“Jesus in the Temple” by James B. Janknegt, 2009.
Milk Carton Jesus
Homily delivered Second Sunday of Christmas (ABC)
3rd January 2015 8:00am Said and 10:00am Sung Eucharist
Parish Church of Trinity Ashland, Oregon
Homily delivered Second Sunday of Christmas (ABC)
3rd January 2015 8:00am Said and 10:00am Sung Eucharist
Parish Church of Trinity Ashland, Oregon
God, give us hearts to feel and love; take away our hearts
of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
Today’s gospel is a story of terror for any parent—losing your child with little hope of finding him again. Had it occurred in a later age, we would find Mary and Joseph publishing pictures of the 12-year old Jesus on milk cartons, or sending out an “Amber alert.” They discover to their horror that their son has disappeared. They return to Jerusalem and search for days only to find Jesus in one of the Temple Courts taking an impromptu course in religious law. The Blessed Virgin greets him pointedly: “Child, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been looking for you for three days.” He answers with a “well, duh!” kind of response known all too well by parents of adolescents worldwide: “Why did you look all over town for me? Surely you must have known, Mother, that I would be in my Father’s House.” His barbed use of the word “Father” to mean God here corrects his mother’s loose use of it to refer to her husband Joseph. Mary, like many parents, doesn’t appreciate her teen-ager’s humor. Rather, she takes it in with puzzlement. The story concludes with the family’s return home and, “He was obedient to them.”
The story presents the glories and the incongruities of the incarnation, the
taking on of human flesh by God in Jesus. God in human form speaks, but as a
twelve-year-old boy talking back—talking truth to be sure, but still talking
back—to his distraught mother. It sums up the incarnation’s scope: in the words
of the Book of Hebrews, Christ shared all our limitations and trials, but without
sin.
The incarnation marks a radical continuity between our human lives and God’s, and that implies sacredness in all it means to be human, including adolescence. We often miss the point, wrongly thinking that somehow God came among us without truly being one of us. This “God incognito” paid for our sins and somehow made it possible for us to be more like God, and less like human beings.
That is a total warping of the meaning of the incarnation. God became truly human in all ways (except in resisting God), and that means it’s O.K. to be fully human. In fact, it means God calls us to be fully human, and to do that he calls us to follow his example when he was among us, and not resist God so much. It is only thus that we can find our true and full humanity.
The incarnation marks a radical continuity between our human lives and God’s, and that implies sacredness in all it means to be human, including adolescence. We often miss the point, wrongly thinking that somehow God came among us without truly being one of us. This “God incognito” paid for our sins and somehow made it possible for us to be more like God, and less like human beings.
That is a total warping of the meaning of the incarnation. God became truly human in all ways (except in resisting God), and that means it’s O.K. to be fully human. In fact, it means God calls us to be fully human, and to do that he calls us to follow his example when he was among us, and not resist God so much. It is only thus that we can find our true and full humanity.
The doctrine of the incarnation, of God becoming a human being, was a scandalous idea from the start. The basic problem is obvious—we tend to define the word God by what we are not. We are contingent; God is sufficient. We are changeable; God is unchanging. We are incomplete and sick; God is wholeness and health itself. We are sinners; God is perfection itself. We are mortal; God, immortal. How can these two polar extremes be reconciled, let alone combined?
The Church during its first six centuries dealt with these issues in a series of ugly arguments called the “Christological controversies.”
The
doctrine of the united Church—the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church that
we confess in the Creed—was worked out during those controversies and by those
Councils. The Creed itself, together with the list of what books we accept as
the Holy Bible, stand as the primary legacies of those Councils.
What
the Church gradually recognized is that in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the
Love and Power that brought the universe into existence and still sustains it
embraced and took on in every way the weakness, limitation, handicaps, and
contingency of being human. The Councils declared that Jesus Christ was fully
God and fully Man, 100% God and 100% Human being. He was not a 50-50 mix, half
God and half human being.
To
those who stress the oneness of God at the expense of the divinity of Jesus,
the Creed states, “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father (that is, there never was a time when he was
not thus begotten), God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,
begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were
made.”
To those who stress the divinity of Christ at the expense of his humanity, the Creed declares, “We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, . . . who became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and became truly human. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.”
To those who stress the divinity of Christ at the expense of his humanity, the Creed declares, “We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, . . . who became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and became truly human. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.”
Popular Christian legends from those
early years show some of the confusion that prevailed—many of the infancy
Gospels rejected by the Councils for inclusion in the New Testament portray not
a helpless, speechless baby Jesus, but one that can give his Mother sermons the
day he was born and that as a child blasts with lightning his playmates when
they are mean to him and then resurrects them when his Mother tells him it is not
nice to kill one’s playmates. Other
later Gospels divide the Christ from Jesus and say that Christ never suffered
on the Cross.
Against all these views, the Church teaches that as difficult as it may be to understand, Jesus Christ was both truly God and truly Man. God incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth shared all our limitations, weakness, and silly quirks. He was subject to natural evil like the rest of us. The most obvious example is his unjust death by torture at the hands of the Roman Empire. But despite this, he never resisted God. Though a typical adolescent in some ways in today’s story, he is unusual in his openness to God.
Theologians describe the incarnation from the outside by saying that God in taking on flesh accepted its limits, or in technical jargon, willed the “occultation of his divinity.” An early hymn in Philippians (2: 6-8) describes it as Christ “emptying himself.”
But we need another image to describe it from the inside. One is the Celtic spirituality’s idea of “thin places,” geographic spots where the veil between the ordinary world and the spirit world seem particularly thin, like the island of Iona. These are places where the Distant, Shining City does not seem so far away, where it seems easier to commune with God. There are also some people in whom the image of God does not seem so distorted, whose life shows the presence of God shining through. The man Jesus is the ultimate example of a person as a “thin place,” in fact, the thinnest of places.
This implies a great deal. William Stringfellow wrote,
Against all these views, the Church teaches that as difficult as it may be to understand, Jesus Christ was both truly God and truly Man. God incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth shared all our limitations, weakness, and silly quirks. He was subject to natural evil like the rest of us. The most obvious example is his unjust death by torture at the hands of the Roman Empire. But despite this, he never resisted God. Though a typical adolescent in some ways in today’s story, he is unusual in his openness to God.
Theologians describe the incarnation from the outside by saying that God in taking on flesh accepted its limits, or in technical jargon, willed the “occultation of his divinity.” An early hymn in Philippians (2: 6-8) describes it as Christ “emptying himself.”
But we need another image to describe it from the inside. One is the Celtic spirituality’s idea of “thin places,” geographic spots where the veil between the ordinary world and the spirit world seem particularly thin, like the island of Iona. These are places where the Distant, Shining City does not seem so far away, where it seems easier to commune with God. There are also some people in whom the image of God does not seem so distorted, whose life shows the presence of God shining through. The man Jesus is the ultimate example of a person as a “thin place,” in fact, the thinnest of places.
This implies a great deal. William Stringfellow wrote,
“Jesus Christ means that God cares extremely, decisively, inclusively, immediately, for the ordinary, transient, proud, wonderful, besetting, frivolous, hectic, lusty things of human life. The reconciliation of God and the world in Jesus Christ means that in Christ there is a radical and integral relationship of all human beings and of all things. In Christ all things are held together (Col. 1:17b)” (A Public and Private Faith, 1962, 40-44).
This
means it is OK to be human. Incarnation
tells us to accept who we are—gifts, and strengths, disabilities and ugly
deficiencies and all. We must accept who others are as well. We must be gentle
both on them and ourselves. We must respond to the glimpses of glory, to the thin places, in our lives. Seeking to let God finish his creative work in us,
trying to amend our lives, both personally and communally, requires an open-ended
listening, a total trust in God’s good intentions for us.
Ambrose
of Milan, who taught and converted Augustine of Hippo in the mid fourth
century, wrote dozens of hymns popularizing the basic teachings of
Christianity. Both Ambrose and Augustine were very flawed people—Ambrose an anti-Jewish
bigot and Augustine a lecher who never seems to have gotten over a conflicted view of his own bodily urges. But they
both persevered in open-ended listening to God. That’s why we call them
saints—not because they lacked flaws, but because they persevered despite them.
One of Ambrose’s hymns praises the enfleshment of Christ in these words:
O equal to Thy Father, Thou!
Gird on thy fleshly mantle now;
the weakness of our mortal state
with deathless might invigorate.
As God became truly human in Jesus, let us accept our own humanity, with all its limitations and failings. And as Jesus accepted the Father's will in all things, let us open ourselves to listen to God and follow where Jesus leads us.
In the Name of God, Amen.
Jesus in the Temple, Our Lady of the Lake Catholic Church, Verona, NJ. Photograph Copyright 2011 Loci B. Lenar
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