I once noted that there seems to be no part of holy writ so well defended from the pulpit as the story of the wandering Magi and the Christmas star. It seems also that every year my Christmas reflections are subject to complaint or condemnation. This year I seemingly went too far in naming the narratives of Jesus’ birth as found in Luke and Matthew as “fabled tales”.
If one has spent time reading scholarly commentaries on the scriptures, one encounters very many scholars willing to stretch the hypothetical to the stratospheric, but few scholars willing to be blunt. Too many are, undoubtedly in deference to the institutions that licence them and support them, adept at diplomatically soft-pedaling opinions, insights, and facts that might arouse too much controversy. I am not in the employ of any institution. Age may have deducted from my constitution certain energies, but it has also graced me with certain freedoms, including the ability to speak my mind without concern for censure. Thus, I feel free to speak the truth even if a bevy of local bishops choke on their martinis, spitting out “you cannot tell that to the people”. The guardians of tradition may not be given to novelty or evolution, unfortunately, reality is. As I appear to be ripe to present the truth without mollification, I shall put that last sentence in terms their concern can read: creativity and novelty, not the static status quo, is God’s way—unless, of course, there exists an option to jettison the Holy Spirit ever whirling about to make the new, and God ever creating ex nihilo. [i]
To return to the topic of the Christmas stories, bluntly put—there was no star, no magi, no shepherds, no sheep, no stable, no Bethlehem, no angels, no virgin, no slaughter of innocents, and no running to Egypt for safety. They are all elements of a story told to make a point. They are all elements drawn from the poetry and prose of Hebrew scripture and legend, or from some accounting of current events. The tale they are made to tell is about a child and his destiny. Such narrative was not an uncommon thing in Jesus’ culture, or in other cultures of the time. Yet, it is almost universally presented to our culture as fact, despite the fact no one in our day is willing to dub as factual the very similar tales about the birth of Buddha, Alexander, or other luminaries of the past.
When Buddha was born the entire heavens and earth shook. The Buddha-to-be stomped his foot and roared out that this was his last birth. Fact, or tale told about the destiny of a child whose teachings would transform the flow of history? On the night of her marriage to Phillip of Macedonia, Olympias was struck by Zeus with his lightning bolt, and the child she conceived that night was not by Phillip but by Zeus. The resultant Alexander, “son of God”, conquered the world and spread out Greek ideas and ideals from the Indus to the Nile. We do not take the tale of his conception literally, even if it might explain in a certain age his extraordinary accomplishments.
What of Jesus’ birth? There are no facts. There are gospel accounts—and gospel is not history but notes for teaching something about a man and about humanity in succinct narrative form that a philosopher would belabour himself to render in a tome. The principle point is that Jesus is a man with a destiny, an extraordinary man. In the mind-set and culture of the day that produced these narratives, extraordinary translates as the divine and miraculous. Jesus, thus, cannot be spoken of in ordinary terms. His conception requires an announcement from Gabriel, the angel Hebrew legend reserved to signal the end of times; with Jesus history as it was known is come to its end and a new chapter, the final chapter, begins. Like Caesar, who came into the world by Caesarian section, Jesus cannot be born as are other men. Because his destiny is to transform both man and cosmos his conception must be set within extraordinary bounds, that is, solely (as with Alexander) within the act of God without any recourse to human wants. In keeping with the thinking of the day that made of woman merely the receptacle for the almighty sperm, Mary needed to be a virgin, an unblemished vessel worthy of being touched only by the sacred. Because Jesus came to be understood, interpreted, and preached as the Messiah, the Christ of God, the divine delegate to effect the perfection of God’s creation, he had to fit the popular profile of the messiah cobbled together from varied and sundry places in Hebrew holy writ and legend. He had to come from the royal city of Bethlehem. Kings from the corners of the earth must bring him honours. Angels herald him for he is God’s ambassador. For Matthew, whose entire gospel is constructed to present to his Jewish audience Jesus as the new Moses, Jesus has to go into Egypt and come forth from there to lead the people anew. For Luke, whose whole gospel revolves around the poor and lowly, lowly shepherds must be the first to be summoned to Jesus’ side.
There are some possible facts but they are undeniably contoured to create the movement of the narrative. Many are certain there was circa 6 BC an uncommon, bright object in the sky visible to the naked eye. However, no one seems to be able to speak definitively about what it was (a supernova or a bright conjunction of planets), how long it lasted, or the extent of its visibility–although they do try and try and try. There is no record of a census ordained by Rome, although such a devise is not out of character for the organizational mind of the empire. If there was a local census during the Syrian governorship of Quirinius, it would have been much later than Luke reports, and questionable as to its application to Judea. Again, of any such local census there exists no record. The broadest assumption we can make is that Luke used a memory-shard of some current event toward the progress of his story. While Matthew has Mary and Joseph living in Bethlehem and moving to Nazareth after a self-imposed exile into Egypt, Luke has them originally living in Nazareth and so needed a devise to get them to the “city of David”–enter a census involving travel. The appeal to a tradition that Mary, who “kept all these things in her heart”, gave Luke or Matthew details of family history is one of those appeals to the stratospheric akin to Mary pausing in her ascent into heaven to give Thomas her belt as a memento—sentimentalized, presumptive, excusive pseudo-causality writ out on a grand scale. Herod the Great, a skilled politico, was undoubtedly paranoid, and possibly psychopathic. He had a propensity to see enemies everywhere and had no compunction in dispatching them from this life. Thus, a slaughter of infants would not seem an impossibility. However, there is no record of a mass execution in Bethlehem. There is a reference in Hebrew scripture to Rachael, the wife of Jacob (also called Israel), weeping for her lost children—a reference Matthew may well have used to signal something more spiritual than historical.
Matthew and Luke took all these elements, these “current events”, added to them legends, expectations, bits of sacred writings, and wove them into two—if you read them closely, mostly contradictory–tales to say of this Jesus that he, his teaching, his life, changed the flow of history, and the understanding of humanity, of religion, and of God. But I named these “fabled tales” for a reason; fables read on several levels. These of Jesus’ birth speak as preambles not only of his destiny, but of the new understanding of man and cosmos that destiny unfurled—the sacredness, the extraordinariness of every new life, the precariousness of life, the preciousness of life, and the tenderness and compassion with which it ought to be honoured. Fable? Yes. Truth? Yes. The two are not contradictory unless one believes truth can only be literal.[ii]
To that end, John in writing his gospel did not give it a preamble about the birth of Jesus. He sets Jesus’ beginning in the very heart of creativity itself. He claims Jesus is the “Logos” of God, the “word” (as the Greek [λόγος] logos is usually translated). Through this “word” God created the world and now intends to perfect it. Logos, however, is a more inclusive term than “word” as we normally understand it. We think of word as something spoken, a sound denoting something, or as something written out, a jumble of characteries denoting something, and therein as “literal”. Logos means more. It denotes an idea, a thought, a mind-set as well as its result—not merely word spoken or written, but the multi-dimensional reality made, changed, and effected in, by and through that “mind-in-action”. For John, Jesus is the divine logos because he is of one mind with God; Jesus is “God on earth”, God incarnate, because he is creativity and novelty let loose upon the earth in a way not seen since the foundations of the earth. They that are wont to embosom their bibles—their translations of the sacred texts–as the literal word of God ought to consider well that God is not a writer but the creator, and if I may play further at being literal, probably not amused to be demoted from producer and director to the writing of a script.
The fables of Christmas are not literally true, but they graphically present us with profound truths about the good and the dignity of man and world, our inherent rights, and our inherent duties to honour that good and dignity. Christmas is not about sentimentalized, romanticized tales of poor people in a barn illuminated with angelic light. It is about seeing humanity and the world in a new light, as worthy of cherishing, of love, and self-sacrifice. The jubilee of sharing good cheer and celebrating good will gives us pause to boldly go forward, as did the shepherds to adore, the magi to discover, as did Joseph and Mary with child in tow to find shelter and regroup, for if this world is so deeply the object of God’s love, how much more so ought it to be of ours?
[i] It must be admitted that church hierarchies are rather tightly knitted clubs wherein keeping the status quo trumps even the tiniest rocking of the boat, where, in my modest experience, repression, suppression, and denial run so deeply it is sometimes difficult to imagine anything can happen beyond the bare continuance of existence. While the institution of church, its hierarchies and bureaucracies, ever want to hold the status quo, to self-preserve the sacred tradition, it was the creativity and novelty of Jesus and his teaching—in word and act—that propelled him to notice and effectiveness, the creativity and novelty of Paul and his preaching that took “Christianity” from the confines of control embodied in James and Peter and Judaism, and internationalized it, the creativity and novelty of the early church theologs and apologists that rendered it academically and intellectually acceptable and thereby further propelled its appeal and deepened its cultural roots—although this did propel some into reactionary solitude to resist the turning of “a way” into an institution too tied to a culture, and therein nurtured that system we know as monasticism which unwittingly in turn split Christendom betwixt the professionally holy and the common folk who needed to rely upon the mediation of “saints”—a title Paul had reserved to believers! The conservative rudder of institution may preserve traditional teachings and rites, but it fails to honour the God ever before-us, the power of the creative and holy Spirit, the Christ whose work is ever to infold all, all times, places, things, movements, peoples, cultures, sub-cultures, etc., that in the end, God [and in 21st century parlance in every instance “God” is translated “Love”] may be all-in-all. Institutions may need be defended; God does not. God needs be made manifest, and that manifestation to the world must speak to the world here and now, with its present day knowledge and understandings, cares and concerns. The church wastes its time trying to speak to the world of today as if it were still the world of the second century, the sixteenth century or any other time past. Good intentions are intentions—and proverbially, the way to hell is paved with them. God is named the Creator not because he sat in heaven for aeons intending a creation, but because he acted. Jesus did not command his followers to sit on a hill-top and point to the point he vanished from their sight that all might look up and see the now empty spot; he told them “Go!” and do that which will cause the whole of the cosmos to be saturated [in biblical terms: baptized] in being communicatively and lovingly whole [in biblical ideogrammatics: in being holy through a partaking in the fulfillment that is the eternal life of Father, Son, and Spirit].
I direct the reader interested in an analysis (in Toynbee’s understanding) of the functions within history conducive to this conservation-minded attitude to my on the Crisis in the Church (April 2012). Likewise, I direct the reader interested in more detail concerning the structure of gospel narratives to my on Being-church (Jan. 2012), on the Use of Scripture (Jan. 2012), on Lost Gospels (July 2012), on Gnosticism, new and old (July 2012), on Gospel (Sept. 2012), and on the Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith (Oct. 2012). If the reader is willing to engage in something more than my few humble pages of text, I recommend a visit to Raymond E. Brown’s very readable commentary on the infancy narratives, The Birth of the Messiah.
[ii] It is reported that the brilliant and prolific Thomas Aquinas had one morning an epiphany that all his erudite plummeting of nature and super-nature was but straw. He stopped all dictation to his several secretaries, and shortly thereafter passed from his philosophical silence to the silence of eternity. Christmas brings us to a similar ground for insight. We are confronted by a manger filled with straw. Its meaningfulness for us is that which faith (portrayed by Joseph and Mary) places into it—a divine child, an infantile but initiatory presence of the Creator who will come to be named, not the unpronounceable and forbidden YHWH of Israel, but simply the name everyman knows, wills to know, hopes to know, strives to know—Love. The placing of the Love’s child in the midst of straw transvalues a manger from feed for cattle to the centre of history, the pivotal point of each and every man’s becoming fully human. We can gaze upon the parents who guard over this child, who will care for it, nurture it, sacrifice for it, protect it, and love it in countless, albeit as with all things human, never perfect ways, and therein reflect upon ourselves and our own and personal histories, but the icon the biblical image creates is about more, about the quintessential meaningfulness of being-human, the need to place love, if even by the seemingly most infantile steps, in the centre of our being, our being-with others, our being for-others. For that the prescient Luke tells us the normative path; he ends the narrative of Jesus’ beginnings with “and he grew in wisdom and graciousness”. So may we all.