Christmas I

• Isaiah 9:1-7

Our comments throughout Advent described the  paradoxical perspective of a new, unexpected, liberating  action by God in the midst of human confusion, doubt and despair.  In the history of patriarchal and matriarchal Israel, that hope in God’s rescuing power in what seemed like hopelessly doomed situations was manifest frequently in the excitement caused by the birth of a child, sometimes a miraculous birth.  (God’s covenant originated in the miraculous birth of a son to an old couple, Abraham and Sarah, long past childbearing years!) That new life, full of promise, and guaranteeing life for another generation, was a meaningful symbol for God’s fresh start.  Out of the ruins of past failures by the people and their leaders, God initiated something new.  In this passage, Isaiah links hope for the future to an idealized memory of the reign of David with the promise of “a child born for us,”  a new monarch who will inaugurate peace upheld by justice. The miracle of birth, the promise of a new life, the prospects of a new beginning, the excitement of a bright, open-ended  future out of a dreary past, the hope of a new era of justice out of the dim memory of a past idealized king inspire anticipation.

• Psalm 96

This psalm is a solid example of how biblical texts are frequently compilations of other texts into a new composition.  This psalm is a mosaic of excerpts from many psalms.  The nationalistic aspirations for peace and justice are now expanded beyond the Jews to the whole earth.

• Titus 2:11-14

Titus (as well as First and Second Timothy) seems to also be a compilation from prior texts, this time fragments taken from letters assumed to be by Paul.  The emphasis here, however, is on deeds of love and mercy not so much as a response to our personal experience of God’s love and mercy as practical ways to be differentiated from larger society.

• Luke 2:1-14, (15-20)

In his essential study, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Birth Narratives of Matthew and Luke, Raymond Brown conjectures that Matthew began his gospel with a birth narrative, but that Luke wrote his gospel and later added a birth narrative under the influence of similar birth/youth narratives for heroic leaders in the ancient world.   Basic Lucan themes are clear: the essential role of some very unlikely people in God’s work in the world– a devout young girl, a loyal father-to-be, some smelly  shepherds, a hapless innkeeper– yet placed in the context of world history, specifically the might of the Roman Empire vis a vis the dire circumstances of the Jews and their ancient longings always centered on the restoration of the Davidic monarchy.  Fr. Brown also assumes that the details of the birth narratives were not mere historical “facts,” even though Luke’s narrative cites specific names and historic events.  Luke’s birth narrative was, Fr. Brown demonstrates, instead a brilliant amalgamation of texts, extant inter-testemental interpretations, customs, and popular beliefs initiated by the Hebrew scriptures, particularly the books of Isaiah and of Micah.  Luke’s purpose was to create a point-by-point counter story to the dominant narrative of his day– human invincibility as represented in the Roman Empire, specifically in the person of the Emperor Augustus, whose birthday had been made into the first day of a new calendar and who was being hailed as “savior of the world,” which is a verbatim quote from surviving inscriptions in Rome.  (p. 393 ff)  Luke’s birth narrative is a deliberate, point-by-point counter-narrative  to what surely seemed like the power of a human empire that was invincible.

Christmas II

• Isaiah 62:6-12

Written after the trauma of the destruction of Jerusalem and exile in Babylon, this passage offers a vision of Jerusalem fully restored to its earlier grandeur and secure position as a sign of God’s redemption of “the holy people,”

• Psalm 97

This psalm is another example of the way biblical writers borrow and adapt habits of speech from their neighbors to create new texts for  a new purpose.  The image of the Lord surrounded by clouds, thunder, and lightning is borrowed from Canaanite mythology.  But the new purpose expressed in this psalm is that the power of the divinity is not an end in itself; it is to establish justice.

• Titus 3:4-7

Unlike the earlier excerpt from Titus (Christmas I), this one seems to be closer to Paul’s original writings.  Followers are to be known for their “works of righteousness” in response to the work of the Holy Spirit in Jesus Christ.

• Luke 2: (1-7), 8-20

(See comments, above, for similar excerpts from Luke’s birth narrative.)

Christmas III

• Isaiah 52:7-10

Continuing Isaiah’s powerful use of paradox, the writer depicts Jerusalem in ruins, but at the same time calls for hope in God’s action.  Among the ruins and debris of destruction, he envisions sentinels announcing God’s salvation and calls for singing and celebration.  Walter Bureggemann interprets this passage as an announcement which has the force of creating what it announces: God’s reign and the flourishing of God’s people!  “Where Yahweh rules, there is another world of human possibility.”  “A new world pushes with determination against the old one.  It begins in singing….” (Israel’s Praise: Doxology against Idolatry and Ideology, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988, p.49)

• Psalm 98

The psalmist recalls how God acted with decisive power as an expression of God’s “bounty,” “kindness” and “faithfulness.”  The “whole earth” is enjoined to “shout out,” to “burst out in song.” accompanied by strings and brass, and also by rivers and mountains, because “when the Lord comes to judge the earth,” it will be with pure justice and righteousness.

• Hebrews 1:1-4, (5-12)

In this excerpt, the writer recalls that God spoke in the past through prophets, but now speaks through a “Son,” who is “the reflection of God’s glory and exact imprint of God’s very being.”  He then cites various excerpts from extant texts to highlight what Christians see as so compelling in Jesus.

• John 1:1-14

Jean-Luc Marion notes the essential and original role of words: “for every mortal, the first word was already heard before he could utter it,”  He can only “undergo by receiving it….”  Therefore, “some gift happens to me because it precedes  me in such a way that I must recognize that I proceed from it.”  (Being Given” Toward a Phenomenology of Giveness, p. 270)  Applying Marion’s primacy of “the word” to Genesis, we appreciate better the import of the announcement that God “speaks” and creatures, order, beauty, meaning, relationship, and  community ensue.  The opening of John’s gospel echoes the opening of Genesis and announces that “the Word became flesh,” inaugurating a ‘second’ beginning/birth/genesis for all creation.  God’s motive is the same in both beginnings– love for creation.  The God of creation who walked with Adam and Eve walks among God’s people again!  This time, in the flesh.

Luce Irigaray, psychoanalyst and philosopher, reacted to a sermon she heard at Notre Dame, Paris, on Christmas Day:

“There was not so much as a trace of the birth of God made man, and no incarnation save the choice of text, the voice of the preacher, and the congregation gathered there.”  “Why invite the people to a celebration of the Eucharist on Christmas Day if not to glorify the felt, the corporeal and fleshly advent of the divine, this coming, the consequences of which theology seems far from understanding.”  (The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, p.205)

Luke’s story includes a young couple at the birth of their first child, some angels and a few smelly shepherds all crammed into a shelter for animals.  Divine love can and does penetrate, live in and illuminate our lives in all their messiness.  The newborn is solely dependent on the caring of his parents for his human survival.  The most mundane, human actions are exposed in their full stature. 

Was somebody asking to see the soul?

See, your own shape and countenance…

Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main

Concern, and includes and is the soul.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

And so the assertion of John’s gospel–“and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and glory”– has still not lost its shock value!

Medieval mystery plays had a knack for intertwining the earthy and the divine.  What began as modest tropes on biblical/liturgical texts in the Middle Ages developed into day-long plays with hundreds of actors in as many as forty-eight different scenes.  Among the most elaborate and popular were those presented on the Feast of Corpus Christi in the Medieval city of York, from which we have the most complete, extant script.  Each guild of workers in York would take responsibility for producing one of the scenes, which were written and performed in the vernacular with a few, well-known phrases from the Latin liturgy.  Scenes included the whole range of human emotions, from deepest sadness to light comedy  The Corpus Christi play was performed from 1375 until 1569, although it had been banned by “reformers” in 1534.  The scene of the nativity of Jesus was the responsibility, appropriately, of the roofers or thatchers in the city.  In this script, just after Joseph expresses his joy and anxieties about the imminent birth, Mary assures him, “God will advise, full well, you’ll see,” and then she sings this song:

Now in my soul great joy have I;

I am all clad in comfort clear.

Now will be born of my body

Both God and man together here.

Blessed must be he,

Jesus my son that is so dear,

Now born is he.

             [After the birth, Mary continues with a lullaby to her newborn]

Hail, my Lord God, hail prince of peace;

Hail, my father, and hail my son;

Hail, sovereign Lord, all sins to cease;

Hail, God and man on earth to run;

Hail, through whose might

All this world was first begun;

Darkness and light.

Son, as I am a simple subject of thine

Permit, sweet son, I pray to you

That I might take thee in these arms of mine,

In this poor weed [thatch] to cover you.

Grant me your bliss,

As I am your mother chosen to be

In faithfulness.

from a “Modernization” of the text by Chester N. Scoville and Kimberly M. Yates, copyright, Toronto, 2003

Such texts are more faithful to Luke’s text, combining seamlessly the human/mundane and the divine, than any theologizing projects.  This is the story that launches the story of the actual extent to which God was willing to go to reveal/remind humankind through one Person of the exact true nature and true extent of God’s love.  John the gospel writer is fully aware of the scandal of his claim: “and the Word became flesh….”

Luke (and Matthew, too)  tell a story that blends the routine and the miraculous for effect.  It is a story about a new beginning as told in the story of a birth.  Throughout the Hebrew scriptures, when the future seemed to be trailing off to some dreary dead end, when human prospects seemed doomed to cycles of endless failures, when faith in God seemed nearly foolish, there is a birth that raises the possibility of a fresh start.  Indeed, the story of covenant begins with the miraculous birth of a son to an elderly Abraham and barren Sarah.  More than Matthew, Luke invokes these ancient stories in his version of the birth of John to Elizabeth and Zechariah and of Jesus to Mary and Joseph, which God enables not through a barren woman, but through a virgin.

It is somewhat amazing that Hannah Arendt, a non-practicing Jew who was a first-hand witness to the horrors of the Twentieth century and a brilliant philosopher,  could write:

“The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’, ruin is ultimately the fact of natality….  It is, in other words, the birth of new men [sic]and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by the virtue of being born.  Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether, discounting the keeping of faith as a very uncommon and not too important virtue and counting hope among the evils of illusion in Pandora’s box.  It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announce their ‘glad tidings;’ ‘A child has been born to us.'”  (The Human Condition, p.247)

“Hope for the world” causes action, which is emphasized specifically in the epistle readings for Christmas I (deeds of love and mercy) and II (“works of righteousness”); specifically action in response to one another.  In an interview by philosopher Richard Kearney with theologian Catherine Keller, she explores the implications for action in the narratives of the news to the barren Sarah and then to virgin Mary of pending births.  Keller notes that with both women the miracle story of something impossible actually happening begins with their receptiveness to a stranger.  Keller writes: in their “respective annunciation scenes– of Sarah at Mamre and Mary at Nazareth–… a child is conceived at the visitation of strangers, visitors who give life to an ‘impossible’ child– namely, Isaac and Jesus.” (Reimagining the Sacred, p 63)  Keller sees this common detail to both women as initiating a central biblical theme.  Throughout the life of Jesus, right to the very end, it will be strangers, with unreasonable requests and unexpected generosity, with whom he will engage and through whom his identity and mission will be made clear, to himself and to others.   Keller writes: “In both cases [Sarah and Mary] the impossible becomes possible at the moment of responding to the stranger’s call.”  (p. 64)  We can continue her observations when we think about the basic hospitality of a harried inn keeper, or anonymous shepherds or exotic magi.  The miraculous in the gospel story depends on and elicits quotidian “deeds of love and mercy”  to the stranger, who is, by definition, always unexpected.