In the middle of the classic Christmas hymn ‘Away in a Manger’, there is this one line that doesn’t quite ring true. The second stanza tells us, “The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes / But little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes”. Did baby Jesus really not cry? The hymn author was likely thinking that Jesus did not cry because he was perfect and divine. But does a crying baby Jesus detract from his divinity? I think not, but a non-crying baby Jesus detracts from his humanity.
I see no inherent conflict between Jesus being God and Jesus crying as a baby. Crying is not necessarily sinful. If a child cries when it is hungry, tired, or just plain uncomfortable, is that wrong? No, that is just the way that God made us. However, there is also selfish, sinful crying, which does manifest itself from infanthood because we are sinful from birth (Ps 51:5; Eph. 2:3).
Now Jesus never sinned, so he never cried in a sinful way. So that means that four-year-old Jesus never collapsed in a heap of whingeing and crying because he didn’t get his way, like my four-year-old does sometimes. But if toddler Jesus was running around Mary and Joseph’s home and tripped, and bonked his head on the corner of a table, did he cry? I’m sure he did. And after the shepherds went home and Mary and Joseph tried to get some sleep, did newborn Jesus wake multiple times during the night and cry to be fed? I’m sure he did.
A crying baby Jesus is a human baby Jesus. If Jesus was anything less than 100% human, then he would have been disqualified from dying on the cross to redeem us from God’s wrath against our sin. Why is that? Because just as Adam represented the whole human race in the Garden of Eden and led us all into death, Jesus Christ (the Second Adam: Rom 5:12-21; 1 Cor 15:45) represented all those who would trust in him, leading us into eternal life. He had to be human in order to be humanity’s representative before the Father at the cross. Jesus’ divinity kept him free from sin, which would have disqualified him from being the perfect sacrifice that God required, and Jesus’ humanity made him truly able to stand in for those of us whose feet are made of clay.
Let us rejoice in the birth of Jesus as a little child but remember that he was a crying baby. It is a crying baby Jesus that we need. Anything less and he would not be the Saviour.
Karl Dahlfred blogs at Gleanings from the Field.
Karl ~
Congrats on getting on the Briefing.
All the best for your return to Thailand.
So right. I’ve often wondered about that… and somehow never pondered it long enough to come up with a solution. Thanks for sharing this little nugget of wisdom. I think I’ll share it with my kids!
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Does anyone have alternative words for the second stanza of “Away in the Manager”?
How about this?
“The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes
Little Lord Jesus, such crying he makes!”
Hi Steve, I just recalled a song I used to sing at church. Maybe you could ensure that straight after singing ‘Away in a manger’, you then sing the Emu Music song from the album One For Many – ‘Jesus Wept’. :)
Sure, we shouldn’t dehumanise Jesus. Another way of looking at this would be from the perspective that the lyrics in question were probably designed to guilt little children into thinking that being good means not crying: the opposite of teaching children the reason Jesus came to this earth. I feel this promotes a moralism rather than a reliance on Jesus as our perfection.
But I hardly think any of this makes much difference. These songs are used by our culture mostly just to show off the next wannabe diva’s vocal chords, and are repeated so often in shopping centres that the words have lost their meaning. To Steve above, you might find alternative lyrics somewhere, but considering how entrenched this song is in our culture, I can’t see a censored version offering much benefit.
I’d say the hymn writer was thinking “perfect baby”. I mean, Jesus was perfect, right? And somehow sinless-perfect gets mixed up with what-sinful-humans-think-is-ideal. Wouldn’t a calm, placid baby who never cries be “perfect”? (In fact, babies who never cry are often ones who have been neglected as they have learned already that crying makes no difference at all.) So, to fallen humans, a baby who never cried, or woke you at night, or vomited and pooed in inconvenient places, at inconvenient times; that seems “perfect”. The blessings without the work.
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Also, in response to my previous comment, I read this to my six year old and eight year old children. They had been singing Away In A Manger recently and at least one said that baby Jesus didn’t cry. We read the article, discussing words and phrases they didn’t understand, and they came away with a better understanding of what fully God and fully man looks like. Thanks for providing us with this opportunity for discussion and to the whole Briefing blog team for the steady stream of thought provoking articles.
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Hi, yes – Thank you Karl for posting an article about this! My husband and I were also pondering recently what this hymn-writer’s choice of phrase shows about his/her opinion of crying and sin.
In thinking about it, I realised that we don’t just have to rely on logic to answer the question of whether crying is sinful (e.g. ‘If a child cries when it is hungry, tired, or just plain uncomfortable, is that wrong? No, that is just the way that God made us.) I think that when we are told in Revelation (among other prophecies) that when God brings in the new creation “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore” (Revelation 21:4) we can conclude that crying, in any form, *is* a *result/effect* of sin in the world – ie. that the world is cursed and now causes death and pain, which lead to our tears. So it’s quite possible there was no crying before the Fall. (However, I can’t prove this, because the new heavens & earth are not a restoration to Eden but something completely new. -There was marriage in the garden but there won’t be marriage in the new creation [Mark 12:25]. So we can’t be sure.)
In the end though I just wanted to note that the reason we can say pretty confidently that Jesus as a baby/child probably *did* cry, is the fact that we are explicitly told of times when Jesus the *adult* cried: in the gospels in Luke 19:41-44 (over Jerusalem) and John 11:30-36 (over the death of Lazarus)- and also in Hebrews 5:7.
So we can speculate from these episodes that (as Karl points out) Jesus as an infant may have only cried when he was emotionally sad. So his crying would have always been *caused by* sin (ie. the effects of the curse on his human mind and body), but it was never sinful for him to do it.
I know this is probably obvious but just thought I would share! :) – It’s particularly of interest to me as we’re expecting my first baby in a few weeks’ time so am trying to prepare my mind for having to deal with baby tears… and mine too no doubt :)