ニューイングランドの母校からアドベントの便り、その17
2016 Gordon-Conwell
Advent Devotional | Day 17 | Go to the Mattresses
Luke 2:1-7
There’s a famous scene in the film The Godfather where the caporegimes are informed of the don’s decision to “go to the mattresses.” It’s a reference to the fact that the boss’s house would soon be over-run by temporary “guests” in preparation for an impending gang war. The scene ends with the greatest line in cinematic history: “Leave the gun, take the cannoli”–but I digress.
The point is, it’s not uncommon for families to “go to the mattresses” when the quartering of relatives exceeds the capacity of a single home; at least it used to be common in the days before Motel 6, Airbnb and Yelp.
One of my earliest memories as a child, in fact, is the sight of my mother and grandmother sitting at the kitchen table folding crisp white sheets in preparation for their return to our neighbors, as we had “gone to the mattresses” the week before when my out-of-town relatives descended upon us for my older brother’s wedding.
But neither the folding of sheets nor the presence of cousins sleeping has caused it to stay emblazoned on my mind for over fifty years.
As we sat in the kitchen, enjoying the delights of an otherwise unexceptional November afternoon, my brother burst into the house and before anyone could welcome him home from his honeymoon, he shouted the news that President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas and was probably dead. From that moment on, time seemed to stand still and I somehow knew that nothing in my hitherto sheltered life of juvenile bliss would ever be the same again; not for me and not for America–and of course, it wasn’t.
This memory came to me as I considered the story of Jesus’ birth from Luke 2: 1-7.
Not the well-known nativity-play version about there being “no room at the inn;” but the more accurate reading of the Greek that there was no “place” (topos) for them in the “guestroom” (katalumati). Joseph’s family had merely “gone to the mattresses” during the census and while the guestroom may have been taken, they were still willing and able to provide safe, if spartan accommodation for him and his pregnant wife. This would have been a perfectly normal occurrence, nothing out of the ordinary at all.
Of course, the birth of Jesus in the back of a relative’s house in the city of Bethlehem 2000 years ago was anything but ordinary; it was nothing less than the sequel to creation itself, after which everything would change, for everyone, forever.
The Bible tells us that when the “day of the Lord” comes, it too will be unexpected and will come “as a thief in the night” (1 Thes. 5:2). The question is, will we be asleep when it happens, or will we be ready, because there simply won’t be time to “go to the mattresses.”
Dr. Ken Barnes
Director of the Mockler Center; Mockler Associate Professor of Workplace Theology and Business Ethics
