A Full Coming: A Child in the Temple

There are next two “And” verse. “And Jesus went up to be circumcised”, “and when time for purification came they went up to Jerusalem.”  I want to return to what I see in those few lines, but first lets get into this story. Luke tells us how after a child is born a sacrifice must be made. He doesn’t get into the specifics of Mosaic law and the purification of women and neither should we. What we should get into is when Simeon shows up or rather, is guided to Jesus by the Holy Spirit. All that we have read so far has taken place over the course of, from the conception of John to this moment forty days or so after the birth of Jesus, not quite two years. But for us we are in two chapters, the two chapters are a whirlwind of angelic appearances and heavenly promises, glorious canticles, the Magnifcat, the song of the coming evening, the Benedictus, the song of the day and the Gloria which is recited at every high mass and another variation sung on Christmas. But now comes Nunc Dimittis. The Magnificat is the evening song, but when night sets in we sing the song of the old man waiting for God.

“Sovereign Lord, as you have promised,
    you may now dismiss^[d] your servant in peace.
³⁰ For my eyes have seen your salvation,
³¹     which you have prepared in the sight of all nations:
³² a light for revelation to the Gentiles,
    and the glory of your people Israel.”

It is a strange song, or speech because Simeon is joyful, but he is also saying, I can go now. I’m actually ready to go. It’s been a bit too much. I am ready to leave this world.  It is strange because he is dying in hope, but there is a note of him wanting to die. He doesn’t need to live to see what comes after this and one wonders what he thought was going to happen, at least one wonders briefly. Next he turns to Mary and says a little more before leaving.

 “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, ³⁵ so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.”

Here is the sting. Not the return to real life after the Christmas holidays, not the end of the miracle, but revelation of the other side of miracle. When we speak of miracle as magic or joy we often think of it as excluding the pain of life. I know I do. Part of the lesson of grace is that God exists in the discomfort and the pain, that the miracle is present in the suffering as well. The coming of God is a full coming, It is a coming in fire.

Luke then continues, “When they had completed this, they returned to Nazareth and next that “every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the Passover…” We have skipped twelve years and now we arrive at the story of Jesus being found by his parents in the temple. Two temple stories in a row, one about his first visit and this about another visit where Joseph and Mary head back home to Nazareth after Pesach, and on their way they realize Jesus is not with their company and search among their kinfolk and then head back to Jerusalem. They find Jesus in the Temple, the last place they left him, and he is sitting with the teachers, asking questions, but also answering theirs and amazing them. When Mary ask, “Why have you treated us so?” adding, “Your father and I have been looking for you anxiously,” Jesus returns, “How is it that you sought me? Did you not know I would be in my Father’s house?”  and this is the last time Jesus and Mary have an exchange in this Gospel, and the last time that Mary speaks in it. Jesus and his parents go home and Mary keeps these things in her heart. The curtain closes. This stories of Jesus as a child are over, and now we are about to launch into the Gospel proper.

Shepherds

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Cæsar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. 2 (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) 3 And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. 4 And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judæa, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:) 5 to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.

6 And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. 7 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.

8 And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. 9 And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. 10 And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. 11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. 12 And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. 13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, 14 Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

15 And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us. 16 And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. 17 And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child. 18 And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds. 19 But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. 20 And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.

There are many who have pointed out, I among them, that the shepherds were the lowest of the low in the society. I’m not exactly sure there’s a record of that in the Bible. In fact the record is just the opposite. The Bible has a long history of sheepherders, and it is anything but a lowly one. The patriarchs and Moses, the prophet Amos as well as King David and possibly Solomon were shepherds. While the shepherds outside of Bethlehem probably do no represent the mainstream or the wealthy, they are the original occupation of Israel. The patriarchs who herded their sheep also led their people, and the herders were also the sacrificers who acted as the original priests. Even in the time of Jesus the sheep belonging to these men would have been brought to Jerusalem and every priest, no matter how exalted would have had to know how to kill and sacrifice one. Indeed such a sacrifice would have been the prelude to the arrival of Gabriel before Zechariah at the beginning of this gospel.

  

I have always wondered, what did the shepherds see? To be keeping your flocks by night and to receive this angel telling you about the son of David, who was a shepherd himself, about this child who will be called the Good Shepherd. And then the shepherds go to see him, and there certainly is a baby, but what then? What do we do with a baby? That’s always been the thing about Christmas. What are the shepherds thinking? We know they go and spread the word..

What would these shepherds have said to people they met, or what would hey have expected on their way to see this infant? How long was hope in thier hearts?  I know how quickly hope abandons me, how easy it is to forget the promises shown by God in one moment. But regarding what the shepherds meet when they meet the baby Jesus, what happens next? Nothing. The world does not change. He is a baby who remains a baby until he is a toddler. He will be a child, It will be thirty years before he begins his ministry, and even then, what happens? When these shepherds who have been promised the Christ, these shepherds who, being shepherds, may not have even been thinking of the Christ see a baby, what are they thinking?

And what was Luke thinking when he gave us, in place of magi and Herod, angels, and shepherds? Matthew’s message is given through stars, through the astrological (magical?) work of those searching for God. Luke’s message is given to shepherds. Both groups are outside of the mainstream of Israel, living on the borders of propriety and common reality, as Jesus is born not only outside of Jerusalem, but outside of Bethlehem too. People who are outside of things, who would lack the ability or even the wit to find him, are sent to him. This is the grace of God, not waiting for shepherds to become wisemen, but overflowing with joy as angels bring news to him..

Virginal

Now we are explicitly told what Matthew merely implied, this child will be the Son of God. But also right here, the process is mysterious. We are told simply the Holy Spirit will “overshadow” Mary and what results will be the Son of God. Mary and the gospel explicitly state that the resulting child is not the result of sexual intercourse and not the child of any man.

            A few years ago, Thomas Jefferson style, the writer Stephen Mitchell cobbled together his own gospel. I am paraphrasing his statement: wouldn’t it be wonderful if instead of the story of the virgin bith, with its hint of fear of sexuality, we got “the truth”, the story of Mary, single and pregnant by another man, and Joseph forgiving her and marrying her. What a better way to show mercy and forgiveness than to have Joseph show it at the very beginning, and Mary be the recipient of such grace. What a better way for Jesus to be one with the sinful than for Jesus to be born out of sin?

            I had the opportunity a few years ago to watch an interview between Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin the early eighties where they begin to muse or rather grouse about Christianity and declare that the Virgin Birth is “disgusting”. It rejects the glory of a man and a woman lying together and wraps up the origins of Jesus in sexual frigidity. It’s just “disgusting” they pronounce, disgusting. Once I even heard an Episcopal priest during one of his sermons offer, though nobody asked, “f you don’t believe in the Virgin Birth, it’s not a big deal.”

            These people are not the first to have problems with the Virgin Birth, except for the strangely liberal priest, they  do have something in common, and it is that they never were or are no longer Christians and therefore the Virgin Birth is not their story. In her book, Reading Jesus, Mary Gordon says that she has problems with “the miracles” again, much like Thomas Jefferson who thought Jesus was a good enough man but cut out of the ‘gospels what he could not bear. Gordon along with the aforementioned Episcopal priest, belongs to that set of liberal Christians who don’t have much power or influence because they have channeled a sort of two percent version of Christianity, the one where they sort of believe. They believe enough to be troubled by the actual wholesale belief.

            Euhemerus was a man who lived in ancient Greece and the term Euhemerism comes from him. It used to be quite popular in trying to discover history. Euhemerus, hearing the Greek myths, decided they were too much to believe in, but also that a truth lay beneath them if they were stripped to their barest and most believable essentials.  If he could strip the stories of their magic, then he would get the actual history of Greece. And so he did, and what he ended up with was a version of Greece which has no actual link to the truth. Euhemrus, faced with the story, tried to boil it down rather than understand it, and so he ended up with something silly. Many people do it today.

            For reasons unknown, two Gospels do not deal with the birth or conception of Jesus. But two of them do, and though there are many other Gospels and many other forms of Christianity that will blossom in the next few centuries, this is the main form that people know, and this interlude between the angel and Mary is a cornerstone of the Christian mystery. Christian mystery is a better term than Christian faith. The conception of Jesus, his birth, his passion and his resurrection, are not separate mysteries, but the same mystery, seen and felt many different ways, but all entering into each other. For a very long time, the mystery of the conception was called up in the Angelus prayer, at the beginning middle and end of each day.

Hail Mary, etc...

V. Behold the handmaid of the Lord.

R. Be it done unto me according to Your Word.

Hail Mary, etc...

V. And the Word was made flesh,

R. And dwelt among us.

Hail Mary, etc...

V. Pray for us, O holy Mother of God.

R. That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

Let us pray:

Pour forth, we beseech You, O Lord,

Your Grace into our hearts;

that as we have known the incarnation of Christ,

your Son by the message of an angel,

so by His passion and cross

we may be brought to the glory of His Resurrection.

Through the same Christ, our Lord.

Amen

And what is the prayer saying, this three times a day recall of the conception of Jesus? On one hand it is saying that it could have happened at anytime. The angel Gabriel could have come at six in the morning, or at noon or at the evening. But it is also saying that the conception IS happening at any time. It is happening while we pray, for the last of the responses is from the Gospel of John. The word became flesh and dwelt among us. The prayer is proclaiming and calling God into our very human midst, into our beings. Heaven is drawn to earth, that is the meaning of the Virgin Birth, or, at least, part ot it.

The tendency to wish to take Jesus, but dismiss the miracles is a tendency to boil the story of Jesus down to what one can bear. But faith is not about what you can bear, faith calls you to bear a little more than you thought you could, believe more than you thought you could, see more than what you were able to see. People living twenty centuries ago were not naïve. This is a mistake we keep making, believing that people who lived long ago were stupid and we’re so clever. They would have known more about sex and more about the things of the earth than we do not farm, do not fuck and stay inside all day know now. So a virgin birth would always have been strange. Stephen Mitchell is not proposing a new idea, but a new spin on and old libel, that the revered mother of God was a sinful slut.  In proposing this, he takes the mysterious  parthenogenetic and slightly pagan power away from Mary, and puts it in the patriarchal hands of Joseph suggesting, wouldn’t it be nice if the story of her glory became the story of her blunder, and the true glory went to this man who was willing to forgive her slip up? 

            Baldwin and Giovanni are brilliant sometimes, but wrong here. The Virgin Birth is not the story of sexual shame, it is the story of how Jesus of Nazareth can possibly be the human son of Mary and divine son of God. All the centuries of sexual dear and repression that came after it, though unfortunate, are not its source. Those who wish to shave away the miracles or chop out the Virgin Birth are those who are wishing for another story,  But this is the story. Mary as Virgin is not a cover up, but a mystery Christians are meant to look into and it seems to be arrived at fairly early, early enough for Jews to lampoon it by telling in the Talmud the story that Jesus was the result of Mary being impregnated by a Roman soldier named Pantera.  But this is not information. It is parody. Hephaestus opens the head of Zeus and Athena springs out. Kronos chops off the genitals of his father and flings them into the sea and up bubbles Aphrodite. No ancient Greek who prayed to her ever looked for a more logical origin, because to them she was God and Gods exist on a different realm. And when the Holy Spirit comes over Mary she is pregnant with Jesus who is the Christ. This is the story. There is no other. You can choose a variety of ways to believe in it or simply dismiss it. That is anyone’s choice, but. trying to make it more manageable, or watering it down is just missing the point.

Mary

The Annunciation: Chris Koelle

Mary isn’t the first person to get an angelic message about an upcoming baby. Actually she’s the last in a long tradition. But she is different in a few not so obvious ways. Generally, even in Matthew, we are dealing with a man receiving the annunciation message. Matthew is strange because it is stated, before they came together Mary was “found to be pregnant with the holy spirit” so apparently Joseph is getting this news passively from the cipher Matthew makes of Mary. Only when this is not enough, when he cannot trust Mary, does Joseph get the dream. In the Bible, when babies are about to come it is the men who hear about it first. Two notable exceptions are the story of Rebecca where she is told directly by God that “two nations are striving in her belly” and in the story of Samson where we are told there was a man called Manoah, and he he had a wife. The “wife of Manoah:” receives the message from the angel about giving birth to the child who will be Samson, but the author of the Book of Judges, one of the rapiest books in a very rapey Bible, feels no need to give Manoah’s wife a name.

            Even Elizabeth received he news of her pregnancy second hand. Or third hand. A presumably male God sending an always male angel to a necessarily male priest. But with Mary this changes. Luke is introducing an innovation which Matthew actually hinted. Right here, for the first time, the view shifts from a man to a woman, shifts to a girl. Mary. The blessed cipher of every gospel becomes the protagonist (if only for a time) of this one.

            She is not the only female protagonist in the Bible, but she is one of a small number. Ruth has her own book and so does Esther. Both of these little books in Judaism are called megillah, not histories, not prophecy, and not Torah, they are read on certain holy occasions throughout the year. Then there is the book of Judith, which was eventually excluded from both the Hebrew and the Protestant canon, but now kept in Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican Bibles as “apocrypha”. Mary is tied to all of these women as well as Elizabeth and Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel who features so prominently at the beginning of the book bearing her son’s name.

           

 “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. ³¹ And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.

³² He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High;
and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David,
³³ and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever;
and of his kingdom there will be no end.”

³⁴ And Mary said to the angel, “How shall this be, since I have no husband?” ³⁵ And the angel said to her,

“The Holy Spirit will come upon you,
and the power of the Most High will overshadow you;
therefore the child to be born^[d] will be called holy,
the Son of God.

There are many things to be concerned about or to question in this angel’s promise, but Mary is concerned about one thing in particular which is that she is not married, rather, that she is a virgin, and has never been with a man. Next the angel Gabriel tells her that she should not worry because the Holy Spirit will overshadow her, and the child which results will be called the Son of the Most High.

            This leaves us with two questions, the one which people seem most excited by of  the possibility or importance of Mary’s virginity, and the second which few people are ever concerned for, but which is far more important, which is the angel’s prediction, and just what it means.

Inasmuch as Many Have Undertaken a Record: Luke Tells His Story

Luke begins by telling us many people have undertaken to recount the things which have taken place “among us” but that now he has done so himself. Apparently what those other people have done was not up to Luke’s standards, but many people, not only Matthew and Mark have started doing this gospel writing thing. That’s important. Apparently there is something about people at this time and this place, the early part of the first century and the late part of the first century of the Roman Empire, that tells them they must write this down. There are scripture scholars who note the stretch of years between the life of Jesus and the first Gospel (Mark in around 70). Often it is noted how long many writings were oral before being transcribed. But the thing about the Gospels is how short their oral tradition is. Early Christians needed to write the story down. The first century is a literate time, letter writing time, a write it down and send it off age.

            Scholars say Mark is the oldest gospel, and Mark has no infancy narrative. Mark is also the shortest gospel. We’ll get to him soon enough. Next comes Matthew, far longer. Scholars point out that Mark and Matthew contain in them the DNA of another lost Gospel called Q, Quelle, German for Source. Did the source have an infancy narrative? If so, why didn’t Mark use it?  If not, where is Matthew getting his from?

Luke opens his history :”In the days of Herod the King” as Matthew opens chapter two of his gospel, and like chapter two of Matthew, Luke opens his gospel in Jerusalem. He opens it with a man and a woman and a miraculous child, and an angel to boot. BUT that man is not Joseph, the woman is not Mary and the child is not Jesus. We are in the temple in Jerusalem and an old man named Zechariah is being called to perform the sacrifice and while he is in the Holy of Holies, the angel Gabriel appears at the side of the altar and declares that Zechariah and his wife will conceive a child and name him John because he will be .. well, not quite the Messiah. He will be great before the Lord. He will not drink strong drink, he will seemingly do many of the things the Messiah is supposed to be, but not actually be the Messiah. He will be a sort of …test run.

            Zechariah does not believe this or he does not believe it enough, and Gabriel, in angelic hauteur, strikes him dumb. Zechariah is dumb, but potent, and he impregnates Elizabeth, who locks herself up in her house for five months.

            But we are told that in the six month,. This same dumb striking Gabriel is sent to Nazareth to the home of a maiden named Mary. Oh, there is a lot going on in this one sentence and soon we will explore it.  On the more pedestrian end of things, Matthew and Luke seem to be agreed about two things: Jesus is born in Bethlehem and lives in Nazareth. These two places are not only on opposite ends of what was ancient Israel, but in the time of Jesus, separate territories. How the gospel writers reconcile this is different. Matthew simply has them already in Bethlehem. 

Kings, Wizards and Swords: The Dark Infancy Narrative of Matthew, Conclusion

   

When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

“A voice is heard in Ramah,
    weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
    and refusing to be comforted,
    because they are no more.”

Here is a dark and dim fairy tale. Into Herod’s kingdom arrive, from the east, not three kings, and not even properly wise men as in smart cookies, but Magoi, that strange word which has its origins in the Zoroastrian priesthood and which, rendered into Greek and Latin actually means wizards, sorcerers. Up until middle ages the three Magi are invoked in spells and charms and regarded precisely as magicians. Were they Zoroastrian priest or were they sorcerers? This is a modern question. The truth is to the ancient mind and he medieval one as well, one was the other. There was lilte difference between astronomy and astrology. Science and magic were both scio, knowledge. The separation we use now just did not exist then.

Let’s remember there were several famous wise men in the bible. Balaam the prophet was regarded as a sorcerer and called upon by Israel’s enemies to perform spells against Israel in the book of Numbers. God tells Balaam to bless Israel instead and he does, but God does not tell him to stop practicing sorcery and the Bible does not dismiss his ability. In the Numbers, Balaam predicts that a star shall arise form Jacob and early Christians reference this as the Christmas star, the Magi as spiritual if not actual descendants of Balaam.

Regarding other sorcerers, Joseph of the coat of many colors fame, not only receives tame dreams like his namesake in Matthew, but actively seeks visions from a chalice and practices scrying according to the book of Genesis, and later on, in the book of Daniel we are told that Daniel was in fact one of the king of Babylon’s wisemen. There are some who would read Shadrach, Meshech and Abednego as different from the group called the “king’s wisemen,” but the fact is they are among them, and wisemen is not synonymous with senators or councilors. It is synonymous with enchanters and sorcerers and seers, and see is what Daniel does.

But if these wisemen really were Persian Magoi, and it seems they were, they would not have been simply crossing the desert from Persia to Israel, but from the Parthain Empire into  the Roman Empire. They would have been men of the world. It is hard to believe such men would have stumbled into the city that was not even actually the capital of Herod’s kingdom—Herod and later on Pontius Pilate lived in Caesarea by the sea—and asked a question as un politic as ;’where’s the new king of the Jews? You know, the real one, who’s coming to replace you?” It’s even less believable that wisemen would be foolish enough to believe Herod was sending them to get word of him so that he could “worship him too”. More than both of those things, it is unbelievable that Herod would not simply have had them followed.

This story, which has not made it into any other Gospels, I am not entirely sure was meant to be seen as true. The part of me that abhors childkilling (all of me) hopes this story isn’t true. The other part of me knows Matthew is telling us something that has little to do with the factuality of the story. The text is asking us to ask questions, and providing no immediate answers. Immediate answers are for children. A true question turns over again and again in the mind. Who is this child? The song asks, “What child is this?” What does it mean to be king, or be king of the Jews? And, if this child is God, what does it mean that his appearing brings not delight, but mayhem, that his birth brings a “loud crying” in Ramah? Though Matthew has left us watching this child depart toward Egypt and grow smaller and smaller as he and his parents reach the horizon, we cannot follow them. Even as we hear the tramping of Herod’s soldiers’ feet, we must rewind. We must return to the beginning, to the only other telling of this story we have in the Gospel of Luke.

The Dark Infancy Narrative of Matthew Part Two: In Which God Does Nothing

Slaughter of the Innocents

We have seen the latter half of this reading before, for it is used three days after Christmas, when the glitter has worn off and we can no longer remember the magic, as the reading for the Feast of the Holy Innocents. The Wise Men, come ot Jerusalem to ask where the new king of Israel is, upset Herod and with him the entire city. Herod consults his own wise men who tell him that the child is to be born six miles southwest in Bethlehem. Herod sends our Wise Men to Bethlehem and tells them bring him word of the child that he may worship him. The Wise Men go, following the star, which makes one wonder why the hell they had to stop un Jerusalem in the first place,, and finding the star rest over the house—no stable in this story-- where Mary is with the child, they enter, offering gold frankincense and myrrh.

            Mary’s house must be spacious, or either they stay at an inn, or they just stay in the tents they’ve been traveling in, because but the Wise Men stay the night, for we are told that God warns them in a dream not to return to Herod. Would Herod have killed them? And so the Wise Men leave. Because the Wise Men did not think to tell Joseph or Mary about this, Joseph has to have his own dream on the same night or the night after. We do not know. And so Joseph packs up Mary and Jesus and they are off to Egypt.

            Now, because neither the Wise Men or Joseph thought to say anything to anyone else in Bethlehem, when Herod realizes he has been deceived by the Magi—who we should properly call the Wise Men, he raises a small army to kill all the male children in Jerusalem who are “in the neighborhood” of up to two years. Even though this story is not read on Epiphany, there’s really no way to think of Epiphany without thinking of it.

            God does not stop the hand of Herod or wake up all the parents of babies in Bethlehem. Anyone who has ever lived in this world or read the Bible knows this is out of God’s character. Rarely does he show his hand. From the moment that Cain kills Abel, God seems to have a policy of stay the hell out of human affairs. This is our world and his involvement is on the sidelines, in time, in small ways, at last and not right away. Those who would argue against this are arguing on one hand against reality, but also forgetting that when the biblical God takes a more direct hand, bad things tend to happen. When God does take notice and intervene, floods destroy the world and arks have to be built. Babel Towers stop being constructed because everyone’s language is changed. Sodom and Gomorrah are burned up in sulphur and fire.

The psalmist joyfully sings of the days when Israel was out in the desert, and God lived with her, but in the actual books of Exodus, Numbers, Levitus and Deuteronomy, God’s proximity often means wrath, the earth opening up and swallowing disobedient people, leprosy spreading, serpents biting the wicked. From a biblical perspective the proximity of God, the eminence of God, also means the judgment of God and the swiftness of his punishments. One wonders if the biblical writers, like most of us, don’t actually prefer God up in his heaven, and for most of the lives we know, and for most of the Bible, believe it or not, heaven is where he stays.

As we watch Joseph and Mary ride away to Egypt let us remember that this very tension, of the God of justice we long for and the God of justice we fear, the eminence of God and his apparent distance are what the life of Jesus and the incarnation are all about.

In the Bleak Midwinter: The Dark Infancy Narrative of Matthew: Part One

Scar of Bethlehem: Banksy

Every Gospel has its weak points. The weak point to Matthew is its very grim and dark beginning. And the weak point to the grim and dark beginning is the long and dull list of names, the genealogy that tells of the ancestry of…. Joseph, divided into three sets of fourteen from Abraham all the way up to Jacob the father of Joseph “the husband of Mary, the mother of Jesus who was the Christ.”

Mary just sort of shows up. Her ancestry is never drawn out. Some, pointing to the slightly different genealogy in the gospel of Luke say that is her family tree, but it is not. There have been some traditions that point out the names in the two genealogies are so close Mary and Joseph must be cousins and this may have been true, but it isn’t pointed out in any gospel and certainly not the Gospel of Matthew. Here, Mary is a mystery, and she is not the main character of this story. This is the story of Joseph. Joseph who hears from Mary that she has conceived of the Holy Spirit and Joseph who, in a dream, is told by an angel to not fret over Mary’s strange story, but take her as his wife, It is Joseph who chooses to not have sexual relations with Mary until she has given birth. We do not get the lyrical Christmas story of Luke here. We get the tale laconically. Joseph took Mary as his wife, she bore a son and called him Jesus. It is chapter two that opens up telling us that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.

Here is something. Nowadays we all understand the Gospel by what is called a harmonization of the Gospels, but they are four different books, and according to Matthew, not only is Joseph a descendent of David, Joseph and Mary are living in Bethlehem. There is nothing about Caesar Augustus taxing the world and massive population shifts of Jews going to their native places. Matthew simply introduces Joseph and Mary and then says Mary gave birth to Jesus in Bethlehem, presumably, because this is where they lived.

Next we are told, “Behold when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the King, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem asking, where is he who has been born King of the Jews?” This whole story, to me, is colored blue and grey with black in it as well. This is the story for Epiphany, the end of holidays, the return to school. The story of the Magi is the tale told before the bone chilling cold a long January and February, a time in which, like cursed Narnia, it is always winter, but bears no hope of Christmas.