focus on an idyllic young mother and a smiling baby. Those images morph to the wise men bringing gifts. We too often stop reading just before the jealous king orders the murder of the baby boys in an attempt to short-circuit the workings of God.

It is easier to keep Jesus as the sweet babe in swaddling clothes, not the innocent man horribly murdered on a cross for our sins.

I think we sanitize His arrival to feel better about ourselves. After all, Consumermas cannot be bothered by the recognition of our deep-rooted sin and desperate need for a savior.

In the moral economy of the Holy God, Jesus came not as He deserved but as we needed Him.

He was born next to animal excrement, which frankly produces a more pleasing aroma than our attempted good works, to borrow from the Apostle Paul.

For God and sinners to be reconciled, Jesus had to live sinlessly through the worst human experiences so He could be the perfect sacrifice. Jesus didn’t deserve to be born in a Bethlehem manger any more than we deserve the mercy He so lovingly offered by taking our place at the cross.

George Whitfield’s glorious hymn gets it just right:

“Hail the heaven-born Prince of Peace!
Hail the Sun of Righteousness!
Light and life to all he brings,
risen with healing in his wings.
Mild he lays his glory by,
born that we no more may die,
born to raise us from the earth,
born to give us second birth.”