Tag Archives: Birth of Jesus

On Welcoming Jesus

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Advent is a time when we anticipate God’s coming into our lives in mysterious ways. But are we really looking forward to God coming to us, or are we expecting business as usual, even if business isn’t all that good? Do we believe that God can affect our lives, or do we live on the assumption that such does not happen?

During a time of crisis, King Ahaz is urged to ask a sign of God but refuses to do so. (Is. 7: 1-12) Why? Asking God for a sign would alert him to the possibility that God might enter his life in some way. Business is bad, with the Assyrians threatening Jerusalem, but maybe he would rather be trampled by a powerful army then open himself up to what God might do. In the face of the king’s closing himself off, the prophet Isaiah announces a sign whether the king likes it or not. The sign doesn’t seem like much up against an invading army. How is a new born child going to solve the problem? Well, it isn’t exactly the baby who solves the problem; it’s God who solves the problem with a nudge that sends the invading army away. The baby was a sign of hope for the future, as babies often are. Nothing happens here that conflicts with the laws of nature. After all, God can accomplish much with the laws of nature. (The old translation that had a “virgin” conceiving in Isaiah’s time is considered by almost all scholars to be a mistranslation.) Now God’s little but decisive nudge wasn’t so bad was it? The only problem was that the king wasn’t in control of the situation. Not letting God control his situation would lead to Assyria controlling the situation. Is it easier to cope with being controlled by other humans that in some mysterious way being controlled, or at least led, by God? That is a particularly good question for us to ask ourselves during Advent.

Fast forward to Joseph confronted with a betrothed woman who has become pregnant, but not by him. Knowing the laws of nature as well as any modern gynecologist, Joseph decides to divorce Mary discretely, but before he can carry out his resolve, he is challenged by a dream to believe that God has intervened directly in violation to normal natural law. One could say it is once again just a little nudge. Once the conception of the child has taken place, the child develops in Mary’s womb like any other child and, when born, is just as fully human as any other child. But this little wedge, or nudge, is a big one, even a cosmic one. It is a nudge that has fundamentally changed the world for all time. And yet this little nudge, in spite of being contrary to natural law, did not send an army away. The Roman army stuck around and did its work, including the crucifixion of criminals, one of whom turned out to be the child conceived by the Holy Spirit. On the surface it doesn’t look like much of an intervention.

At this point we might ask ourselves: Do we need a decisive intervention from God such as Matthew claims to have happened with the conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary? Maybe business as usual has been bad, but at least we’re used to it. St. Paul, however, insisted that humanity had become a train wreck and needed the direct presence of God within humanity before anything could get better. St. Augustine and subsequent theologians have seconded the motion. The modern thinker René Girard has offered us anthropological insights to suggest that we are too entangled in rivalrous relationships for any of them to be disentangled unless there is intervention from outside the system, which to say: from God. So, business is bad, as I said, but do we prefer the bad business as usual to the unknown possibilities that might emerge if we embrace the child born of the Virgin Mary? Christmas is coming. Do we really want Christ to come?

Singing Jesus to Sleep

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In Christian devotion (and in many other religious traditions as well) there is much praise to God for creating the world. That God would consider it worth while to make a world with living creatures in it is astounding; an occasion for contemplative awe. According to the Psalter, the rivers clap their hands and the mountains sing together for joy. (Ps. 98: 8) Needless to say, the Psalmist expects humans to praise God at least as much as that if not more.

The traditional celebration of the Christ Child is enriched by the inclusion of nature. It is true that Luke doesn’t mention animals except for the sheep tended by the shepherds, but where there is a manger, there are animals, and the Magi probably didn’t walk great distances when camels were available. The tradition of farm animals being present to welcome Jesus into the world is inspired by the words of Isaiah: “The ox knows its master, the donkey its owner’s manger, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand.” (Is. 1: 3) Isaiah obviously thinks the animals are better at praising God than humans. Meanwhile, the angels really show us how to whoop it up over the pastures where the shepherds are tending their flock.

It is amazing that in spite of all the human failure to praise and obey God, the Creator entered God’s own creation as a human being, as frail as any other. That is quite a lot of downward mobility for one in whom “all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities.” (Col. 1: 16) It really is too much for us to take in. Like Mary, we need to treasure these things and ponder them in our hearts. (Lk. 2: 19)

In addition to all the carols about ox and ass tending the baby Jesus and the lovely carol Angels We Have Heard on High, there seem to be more Christmas lullabies than there are stars in the sky. The lullaby for Jesus, Schlaf, mein Jesu,” (Sleep my Jesus) sung by the alto soloist in Bach’s Christmas Oratorio is among the most beautiful. As a choir boy, I sang several lullaby carols. One of my favorites was a Czech carol called the “Rocking Carol” with flowing melodic lines accompanying the lovely melody.

From the dawn of humanity, mothers have been lulling their babies to sleep. It seems quite possible that lullabies may be among the oldest songs conceived by humanity. They are among the first songs that children learn. I still remember several from early childhood, especially the Irish lullaby: “Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-rah.” It is both fitting and a deeply sound intuition to assume that the infant Jesus would have been lulled to sleep like every other baby, his divinity notwithstanding. Nothing could more deeply affirm his full humanity. The lullaby Christmas carols give us entry into a devotion of rocking Jesus to sleep as an act of devotion.

Because God became a child who was lulled to sleep, every child is Jesus, just as each person is the least (and therefor the most) of his brethren. Like every baby, Jesus was fragile and needed to be handled with care. When he grew up, nails could be driven into his hands just as easily as with any other human. Because of Jesus, every baby, every person, needs to be handled with the same gentle care expressed in these Christmas lullabies. The same applies to the whole eco-system, which is both resilient and frail, so that heaven and nature can have something to sing about. Quite a lot for us, like Mary, to ponder in our hearts.

Czech Rocking Caro lhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpa2qjIxolY

Sharing God’s Riches

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creche1-copyLike every culture, the Jews had to face fundamental decisions as to how open or closed they would be to others. The default mechanism tends to be flight or fight. In discussing remaining social groups living close to the level of what he calls “traditional” societies, Jared Diamond observed this phenomenon. A stranger wandering into the territory of a different tribe had better come up with a common ancestor or the encounter could prove fatal.

The type of encounters with other nations has an effect on such decisions. In the case of the Jews, most encounters were bad. Slavery in Egypt was followed by both cultural and military threats from the Canaanites who tempted the Jews to forsake the God who had delivered them from Egypt. Encounters with the Assyrians and Babylonians were catastrophic. But then the Persians destroyed the Babylonian Empire and invited the Jews to return to their homeland and revive their cultural and religious traditions. It is surely no accident that the return from Babylonian exile and resettlement back in their homeland coincided with the first expressions of openness to other cultures on the part of the Jews such as we have when Isaiah proclaims: “Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.” (Is. 60:3) With Isaiah, we have the breakthrough insight that the God who brought them out of Egypt and then delivered them from Babylon was the God for all people and not just them. Although Adam Smith took the title of his famous book The Wealth of Nations from Isaiah 60:5: “the wealth of the nations shall come to you,” the prophet encourages a much more profound exchange than that of capital: an exchange of the riches of the Jews’ religious tradition for the riches other nations can bring to that same tradition. Unfortunately, retrenchment followed, climaxed by the expulsion of all foreign wives at about the time of the building of the second temple.

At the time of Jesus’ birth, the relationship between the Jews and the Gentiles, the other nations, was complex and tense. Their religious traditions were mostly tolerated but at times menaced by the Romans. Although some individual Gentiles became God-fearers, practicers of Jewish piety such as the Centurion who built the synagogue at Capernaum, (Lk. 7: 4-5) there were few friendly relations between Jews and Gentiles. And yet in the face of this tension, Matthew sees in the visit of the Magi to the infant Jesus a fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy of the exchange of wealth between the two peoples.

It was for St. Paul to return the gifts to the Magi. After his dramatic conversion, he was called to preach the Good News of Jesus, a Jew, to the Gentiles. To the surprise of many Jews who followed Jesus, “the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.” (Eph. 3: 6) That is, Jesus dissolved the fundamental division between Jew and Gentile when he was crucified by a collaboration between the two peoples who had suddenly come together for that brief moment. But when Jesus was raised from the dead as the forgiving victim, he bridged the gap between nations with one comprehensive act of forgiveness.

Ever since Paul’s commission, the Church has been tempted to retrench herself as the Jews did after building the second temple. This is to fall back into the default hostility to the stranger that Jared Diamond saw as part of “traditional” humanity. What the feast of Epiphany celebrates is the generosity of God who shares God’s riches with all so that all people can share this same richness with all others, not least with strangers who can then soon cease to be strangers.