The Mean Innkeeper and His Witchy Wife

Mean-spirited, cold, cruel, uncaring, apathetic, dismissive, judgmental—for as long as I can remember, this is how the innkeeper and (often as a shot at nagging women) his wife were depicted in movies, church plays, and sermons that focused on the Christmas story.

In fact, during one church play, I think I portrayed that very same obnoxious wife who gets to spout the now infamous phrase, “There’s no room at the inn!”

I remember the moment when I reread the story for myself and found that there was no description of the inn, no mention of an innkeeper, and the entire incident—only found in the Gospel of Luke—was only a sentence long.

Here it is:

And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

Apparently, scholars dispute the translation of the word “inn.”

On the Christianity Today website, there is an article by Ben Witherington III that claims:

When it came time for Mary to deliver the baby, the Greek of Luke's text says, "she wrapped him in cloth and laid him in a corn crib, as there was no room in the guest room." Yes, you heard me right. Luke does not say there was no room in the inn. Luke has a different Greek word for inn (pandeion), which he trots out in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The word he uses here (kataluma) is the very word he uses to describe the room in which Jesus shared the Last Supper with his disciples — the guest room of a house.

What Witherington goes on to claim is that it was Joseph’s family that was turning the young couple out—perhaps out of shame because of the couple’s apparent shotgun wedding or because there were already too many people in the house.

The Gospel of Luke says that Caesar Augustus made a decreed intended to squeeze out some tax money, so everyone had to trudge back to the city of their lineage’s origins. For Joseph, this meant Bethlehem. So, some scholars posit that Bethlehem, like many other cities, would’ve been hopping and bursting with cousins upon cousins.

If it was family who had “no room” in their guest room, then at least the family did what they could. Certainly, the stables would’ve provided shelter.

Just because there was “no room” does not mean that someone had to be “the bad guy” or the “obnoxious wife.”

And, the same can be said even if a person wanted to view the inn as one of our modern day hotels.

What’s wrong with depicting the innkeeper as compassionate and doing what he could with what he had? He set the young couple up in the stables.

Or, better still, why invent someone at all? Maybe Joseph and Mary went and stayed in the stables on their own accord—without invitation?

To me, the line is only an explanation for why Jesus was placed in a manger to sleep, but, these days, it has become a cliché.

The fundamental principle, though, remains.

And, as I bustle through the stores, which are glutted with fake Christmas trees and red and green and Santas and merchandise and customers muttering and scowling and cash registers chiming, it’s easy to see how those less fortunate might not find much “room.”

I buy the things that I buy every year for people—things that most people on my list admit that they don’t really need. Yes, we like our toys, but, lately, it feels a little perfunctory.

Instead of buying presents for each other, we should all donate to charities.

In the Christian story, Jesus was God’s “gift to the world.” He was born into simplicity. Yes, the birth in the stables shows a lowly and humble birth for a king, for a deity, but it also illustrates that a manger can serve as a crib. Jesus didn’t need anything more than what he had.

And, in my opinion, it shows a problem inherent in Christianity today. There was no mean innkeeper. There was no intolerant wife. So, why invent them? Why create these two cold-hearted characters when it seems that it is, in fact, many Christians these days who are telling people marginalized by society that there is “no room at the inn.” Some Christians seem to embody these two caricatures of mean-spiritedness. We should be the ones offering what we can with what we have.

To me, what I take from this account in the Gospel of Luke is this: we should strive to embrace simplicity and compassion and humility, not just at Christmas but in each day of our lives.