The Ox, and Ass, and Lobster

All sorts of animals crowd into the Nativity story, as in this piece of dialogue from the film Love Actually:

Karen: So what's this big news, then?
Daisy: [excited] We've been given our parts in the nativity play. And I'm the lobster.
Karen: The lobster?
Daisy: Yeah!
Karen: In the nativity play?
Daisy: [beaming] Yeah, *first* lobster.
Karen: There was more than one lobster present at the birth of Jesus?
Daisy: Duh.

Or in the carol In the bleak midwinter:

Enough for Him, Whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, Whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Or in the mediaeval Latin text O magnum mysterium, often set to music, and for me most memorably by Morten Lauridsen:

o great mystery

and wondrous sacrament,

that animals should see the newborn Lord,

lying in a manger!

Blessed is the virgin whose womb was worthy

to bear our Lord Christ.  Alleluia!

Lord, I heard your call and was afraid;

I considered your works,

and I trembled between two animals

Lobster, ox and ass are all missing from the narratives of the birth of Jesus in the 'canonical' gospels written by Matthew and Luke, as are any mentions of animals at all, apart from the 'flocks' watched over by the shepherds outside Bethlehem (Luke 2:8).

What interests me is the way in which the birth stories in Matthew and Luke are sparse enough to both beg, and to hold, an imaginative filling-in of details.  One of these imaginative 'fillings-in', and perhaps the source for some of the more traditional animal inhabitants of the Nativity story such as the Ox and the Ass, is the 8th century Pseudo-Matthew gospel:

And on the third day after the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, Mary went out of the cave, and, entering a stable, placed the child in a manger, and an ox and an ass adored him. Then was fulfilled that which was said by the prophet Isaiah, "The ox knows his owner, and the ass his master's crib." Therefore, the animals, the ox and the ass, with him in their midst incessantly adored him. Then was fulfilled that which was said by Habakkuk the prophet, saying, "Between two animals you are made manifest." (Chapter 14)*

What all these texts betray are two deep human desires.  Firstly, a curiosity about the details of life of Jesus, and in particular his childhood, which the New Testament both stubbornly refuses to meet but also (strangely) prompts by allowing so many empty spaces within which the imagination can work.  Secondly, a longing for the divine to be made real and understandable within the span of domestic experience; the Ox and the Ass provide the realism, the prophetic 'authority' of Isaiah and Habakkuk appear to provide a divine sanction for their inclusion - heaven in ordinary.

*The Isaiah quote is 1:3, that from Habakkuk is 3:2 but where the King James Version has 'O LORD, I have heard thy speech, and was afraid: O LORD, revive thy work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make known; in wrath remember mercy.' the Pseudo Matthew gospel relies on the Septuagint (LXX) which translates the words in bold as 'two living creatures'.