Two Stories, One Gospel (Advent 4B)

 

Two Stories; One Gospel

18 December 2011

Fourth Sunday of Advent (Year B)

Seattle, Washington 

2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16; Psalm 89:1-4, 19-26; Romans 16: 25-27; Luke 1: 26-38

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, "Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you." But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. 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 ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end." Mary said to the angel, "How can this be, since I am a virgin?" 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 will be holy; he will be called Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God." Then Mary said, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word." Then the angel departed from her. (Luke 1:26-38)

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Christians at this season are all accustomed to seeing nativity scenes and stage representations showing the baby Jesus in a manger surrounded the shepherds and the Magi, with the heavenly choir and the star of wonder, star of might, floating awesomely in the night sky above.    Today’s Gospel reading starts a cycles of Christmastide readings on the birth of Jesus that we tend to hear through the filter of this familiar scene. 

But the scene as such is not a scriptural scene.  It is the combining of two separate stories about the birth of Jesus Christ found respectively in Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2.  Just as it is necessary to distinguish between the two different accounts of the creation of the world (Gen 1:1-2:4a, and Gen 2:4b-3:24) in order to understand them as they were originally intended, it is helpful to look at each of these stories  about the birth of Jesus separately in order to see clearly what they are trying to teach us about Jesus 

Matthew’s story includes the Magi and the Star, but no angelic choir, stable and manger, or shepherds.  Matthew is richly embroidered with allusions to the Hebrew Scriptures, and uses imagery to develop the meaning of Christ’s ministry.  Joseph is the main character of the story.  He is a dreamer, like the Genesis patriarch Joseph (with his many-colored or long-sleeved cloak) (cf. Matt 1:20, 24; 2:13; and Gen 37:5,9,19; 41:15).  Like Joseph of old, he saves his family (indeed, all Israel) by going into Egypt (cf. Gen 45:4-8; Hos 11:1; Matt 2:14-15).  Likewise, the Magi are reminiscent of the non-Israelite prophet Balaam of Numbers 22-24.  They are mysterious gentile astrologers or Zoroastrian priests (the most evocative translation I have seen of what the word means and evokes in Matthew is “wizards”).  The star they follow as a literary symbol itself occurs as the star of Jacob in the oracle of Balaam originally intended as a prophecy about David’s victory over Edom and Moab (Num 24:17-19).  Just as the eventual acceptance of Christianity by the gentiles is hinted at by the gentile wise men on their knees before the newborn King, so also is Jewish officialdom’s rejection of Jesus, as well as the Cross, foreshadowed by King Herod’s attempt to kill the baby by ordering a general massacre.  Matthew’s portrayal of the massacre of  the innocents itself is an echo of the Hebrew Scriptures:  Herod plays Pharaoh to a new Moses, sent to deliver his people from bondage and bound to give them a new law in five books (the five sermon-plus-narrative blocks in Matthew’s Gospel).  Thus Matthew reveals Jesus as the fulfillment of all Jewish hope, using texts and images from the Hebrew Scriptures. 

Luke has passed on to us the story of the shepherds, stable, and angelic choir.  A much longer story than Matthew’s, it has Mary as the main character, and sets Jesus and John the Baptist in parallel by casting them as distant cousins and telling of their births and the angelic announcements of their mothers’ pregnancies.  Luke clearly teaches that the Baptist is but a forerunner and servant of Jesus.   Songs and hymns with rich allusions from the Hebrew Scriptures (like the Magnificat in Luke 1:46-55, and the Nunc Dimmittis  in Luke 2:29-32) are woven into the narrative.   The conception and birth of John seems modeled on the story of the conception and birth of judges and heroes like Sampson and Samuel.  The story of the presentation of Jesus in the Temple, though it seemingly gets details of Jewish Law and practice wrong, is aimed at helping establish a continuity between the worship and religion of the Hebrew Scriptures and hope fulfilled in the person of Jesus.  The story of the stable emphasizes the humility of Jesus, and ties him with the figure of Israel’s God as a loving shepherd (Psalm 28:9; 78:72) or with Isaiah’s remark “The ox knows its master, the donkey its owner’s manger, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand” (Isa 1:3).  This all emphasizes his humanity, while the annunciation by an angel, and the rejoicing of the angelic choir at his birth emphasize his divinity.  Luke takes his narrative up to the time Jesus is twelve, with the story of the visit of Jesus to the Temple and being lost by his parents (Luke 2:41-52). 

 The two stories can be combined only by ignoring details in each of them.  Matthew seems to assume that Mary and Joseph live in Bethlehem, for when the wise men arrive, they come to their house there (Matt 2:11).  After fleeing to Egypt, when Joseph is told to return home, he heads for Bethlehem, but decides because of a further dream telling him about the continuing bad political situation there that he needs to bypass Judea and Bethlehem and set up a new home in Nazareth in Galilee (Matt 2:19-23). Nazareth, after all was the town that Jesus was publicly known to have come from, though Bethlehem had been associated with hopes for the birth of a new Davidic King already for several centuries.  Luke, for his part, sees Mary and Joseph living in Nazareth and makes literary use of a famously known census at about the time of Jesus’ birth (he almost certainly has gotten its date wrong) to move Mary and Joseph down to Bethlehem, filled to over-flowing and with no room for the holy couple and the soon-to-be-born baby.  After the appearance of the shepherds, Mary and Joseph go on an apparently leisurely trip to Jerusalem for the presentation of Jesus in the Temple, after which they return directly to their home in Nazareth.  Luke’s story would seem to preclude Matthew’s references to Herod’s plot to kill the baby Jesus and the family’s subsequent flight into Egypt.  Matthew’s story would seem to preclude the immediate return to Nazareth from Jerusalem which Luke recounts. 

There are ways of forcing the two stories together into harmony, to be sure.  One is to follow Luke’s story up to right after the presentation in the Temple, then assume an otherwise unmentioned return to Bethlehem and the leasing of a house there, where two years later the Wise men show up.   Similarly, some people account for the differences in the stories by suggesting that Matthew’s version is based on Joseph’s recollections while Luke’s is based on Mary’s.  But it is hard, if not outright impossible, to see how the harmonized story, if original, became fragmented and turned out the way the stories show up in the Gospels themselves, simply passing in the night and not really telling the same story at all. 

As a result of this, most scholars today believe that there is a lot of legendary material in these chapters.  Some conservative scholars argue that Matthew and Luke’s shared details—Jesus’ irregular conception and birth in Bethlehem rather than Nazareth—could conceivably stem from pre-Gospel oral traditions rooted in the experiences of the players in the stories.  Most scholars, however, simply write off any historical basis of the first two chapters of both Matthew and Luke and rather focus on their theological symbolism rather than their possible historical claims. 

Remember that the Gospel of Mark says that the “beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ” is the preaching of John the Baptist (Mark 1:1); Mark has no infancy narrative.  And even in Matthew and Luke, there seems to be little connection between the story of Jesus' public ministry and these early birth narratives (John the Baptist appears as a distant figure in the later chapters of Luke, not as a cousin.)  And the Gospel of John is also without an infancy narrative.  Rather it has as its start the great hymn to the Pre-existent Logos, where the Word comes down from heaven, and is made flesh (John 1).  Elsewhere, John actively argues that it does not matter where Jesus’ earthly origins were (what matters is his heavenly origin), and even suggests that insisting on Bethlehem as the Messiah’s origin is a misunderstanding (John 7:27-29, 41-43). 

Both Matthew and Luke agree that Jesus was Son of God from his conception, and they both foreshadow the worship of Jesus by people who accept him and the demeaning and crucifixion of Jesus by those who reject him.  Because of the bodily reappearance of Jesus after his death, the earliest Christians accepted him as uniquely God's agent.  But they saw problems in saying that he was the Messiah during his life, since the historical Jesus did not fulfill the exact hopes people had for the Messiah.  So some of the earliest Christians had believed that Jesus would be appointed Messiah as of the Second Coming (Acts 3:20).  Later, St. Paul believed that Jesus was constituted as Son of God as of his being raised from the dead after his crucifixion (Romans 1:1-4).  The earliest Gospel, Mark, places it as of his baptism in Jordan by John the Baptist (Mark 1:11, esp. in the Western Manuscript tradition, where the words “this day I have begotten you” are added).   Matthew and Luke separately make the great leap in Christian faith by saying that Jesus had always been uniquely God’s chosen one, from the moment of his conception.  It is only on the basis of their confession that a generation later, John can say that Jesus was not Christ as of his conception, but rather from the very beginning of creation (John 1:1).  The Nicaean Creed, the formulations of the Council of Calcedon, and the Creed of Athanasius in the centuries to follow only developed these basic themes further. 

So when we see these mixed crèche images of bits from Matthew and Luke together, let us remember that it is the person of Jesus that is the key issue, not the details of these specific stories.   Christ is alive and is at work in our hearts, minds, and actions of service and love.   Christ is God made manifest to us, God’s perfect revelation.  Jesus is uniquely God's child.  These stories give us partial images and reflections of this overwhelming truth. 

Thanks be to God. 

In the name of Christ, Amen.