Micah 5:2-5a has the theme of the distress and glory of the Davidic dynasty. It seems to derive from around 701 BC, during the Autumn festival. It has a close relation to 4:11-13. Reflecting upon this passage gives me an opportunity to reflect upon Bethlehem, the hope contained in the birth of a child, and the Celtic notion of thin places.
In Micah 5:2-5a, we find a prediction of restoration for the king. The passage is messianic in that it promises greatness for the Lord's anointed. The ruler is probably a contemporary king. Like other prophets of the 700's, Micah described and deplored the sins and shortcomings of the surviving southern kingdom of Judah under the questionable rule of Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah. Especially pernicious to both Isaiah and Micah was the oppression of the peasants in the Judean countryside by the land-grabbing ruling classes ensconced in Jerusalem. Through ever-expanding inheritance laws, land ownership among those actually living on the land was becoming almost impossible. Isaiah and Micah predict the end of this corrupt ruling class while announcing the birth of a new and old king -- a messiah. Micah insisted that God would establish this new king's dominion on the grave of old Zion. Micah declared that God would obliterate old Jerusalem in order for the new king to begin his rule. The point is that with the end of the old city and its rulers comes a new ruler. What this means is that he discounts the legitimacy of the current leadership to lay claim to the Davidic heritage. 2 Nevertheless you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me, as one feature of the deliverer, one who is to rule in Israel, and a second, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days (distant past). A biblical theme is God's choice of the unlikely, the small. The prophecy suggests the coming ruler will be like David. There is a substantial majesty ascribed to God’s deliverer.
David was from a little clan in Ephrathah, an ancient name for the area around Bethlehem. Scripture passages use Bethlehem and Ephrath(ah) more or less synonymously. Ephrathites, who lived also in the surrounding area, inhabited Bethlehem, the town. The ancestor of the Ephrathites was apparently Ephrathah, the wife of Caleb, son of Hezron. See the puzzling references in I Chronicles 2:19, 50-51; 4:4.[1] The Bethlehemites/Ephrathites were “one of the little clans [or “groups of a thousand”] of Judah.” Bethlehem/Ephrath(ah) is a biblical paradox. It was insignificant as a town in terms of size. Nevertheless, as elsewhere in Scripture, within God’s providence the smaller, younger, or otherwise less obviously superior person or group was to achieve prominence. (What is more “insignificant” in terms of apparent power than is a baby from Bethlehem?) Yet Matthew 2:6 adapts the Micah 5:2 text to read, You are “by no means least among the rulers of Judah.” Bethlehem was on a major north-south ridge road in south-central Palestine, near a fertile area to its west (perhaps giving rise to its name). It was about five miles south of Jerusalem. Jacob’s wife Rachel died and Jacob buried her on the road leading to Bethlehem (see Genesis 35:19; 48:7). Bethlehem was the home of Naomi’s family (see Ruth 1:1-2) and later of Ruth (a woman of the despised Moabites), who became King David’s great-grandmother, by Boaz (see Ruth 4:13-22). Bethlehem was the ancestral home of David himself. In I Samuel 17:12a David is the son of an Ephrathite of Bethlehem named Jesse. It was in Bethlehem that the prophet Samuel would anoint David as God’s king over Judah (see I Samuel 16:4-13). Jews of the early first century A.D. anticipated that “the son [descendent] of David,” God’s delivering Messiah/Christ (“the Anointed One”), would come from Bethlehem. John 7:42 states: “Has not the scripture said that the Messiah is descended from David and comes from Bethlehem, the village where David lived?” Gospel passages in Matthew 2 and Luke 2 firmly place King Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, with Mathew 2:1-6 explicitly referring to the Micah 5 passage as prophetic anticipation of his birth. Luke 2:4 calls Bethlehem “the city of David,” because of its association as David’s hometown (although “city of David” is used in the Old Testament only for the by-David-captured stronghold of Zion/Jerusalem, except in 1 Samuel 20:6, where a similar expression does refer to Bethlehem). Bethlehem receives no mention in the New Testament outside of Matthew 2, Luke 2 and John 7.
3 Therefore he shall give them (Judah) up to foreign powers due to divine discipline, as promised in Deuteronomy 32:30, where their defeat could not occur unless the Lord and delivered them up. Yet, this discipline will last only until the time when she who is in labor has brought forth the promised deliverer; then the rest of his kindred shall return to the people of Israel. The prayer is that defeat and humiliation would be short-lived. God will deliver the people from exile, a promise we also see in 4:6-10. 4 In addition, he, the promised deliverer, shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God. The Old Testament understands the Lord God of Israel and the leaders of Israel figuratively as “shepherds,” for good or for ill (as was often the case for human leaders). Matthew 2:6 employs the shepherd theme of II Samuel 5:2. Jesus refers to himself as “the good shepherd” in John 10. Pastors (the word comes from a Latin word meaning “shepherds”) are to feed God’s “flock.” The people of Judah and even Judah’s Davidic king were in subjugation to outside forces and in danger during a time of current besiegement and future exile. In the midst of these troubles (and others like them) God promised to send a strong deliverer who would be from David’s kingly line. That is the metaphoric meaning of Bethlehem in this passage, which we are also take literally. Finally, this ruler will have the strength to give a gift to the people of God, who shall live secure, for now he, their promised deliverer, shall be great to the ends of the earth, and thus far beyond the borders of Judah. The psalmist said the Lord is a great king over all the earth (47:2). 5a further, he shall be the one of peace (shalom, Hebrew, “This one will be peace”). He will bring peace or salvation/deliverance. In the immediate context of this passage (vv. 5 ff.), it is the Assyrians who will be defeated, if they should attack Judah. The people of God have longed for peace in this land. The ancient story of Gideon, probably around the 1200’s BC, says that Gideon built an altar and gave it the name, “The Lord is peace.” (Judges 6:23) Famously, Isaiah will prophesy of a child born among Israel who will receive authority and have the name “Prince of Peace.” The New Testament viewed this emphasis upon peace as fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth. Thus, God will reconcile all things by making peace through the blood of the cross (Colossians 1:19-20. Christ is our peace, breaking down the wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile (Ephesians 2:14). At the birth of Jesus, Luke has the angels announce peace on earth (Luke 2:14).
Like a raging storm, the Assyrian invaders were bearing down on Judah to sweep them away. Assyria had become an instrument of God for judgment against the people of God. The time was around 701 BC. It was a tough siege, but they escaped. However, about one hundred years later, another empire, that of Babylonia, would carry them into exile.
In one sense, they thought of God as distant, for Micah and Isaiah both tell us of the corruption of Judah during this time. They thought there was a thick wall between God and them, and they could get away with doing whatever they wanted. They had becomes the instruments of the oppression of the people. Yet, God would break through the wall in judgment. For the prophets, God would destroy the old Jerusalem and the old Temple before the new could come.
In another sense, the leaders of Jerusalem and the Temple thought they were the thinnest place around, so thin that God and their place were identical. They could not imagine God allowing anything bad to happen to the city or the temple, or even to the descendent of David, regardless of how unlike David he was. What they did not realize was that their salvation would not come from the present experience of king, city, or Temple. They will not find security there. What I find remarkable here is that this prophet will boldly proclaim that salvation will come in a little town about five miles from Jerusalem. All it had was a few shepherd families and many sheep. It reminds me of a biblical theme is God's choice of the unlikely, the small. It was insignificant as a town in terms of size. In Bethlehem, in a place few expected, God was going to bring the life of heaven to Earth in a very personal way. Help would come from a small clan, Ephrathah, the ancestor of whom was apparently the wife of Caleb, son of Hezron. The clan settled around Bethlehem. David would be from among them.
The contrast was sharp. David was the great pattern of what a king should be, while the present kings were little more than a territory of the Assyrian Empire. Samuel anointed the shepherd-boy David in Bethlehem and he would rule Israel and Judah. The promise of God to David would find fulfillment, but in an unexpected way, by going back to Bethlehem.
The hard thing said here is that God would give up his people to exile until that king would be born. The king will bring the people back from distant lands. The shepherd-king will feed the flock properly.
About thirty years before this prophecy, Isaiah had said that the Lord would give the king a sign in a young woman giving birth and giving him the name Immanuel (7:14). Isaiah prophesied that people in darkness have seen a great light, and thus experience joy and the lifting the burden they had from oppression. The reason is that a child born in Israel and of the lineage of David, who has the name of Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, and Prince of Peace, will bring endless peace (9:2-7). This promise will exert great influence upon the Jewish prophetic tradition. In a text many scholars think derives from the early post-exilic period, a descendant of David will be the one on whom the Spirit of the Lord shall rest, giving him wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge, and the fear of the Lord. He will judge with righteousness the poor and meek. Nature will be at peace, as all become vegetarians. A little child shall lead wild animals. The earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord (Isaiah 11:1-9). Of course, the gospels (birth passages and genealogies) understand this prophesied deliverer of Israel to be Jesus Christ (= Messiah = “son/descendent of David”), born of Mary in Bethlehem. As a promise of a future ruler, it links up with other messianic texts. We read of the same vision of the future king who would make a new beginning possible. Both Isaiah and Micah foresee this ruler coming very literally from the Davidic line. They also both completely discount the legitimacy of the current leadership to lay claim to the Davidic heritage. God chooses the same little clan Ephrathah, the same otherwise insignificant town of Bethlehem, from which David himself hailed, once again as the birthplace of the "one who is to rule in Israel." Although Micah has only a nonspecific future time in mind, he identifies this moment as the time for giving birth. Micah describes the rule of this new king with the same words and images that God used to initiate David's own rule: "shepherd of my people Israel," in II Samuel 5:2.
All of that would happen because God was going to create a thin place where the people did not expect it, right there, in Bethlehem. Instead of a temple, the place where heaven and earth came together, the place where God would dwell with his people, was going to be the feeding trough in a back alley of the tiniest and most insignificant of places.
Phillips Brooks’ immortal “O Little Town of Bethlehem” pays prayerlike homage to Bethlehem, the “house of bread” birthplace of baby Jesus, God’s bread of life. May we as pastors and other people of God explore the meaning of Micah 5 and the gospel passages, beyond their supposed quaintness and familiarity, to the ever-renewed life-giving nourishment that comes to us through the freshly told and trusted good news of our Deliverer and Lord Jesus Christ.Jesus, who would one day call himself “the bread/food/nourishment of life” (John 6:35, 48) was to come from the “little town of Bethlehem” (which itself means “house of bread/food/nourishment” in Hebrew, pronounced beth-léhem — with a hard “h”). The pageantry of countless children’s bathrobe brigades, Christmas cantata narrations and other Scripture readings for Christmas Sunday and Christmas Eve celebrate Micah 5:2-5a. Have we who preach from these verses become jaded with this text? What riches might we yet uncover in these and related verses?
I came across two articles written in 2012, and a blog, that reflect on the notion of thin places.[2] It arises out of Celtic spirituality in Scotland. I understand that instead of thinking of heaven and earth as at opposite ends, the Celts believed they were about three feet apart. Sometimes, they thought, that distance was even smaller --small enough for those on Earth to get a glimpse of the glory of heaven. The Celts believed that Iona is a place where people could feel that thinness and experience the kind of revelations and feelings that one might have when so close to the holy. They believed that was true of other places as well, usually places far away from the crowd and wrapped in both mist and mystery.
The Isle of Iona in Scotland is a tiny, windswept place in the western Hebrides off the western coast of Scotland. It is a skinny little island, only about 3.5 miles long and 1.5 miles wide, but it became the destination of hundreds of people each year who brave a long journey involving trains, boats, busses to get there. It is a quiet place. Only about one hundred people there. You might have even seen Celtic crosses, and the island has a large one. I discovered that no matter how thin a place it might be, when it comes to the weather, Suzanne and I would not want to go. It seems that the rain and wind off the North Sea can drive right through you, no matter what type of gear you have. In any case, the monks who live there welcome visitors from all over the world, searching for something missing in their souls.
The famous 20th century Trappist monk Thomas Merton once wrote that thin places are even more prevalent than the ancient Celts believed, but we just do not see them.
"Life is simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time ... if we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes ... the only thing is that we don't (let ourselves) see it."[3]
Painter and poet William Blake had a remarkably fertile imagination when it came to things of the Spirit. All his life, Blake cultivated a naive openness to the world around him.
“I know that this world is a world of imagination and vision. I see everything I paint in this world but everybody does not see alike. To the eye of a miser a guinea [the gold coin] is far more beautiful than the sun and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. As a man is so he sees. When the sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire something like a gold piece? O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.’”
Indeed, Merton and Blake have placed a finger upon perhaps the greatest problem in the thin-place metaphor. The worldview it assumes and the implications that flow from this worldview present a problem. A thin place is, by definition, an exception to the rule. Moreover, the rule states that a thick barrier separates this world and the heavenly world. God is on the other side of the barrier, mostly separate from the world, except for unusually thin places in which he makes himself known. This worldview is common, but it is not biblical. Scripture teaches us to see God as much more involved in this world than the thin place metaphor assumes.[4]
Jürgen Moltmann said in God in Creation (Chapter 7) that one of the places he thought Karl Barth got it wrong is that heaven and earth are not dualities. He prefers to think of the Father creating “heaven and earth” as affirmed in the creed is a way of saying that earth opens up to heaven. The earth, in a sense, has an upward drift toward God. In the context of this reflection, earth may have more thin places, it may have more traces of the divine as Moltmann put it, than we acknowledge.
Preacher Philips Brooks experienced his own thin place in Christmas week of 1865.
After an early dinner, we took our horses and rode to Bethlehem. It was only about two hours when we came to the town, situated on an eastern ridge of a range of hills, surrounded by its terraced gardens. It is a good-looking town, better built than any other we have seen in Palestine. ... Before dark, we rode out of town to the field where they say the shepherds saw the star. It is a fenced piece of ground with a cave in it (all the Holy Places are caves here), in which, strangely enough, they put the shepherds. The story is absurd, but somewhere in those fields we rode through where the shepherds must have been. ... As we passed, the shepherds were still "keeping watch over their flocks or leading them home to fold."
Several years later Brooks sat down to pen a hymn about the experience. The result is the beloved carol "O Little Town of Bethlehem," a moving meditation on the power of place to inspire believers. Truly, it felt to Brooks -- both at the time, and as he wrote about it later -- that "the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight."
In my journey to the Holy Land, Bethlehem was one of our visits. Yes, there are still shepherds herding their flocks. The Church of the Nativity, built over the traditional place memorialized as the place where Jesus was born. You go inside this ornate church, but then you must go down a narrow and winding staircase to get to the place. The ceiling is low. The tour guide asked me to read the story of the birth of Jesus from Luke. I learned something about thin places at that point, although I did not have that phrase. I focused my attention on the reading. I had so many people on the tour come up talk to me of how the setting became a thin place for them. In fact, a layperson on that journey saw me over ten years later and still looked back at that moment as powerful for her.
Yet, I must say that Bethlehem is a busy place today. Pilgrims from everywhere, meaning you will have to wait before you get into the Church of the Nativity. Monks yell instructions, cameras flashing, and of course, security officers are everywhere. All of this so that pilgrims can come be close and touch this place. In many ways, Bethlehem today is more hectic than holy.
I do get it. Some of us have our thin places, such as a spiritual retreat, a camp, and so on. Yet, let me suggest that as meaningful as a journey to the Holy Land can be, the pilgrimage we need during Advent and Christmas is not to the Bethlehem of today. The pilgrimage we need is spiritual. The thin place we need to experience in our lives is how near God has come to us in Jesus. We can do that right where we are by simply focusing ourselves on the humble and powerful way in which God chooses to bridge the gap between heaven and Earth. God came in the soft skin and helpless posture of a baby, born to a family under Roman occupation that had their own suspicion of “the Jews.” I like to imagine that life was thin for Mary and Joseph, but the life Mary brought forth in the manger was full of more than God's people and, indeed, the whole world could have ever imagined.
In Jesus, God broke through the barriers between God and humanity by becoming one of us. We do not worship a God who is distant, cloaked in clouds, and oblivious to our world. Instead, we worship a God who has consented to humble himself, as Paul says in Philippians 2, and take the road to a cross. This is a God we can know because he has a human face and in him, the best of heaven and Earth come together and show us what is possible for us and for the world.
Therefore, as we prepare for Christmas, perhaps the best preparation is to take some time to go to a quiet place and consider that God is not far away, that the king is quite near and the rule of God is at hand. Allow yourself to live in the reality of who God is and what God has done in Jesus. Take a pilgrimage into the heart of the biblical story of Christmas. Read it as if you are seeing it for the first time. Serve someone who needs to experience the reality that God has come to give them real hope.
May your Christmas be thin!
[1](See Lamontte M. Luker: Anchor Bible Dictionary, “Ephrathah” (person and place), vol. 2, 557-558, for a discussion of some of these issues.)
[2] Emerson, Susan. "Appreciating thin places." Gloucester Times, June 3, 2010. http://www.gloucestertimes.com/lifestyle/x1910025572/Appreciating-thin-places. Viewed June 7, 2012.
Weiner, Eric. "Where heaven and Earth come closer." The New York Times, March 11, 2012, 10.
[3] - Pennington, M. Basil, A Retreat With Thomas Merton, Element, Rockport, MA 1988.
[4] --Mark Roberts, "Thin Places," a 2012 blog entry on patheos.com. patheos.com/blogs/markdroberts/series/thin-places. Retrieved June 19, 2012.
interesting. Thin place is used well,to make your point. I assume, you meant this an illustration or metaphor for meeting with God. We can experience our own thin place any place we pause to allow God to speak to us. Certainly something we should all be doing especially on Christmas eve, when we celebrate His in breaking into our world. "A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices."
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