The “Mass” in “Christmas”
By Michael Patrick Barber
People frequently speak of the danger of taking “Christ” out of Christmas. Much less concern is given to another danger: taking the “Mass” out of Christmas. Indeed, “Mass” is right there in the name of the day. This is not coincidental. Indeed, as we shall see, every Mass—every celebration of the Eucharist—is a kind of “little Christmas.” Let me explain.
Laid in a Manger
In the Gospel of Luke, we are told of how the baby Jesus was placed by his mother in a “manger.”
The King James Version, the most influential English Bible translation, puts it this way: “and [Mary] laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7). This translation, however, has its problems.
Upfront, let me explain that I am not merely about to engage in some sort of iconoclastic myth-busting. As I will explain, the common misinterpretation of this passage leads to a problematic blind spot. It leads people to miss a crucial connection between the Christmas story and the Church’s eucharistic celebration.
“No Vacancy”?
First, by speaking of their being “no room” in the “inn” the translation gives the impression that Mary and Joseph were somehow turned away at “Hotel Bethlehem” due to a lack of “room” availability. This is a historical anachronism. If this common reading were put into a film script, it would involve placing a man at a front desk—an innkeeper—who greets Joseph and Mary with a grim face. He repeatedly calls out to an assistant examining key boxes looking for empty “rooms.”
Innkeeper: “Room 7?”
Assistant: “Occupied.”
Innkeeper: “Room 12?”
Assistant: “Occupied.”
Innkeeper: “Well, what do we have left?”
Assistant: “We are full up!”
One then imagines Mary and Joseph wandering around Bethlehem looking for a hotel accommodation only, alas, to discover “No Vacancy” signs in every window.
Here I should mention that various Christian practices have emerged out of the conventional reading. For instance, one thinks here of the Mexican tradition of Las Posadas, which attempts to recreate Mary and Joseph’s quest for a place to stay. I love this tradition. It is a beautiful reminder of our need to welcome the stranger, for in them we welcome Christ himself (see Matthew 25:31–46).
Yet if we read the story of the Nativity in the Gospel of Luke carefully we will discover something that portrayals of the Gospel narrative often overlook. In Luke’s telling, Mary and Joseph were already staying in Bethlehem when the time came for Mary to give birth. Luke tells us: “it happened that while they were there, the time came for her to give birth” (Luke 2:6). The nativity of Jesus does not take place on the night the couple arrives at the city. It seems they had already been staying in Bethlehem.
The Manger and the “Room”
In addition, despite the King James Version’s rendering, we can also note that scholars typically recognize that Luke never even mentions an “inn” in the Greek. Later in the Gospel, when Luke wants to refer to an “inn,” he uses the Greek word pandocheion. This word occurs in the famous parable of the Good Samaritan. The Samaritan finds a man beaten and left for dead by the side of the road. He shows compassion on him, dressing his wounds and taking him to an inn (Luke 10:34: pandocheion). He asks the “innkeeper” to take care of him, giving him money and promising to return and to pay whatever other expenses are involved caring for the injured man (Luke 10:35).
In the story of the Nativity, however, there is no “inn” (pandocheion) and no “innkeeper.” The Greek word the King James Version translates as “inn” is not pandocheion but a different word: katalyma. This word is best translated as “room.”1 It is a significant word.
The Manger and the Upper Room
What difference does it make that the word translated “inn” in the Christmas story actually means “room”? Luke will later use this word again to describe a vitally important scene: the Last Supper. This is the same word used for the “upper room.” We see the word appear again when Jesus tells the disciples where to prepare his final Passover meal:
. . . you will meet a man carrying a water jar. Follow him into the house in which he enters. And you shall say to the master of the house, “The Teacher says to you: Where is the guest room [katalyma] where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?” And he shall show you a large upper room that is furnished: there prepare. And they went and found everything as he had said to them: and they prepared the Passover. (Luke 22:10-13)
Jesus eats the Last Supper, then, in a katalyma, a “room”—the same word used in Luke’s story of Jesus’s birth.
So, let’s recap. In Luke’s account of the Nativity, Jesus is placed in a “manger” precisely because there was no space in “the room.” As in the story of the Upper Room, this likely refers to some sort of guestroom. There is no horse stable here. What would typically happen in the culture of the ancient Middle East was that visitors would stay with family members and be given special guest quarters. Archaeological finds from the Holy Land indicate that this typically involved a private room with a separate outside entrance.
In the story of Jesus’s birth, we find that Mary and Joseph were not able to stay in a private guest room. They lacked the convenience of their own separate accommodation in the house in which they were staying. (Perhaps this was because other family members were also visiting the same house.)
But there is an important theological point in all of this: Jesus is put in a “manger”—a feeding trough—because he cannot be in the “room.” Later, when Jesus is in the “room”—the Upper Room of the Last Supper—Jesus will reveal what the manger was signaling, namely, that he is to be our food:
And he took bread, and after giving thanks, he broke it, and gave to them, saying, “This is my body which is given for you: do this in remembrance of me.” (Luke 22:19)
The one who is placed in the feeding trough because he cannot be in the guest room later enters a guestroom and identifies himself as the bread of life to the disciples.
Bethlehem as “House of Bread”
The early Church fathers loved to underscore the way the Christmas story points to the eucharistic celebration. St. Cyril of Alexandria, who died in a.d. 444, explains:
. . . whereas we were brutish in soul, by now approaching the manger, yes, his table, we find no longer feed, but the bread from heaven, which is the body of life.2
The manger was the place from which animals were fed. We are fed in the Eucharist. Our celebration of the Eucharist is therefore already signified by the Christ-child’s being put in a manger.
Similarly, in the fourth century, St. John Chrysostom says:
This body, even lying in a manger, magi reverenced. Let us, then, at least imitate those Barbarians, we who are citizens of heaven. . . For they . . . drew near with great awe; but you behold him not in the manger but on the altar, not a woman holding him in her arms, but the priest standing by. . .3
For Chrysostom, what we do in the liturgy is already symbolized in the Christmas story.
Early Christian writers loved to emphasize the eucharistic echo of the Nativity story by making another observation: the name of the town Jesus is born in, “Bethlehem,” literally means “house of bread” in Hebrew. The third-century writer Origen puts it this way: “Where else would the shepherds hasten after the message of peace than to the spiritual house of the heavenly bread, Christ, i.e., the church.”4 St. Jerome, in a homily delivered between a.d. 394-413, thus says:
The fruit of our earth is the bread of life, who was born for us at Bethlehem. Bethlehem, in fact, means house of bread, and this is the bread that came forth in Bethlehem, that coming down from heaven, was made for us; the bread into whose mystery angels desire [to look].5
In the late 500s, St. Pope Gregory the Great sums it up with these words:
Bethlehem is translated “house of bread,” and it is he who said: “I am the living bread who came down from heaven” [John 6:51]. The place in which the Lord was born was called the “house of bread” because it was truly going to come to pass that he would appear there in a material body who would nourish the hearts of his chosen ones by an interior food.6
What all of this helps us to understand is this: we enter into the mystery of what happened on Christmas through the Eucharist.
The Origins of Midnight Mass
The tradition of “midnight Mass” is an ancient one. But why a midnight Mass? As with so much else in Catholic tradition, the answer is found in Scripture.
According to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus’s birth was announced to shepherds. The evangelist tells us that they were “keeping watch over their flock by night” (Luke 2:8). Jesus’s birth, then, would seem to be associated with night.
But why the tradition of celebrating Jesus at midnight? The answer is found in the book of the Wisdom of Solomon. There we are told:
For while gentle silence enveloped all things,
and night in its swift course was now half gone,
your all-powerful word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne,
Into the midst of the land that was doomed. . . (Wisdom 18:14-15).
From what we can tell, it was the fourth century archbishop of Constantinople, St. John Chrysostom, who was the first to associate this passage with Jesus’s birth.7
He explained that this text is best explained as referring to the Feast of the Nativity. With the birth of Jesus these verses were fulfilled—Jesus, God’s “all-powerful word,” became man. He “leaped from heaven.” Moreover, since Wisdom says this happened when night was “half-gone,” it was fitting to link Jesus’s birth to midnight. Henceforth, the Nativity would be celebrated at midnight.
Mass and Christmas
Jesus is truly present under the appearance of bread and wine in the Church’s eucharistic celebration. How could God himself be contained in something apparently so insignificant? The same, however, could be said of the Nativity story itself. God himself becomes man. But not only does he become man, he becomes a helpless infant. And if all of that is not enough, this child is laid in a feeding trough—placed where the animals feed. This shows us the goal of the Incarnation—communion. God comes to save us and, in doing so, becomes our food. What could be more stupendous a mystery?
Believers regularly point out that there can be no “Christmas” without “Christ.” But we should also be reminded that we must not take the “Mass” out of “Christmas.” The goal of Christmas is not simply presents but the real presence—it is that the Savior comes to unite us to himself. He does this whenever we receive him as our bread of life.
To celebrate Christmas without the Mass should be unimaginable. The eucharistic mystery is at the heart of the Nativity story—the child is laid in the manger, the feeding trough. And just as the Nativity story points us to the Mass, every Mass is a little Christmas. What we need now is to return to this “true meaning of Christmas.”
Michael Patrick Barber is Professor of Scripture and Theology at the Augustine Institute Graduate School. He can be found online at TheSacredPage.com and on Twitter/X at @MichaelPBarber. This essay is based on material from The True Meaning of Christmas: The Birth of Jesus and the Origins of the Season (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2021), 85–98. See the book for more sources and references.
See, especially, Stephen Carlson, “The Accommodations of Joseph and Mary in Bethlehem,” New Testament Studies 56 (2010): 326–42.
Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary upon the Gospel according to St. Luke on Luke 2:7; trans. R. Payne Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1859), 11-12.
Homilies on First Corinthians 24.8l; Philip Schaff, ed., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church: First Series [NPNF1], 14 vols. (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1889), 12:143.
Fragments in Luke 40a. Quoted from Fred Ledegang, Mysterium Ecclesiae (Leuven: Lueven University Press, 2001), 309.
Jerome, Homily 64; taken from Ewald, Homilies of Saint Jerome, 54.
Homily 8 (PL 1103); trans. Dom Hurst, Forty Gospel Homilies (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2009), 51.
Joseph F. Kelly, The Origins of Christmas, rev. ed. (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 2014), 86.