“And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.” – Luke 2:12
The word “sign” by itself does not mean the miraculous but simply something that is unusual or out of the ordinary. This sign contained two elements: first, “a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths”; and second, “lying in a manger.” The fact that the baby was lying in a manger, a feeding trough for animals, told the shepherds not to look in the private homes of Bethlehem, but to look inside a cave that was used as a stable. Professional shepherds would know where these stable-caves were located. Regarding the swaddling cloths, these were not merely baby clothes because that would not be a sign. There is nothing unusual for a newborn to be wrapped in baby clothes. These were actually strips of cloth used in burials. During that time caves were not only used for housing animals but also for burial purposes. Tucked in small holes on the walls inside these caves were strips of cloth. When a person died in the area, they would bring the body into one of these caves, wrap the body using these strips of cloth, and then bury the body in a different cave or in the cemetery below the ground. And because Jesus was born inside one of these caves, Joseph and Mary had to make use of what was readily available to them which were strips of burial cloth. So the sign for shepherds that was unusual was that they would find a baby wrapped in burial cloths inside a cave.
The symbolism should not be missed. On the first day of his life, Jesus was wrapped with the same kind of cloth that will be used again on the last day of his life: burial cloths. This shows the purpose of his birth — all of us were born to live, but Jesus was born to die.
Content retrieved from: https://youtu.be/Iq-giGAFAyY.