Baby Jesus

Unless you view the birth stories of Jesus in the gospels of Matthew and Luke literally, Christmas can be a theological minefield. It seems the ‘magic of Christmas” has to be preserved. Santas, and snow, log fires, gifts and crèche scenes seem to encapsulate those feelings of ‘magic’. They appear tied up with folks feelings of hope for things like peace in the world, freedom from anxiety, and harmony in their relationships and within them. I think that is also true of the ‘popular’ Christian story!

The Christmas Story which we know is a creation of the different stories contained in Matthew and Luke. Parts have been taken from both and fitted together into a whole. It is, however, full of inconsistencies as an attempt at a cohesive, or historical, or convincing story of what happened. As a factual account, it doesn’t work, even though it makes a good story.

It turns out that it is the story that matters.

The stories are not fact, though you can read them literally if you wish, and the events did not happen in history, other than the birth of a child. So what’s going on? Are Matthew and Luke charlatans, seeking to tell a tale as if it were fact? If that is not the case, then something else is going on here. The question is, “What is going on?”

Examining the stories in detail, every element can be traced back from the Christian story to Judaic origins. Stars and shepherds, and sages, a virgin, (or more correctly young woman), oxen, lambs, flights into Egypt and even Bethlehem as the birth-place of Jesus, all have antecedents in Hebrew Scripture.

It turns out that it’s the connection that counts.

To understand what’s going on we need to think ourselves into the time after year 70 of the Common Era. Between then and about 100 the gospels of Matthew and Luke were being constructed. Their purpose was to recommend the person and teachings of the man, the prophet, the teacher, the healer, Jesus bar Joseph of Nazareth. This is the man for whom some dropped everything they were doing to follow. This is the man in whose presence people found their broken lives and bodies transformed. Having met Jesus they were not the same people any more. Some would describe it like being in the presence of God, certainly in the presence of holiness, which for some meant wholeness. Here was a teacher who showed how it was possible to live in a way that was not about dominance and competition for scarce resources, but about compassion in lives of abundance.

How do you tell that story? A biography was certainly possible. It would not solve the problem of factuality. Biographies are still interpretative of a life.

What we have is perhaps like a painting. It’s an interpretative portrait at one level. That too is a problem. Almost certainly, to begin with, the Jesus story was told, not written. What was told was an experience and, of themselves, experiences are difficult to put into words. Experiences are about what we sense, and feel, about someone, or something. When we try to describe those, we can come up with some pretty wild language. Think about how you might describe a life-changing experience. What language, or image, might you chose? The contemporary followers of Jesus are trying to tell us that in some way, some how in Jesus they had experienced the presence of God in a way that defied language.

How could it happen and how can you explain to some one how, to put it crudely, God got into Jesus in this way? The gospel writer, Matthew, resolves the issue of how the divine, the holy could be experienced in the life of Jesus, by a story about an angel declaring that Jesus had his origins in the Godhead, he used specific language that Jesus was the son of God, (what that term meant I’ll deal with in another blog). The gospel of Mark, not having any birth stories, puts it in the context of a divine announcement of Jesus’ identity at the moment of his baptism as an adult, in the River Jordan. Luke’s gospel embellishes Matthew’s story of the nativity and has Jesus identity announced to his father, Joseph, in a dream. The gospel of John, in that reading from his first chapter so often used at Christmas, says that there never was a time when Jesus was not part of God.

As they tell the story two things happen. The first is that they understand Jesus in the context of the Judaism from which both he and they come. So before anyone invented what we now commonly call the New Testament, the Jesus story, still within Judaism, was still part of what has been called[1] ‘salvation history’, that is still part of the epic story of how Judaism understood itself in relationship to it’s god and it’s world.

As I read that continuing story, I know that in stories of stars, shepherds and stables, sages and virgin births, I have entered the realm of mythology. I do not mean to suggest that, therefore, what we are dealing with is untrue. I mean that it is not fact. I mean that it is true in a way that fact obscures and limits. I am told that certain Native American story tellers begin telling their tribal stories to young people by saying something akin to, “I don’t know if this happened, but I know it’s true.”

So, in the same way, the birth stories of Jesus are not fact, but they are true. Their truth lies, not in whether or not they happened, but in how the writers understood the holiness they called God, Yahweh, Elohim, El, Jehovah, and Adonai, challenged the way in which they lived together. It’s a story about how we are able to change the normal ways of dominance, and competition, and religious, political and social control and oppression.

It begins with an unlikely story of a defenseless child, born to a peasant family in an oppressed community, who grows up to offer ways to change the way the world can be.



[1] Rudolf Bultmann, (1884- ) I believe, originated the concept in Offenbarung und Heilegeschehen (1941)