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.