The 12 Days: Day 7

Luke 2:39-40:

When they had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth.  The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.

So they went home.

After all the fuss at the temple, after the drama of that night when the baby was born, after all the drama with angels and unexpected pregnancies, they went home.  Back to Nazareth.

They went home and the boy...grew up.  Aside from what happens in 2:41-51, when the child was twelve years old, that's all we get.  No miracles, no drama, no...well, nothing.  They went home and the child grew up.  Grew up well, to hear Luke describe it, but grew up.

With the dramatic flair Luke showed throughout the first chapter and most of the second, you'd think that if Luke had found any good juicy stories (see 1:3 for Luke's frank admission about doing research) about Jesus's childhood (nothing embarrassing, mind you, but a good healing or something), he'd have found a way to work it in.  He did include the temple story, after all, or both of them (Simeon and Anna, and the twelve-year-old at the temple).

But, in the end, Luke doesn't give us anything else.  Just...he grew up.

As has been observed, other writers were happy to fill in the gap.  For example, some time in the second century, an unknown author filled the gap with a colorful piece of writing known now as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.  Jesus isn't a very nice kid, if you buy these tales.  Apparently people wanted stories of Jesus's childhood, though.  Why this kind of account was appealing is beyond me, I have to admit.

Aside from Luke, the gospels have Matthew's more spare account, and John's prologue (more on than another day).  Mark has nothing to say on the subject at all.  And nobody else, certainly not Paul, sees fit to address Jesus's childhood, or any of the other big biographical details, really.  Paul has a few things to say about the meaning of the Incarnation, but doesn't seem to care much about how it happened (again, more later).

People get greedy.  For all his sense of drama, Luke isn't going to feed any kind of frenzy for juicy stories that don't add up to good news.  So, the nativity story ends with...he grew up.

And that's enough.

The 12 Days: Day 6

Luke 2:22-38:

When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as it is written in the law of the Lord, "Every firstborn male shall be designated as holy to the Lord"), and they offered a sacrifice according to what is stated in the law of the Lord, "a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons."
Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; this man was righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit rested on him.  It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Messiah.  Guided by the Spirit, Simeon came into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him what was customary under the law, Simeon took him in his arm and praised God, saying,
"Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace,
according to your word;
for my eyes have seen your salvation,
which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,
a light for revelation to the Gentiles
and a glory to your people Israel."
And the child's father and mother were amazed at what was being said about him.  Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, "This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed -- and a sword will pierce your own soul too."
There was also a prophet, Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher.  She was of a great age, having lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, then as a widow to the age of eighty-four.  She never left the temple but worshiped there with fasting and prayer night ant day.  At that moment she came and began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.

Just when things started to seem normal.

Again Joseph and Mary were doing what good parents were supposed to do, when they were supposed to do it.  A Presbyterian can spot things being done "decently and in order" from a mile away.

All seemed perfectly on track until the old man showed up.  To hear Luke tell it, he just walked up and took the child.  We have no reason to believe that Mary or Joseph knew who he was, so maybe a little bit of panic was in order.  By the time Simeon got through saying what he had to say, maybe the parents wished he had been a mere child-snatcher -- he was old, and they could certainly outrun him...

Oh, it started off well enough, and to Mary at least it should have brought back some memories of angel visits and dramatic prophecies.  Before too long, though, Simeon quit preaching and got to meddling.  Falling?  A "sign to be opposed"?  Might these have been the very first intimations that all would not go well for this child?  Finishing with the cryptic "a sword shall pierce your own soul too" was the last straw, I'd think.  What could that possibly mean?  Is this child going to break my heart?  What will he do?  What will people do to him?

If that weren't enough, then an equally old woman showed up, not to bring darkness to their own hearts, but to point out the child to everyone passing by.  Now Mary and Joseph are not only puzzled and troubled by the old man's words, but they are trying to sort it all out with the whole temple full of people watching, it seemed.

Luke seems very interested in giving us a lot of detail about Simeon and particularly Anna.  We are for a moment treated to the backstory that brought the two to the temple, as well as Anna's personal history and her identity as a prophet (note that Simeon is not so identified).  For Joseph and Mary, though, we have to guess that none of this background was available; just two random strangers suddenly going nuts over their child.

It's not as if there hadn't been enough already, between the angel visitations before Mary was even pregnant, not to mention the invasion of shepherds babbling about angels on the night of the birth.  But what was it like on the other days, when this was just a child who needed to be fed and cleaned and so on?  Did it start to seem, after a while, as if all that other business might have been just a dream, something starting to seem a little less real, a little less present than it seemed at one time?

If so, Simeon and Anna were on the scene to shake those illusions away.

They also served, perhaps, to remind the new parents that they were not the only ones with everything riding on this child, in case that was starting to slip from conscious thought.  To think of these two, blessed with great years, whose whole life had more or less become about waiting for the appearance of this child -- my child -- the salvation of the people, glory of Israel, but my child! -- had to be a jarring, shattering moment.

If there were more of these to come, Luke doesn't record them for us, at least outside of the temple incident at age twelve.  We are left with only two more sentences, in verses 39 and 40, which don't tell us a lot specifically.

Maybe that's because this isn't the important part?

After all, we have done a pretty impressive job of sentimentalizing the nativity story we have beyond all capacity to jolt us or surprise us or move us to live a Christ-like life.  Imagine if we had a childhood full of stories to obsess over.  Can you imagine the carols?  "Away In a Manger" would look like a doctoral treatise in theology by comparison.

Maybe our lack of childhood story is for the best.

The 12 Days: Day 5

Luke 2:21:

After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.

It's what you do.

On the eighth day the male child is circumcised.  That's the procedure.  Even if your child is the Son of God.

Amidst all the weirdness and completely not-normal stuff that happened in the time leading to the birth of Jesus, and after the rather dramatic angel intervention and shepherd invasion of the night of the birth, the next thing we get is this simple sentence about first-century Jewish parents doing what first-century Jewish parents do.

One of the things that stands out as odd about what we know of Jesus's life is this yawning gap between birth and age thirty.  Aside from the episode in the Temple when Jesus was twelve, we skip from this infant/toddler (more on that later, on day 12) to the thirty-year-old Jesus showing up to be baptized by John the Baptizer.  Childhood, young adulthood...<crickets>.  Nothing.

Not that everybody was willing to accept this.  If you delve into the non-canonical material about Jesus, stuff that came out decades or even centuries afterwards, you get some really bizarre accounts about bizarre, willful, even cruel things done by the child Jesus.  Modern authors are not immune to the temptation to "fill in the blanks" about Jesus' life, either.

We stink at not knowing, or more precisely at accepting that we don't know.  There are some occasions where that's a good thing; I'm glad that doctors and researchers didn't settle for not understanding cancer.  But there are occasions where it leads to unhealthy and even destructive behaviors, wild unfounded speculation, and incredibly bad religion.

What's also interesting in the case of these non-canonical accounts, though, is the apparent need to make Jesus's childhood, well, "special."  The miracles and the power have to start showing themselves at a young, even very young age.  The possibility that Jesus just had a childhood -- a reasonably calm, normal childhood -- is apparently unacceptable.

The thing that appeals to me here is the utter normalcy of what the verse describes -- what any male Jewish child would have had done on day eight -- juxtaposed with the reminder of how not-normal things had been up to that point ("the name given by the angel..." -- not everybody has that experience).  At some point, if you're Mary and Joseph, you've got to get on with raising the child.

What do you do when the Son of God poops his swaddling clothes?  You get new swaddling clothes, or clean the old ones, and clean up the child.  Normal.

The child has to be nursed.  The child has to be burped.  And after eight days the child has to be circumcised.

Normal.

The 12 Days: Day 4

Luke 2:15-20:

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us." So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger.  When they saw this they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them.  But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.  The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

They had to check it out, of course.

The angels had made the big announcement to them, and given them a "sign" to know that they were in the right place, so of course they had to go check out what his thing was that the angels had announced, what the Lord had revealed to them.

I've always wondered what became of the sheep.  Some of the songs of the season suggest that they simply left the sheep behind.  This would be a fairly serious thing; to the owners of the sheep it's quite likely that the sheep were of more value than the shepherds.  Was one poor sap left behind to stay with the sheep?  Would one be enough, given that the sheep were quite likely agitated after that interruption from the angels?

I like to think that they herded the sheep along with them.  After all, this child was lying in a manger. If there was a manger around there was probably food as well as possibly shelter for the sheep.  As a result, I imagine a pretty crowded scene around Mary and Joseph and the child Jesus, with the shepherds and sheep crowding in along with whatever other animals were already there.  I like to imagine it, but of course I have no evidence for it.

Whatever became of the sheep, the shepherds made their way towards Bethlehem, and did so "with haste."  It doesn't say "they ran."  Maybe the sheep were slowing them down.  But they got there as fast as they could, in plenty of time for a heaping helping of cognitive dissonance.

It's not like they weren't warned.  The angel was pretty clear about what they'd see; a child lying in a manger.  Still, it wasn't as if the medium and method by which the message was delivered truly prepared them for such a humble sight.

Most scholars suggest that the manger was found not in the rustic kind of stable we imagine, but in something more like a man-made cave, hewn out of rock; in other words, something not far from a literal hole in the wall.  Inside were the child, still rather newborn-looking, probably squawling a bit (NOTE: I'm told by those who have given birth to children that if you're newborn child doesn't cry there's a decent chance something is wrong; that rather stupid line in "Away In a Manger" about "little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes" is absolute BS, nothing more than an attempt to shame Victorian children into being little pod people); Mary most likely spent and wiped out from giving birth, and Joseph in whatever state of panic he had achieved by this time.  It's hard to imagine that the scene itself wasn't quite what these shepherds imagined after all that angel stuff.

Whatever dissonance there may have been, the shepherds didn't seem to be deterred; they unloaded their whole story on Mary and Joseph.  Luke makes it sound like there were others on the scene as well -- "and all who heard it were amazed..." (emphasis mine) -- maybe the keeper of the inn?  Maybe the innkeeper's wife?  (As played by Pig-Pen and Frieda in "A Charlie Brown Christmas," perhaps?) In any case, we get x number of people being amazed, but Mary starting her own My First Baby Book in her own memory.

Certainly Mary hadn't completely forgotten the announcement from the angel Gabriel, or perhaps the experience of that crazy prophetic song coming upon her from out of nowhere when she was visiting Elizabeth.  At the same time, though, the girl was tired.  She could really have used some rest.  But the shepherds crashing in (with or without sheep) no doubt brought back to her all of the unbelievable and awe-full things that had led up to this birth, providing a reminder: remember who this child is, Mary; remember who this child will be.  And the shepherds' account of the angelic announcement brought back into sharp relief for Mary just what it was to be the θεοτὁκος.

As for the shepherds, they were presumably polite enough not to overstay their welcome.  And they ... returned.  To their fields?  To their sheep?  To that one schlub left behind to keep the sheep?  To an empty field deserted by the sheep who had wandered off and gotten swept away in a nearby river?  We don't know.  They disappear from the story.  But they disappear "glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen."  Maybe that made the nights alone with the sheep easier to bear.

The 12 Days: Day 3

Luke 2:8-14:

In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.  But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid; for see -- I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.  This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger."  And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, "Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!"

Now we're getting somewhere.

This is the stuff of Christmas, as it tends to get transmitted in culture both high (no, that link doesn't lead to Messiah!) and popular.  It is so familiar, perhaps, that we don't actually hear it anymore.

Oh, we hear it for certain, when we watch A Charlie Brown Christmas or see the Christmas pageant or the Christmas Eve service, but there's hearing, and there's hearing, and I'm not sure we hear it.

Maybe this is a place where a more modern translation, like the NRSV above, might help.  There's a difference in impact between saying there were shepherds "abiding" in the field, and shepherds "living" in the fields.  And how long has it been since you took the time to figure out what "sore afraid" means?  But we get "terrified."  Maybe not as poetic, but meaningful.

Again, this is maybe a place where our little pageants don't help us.  Who can be terrified of the cute little boy or girl playing the angel?  And yet our understanding of this passage, of the shock and, yes, terror the shepherds felt gets diminished every year.

To go back to A Charlie Brown Christmas: if Shermy thought it was frustrating to play a shepherd every year in the Christmas play, he'd have been totally bummed at being a shepherd for real.  Living (not just abiding) in the fields, trying to keep track of some of the dumbest animals in creation, fighting off predators, fighting off weather, fighting off boredom...again, perhaps not quite like our romanticized illustrated Bible might suggest.

And into this mixture of tedium and chill bursts an angel, appearance enough to leave the shepherds terrified.  The angel's announcement probably didn't help matters.  When a terrifying being tells you not to be afraid, it doesn't usually help.  The heart of the announcement -- a baby born Messiah, wrapped up in cloth scraps and laid in a feed trough? -- probably came off as more confusing than comforting.  And then...if one angel was terrifying, a multitude of same was probably heart attack-inducing.

This might, in all the nativity narratives of Matthew and Luke combined, be the scene that comes closest to capturing something of the radical in-breaking that the scriptures of Advent pointed toward.  An event out of the blue, overturning the existence of those who witnessed and experienced it, the announcement would seem to have made it impossible for the shepherds' lives to go on as normal, wouldn't it?  How do you go back to humdrum shepherding after that?

When you say you want to feel the Spirit, to know what it is to be face-to-face with the radical action of God Almighty, keep these guys in mind.  Their lives are being invaded in this passage.  They are being thrown into the middle of an unexpected and inconceivable divine intervention, and they can't quite know what's next.  Except for one detail: they've gotta check this out.

Our dramatist Luke shows his flair here.  Change of scene; he might as well have started this passage with the Greek equivalent of "Meanwhile..." But the choice of shepherds for this scene -- shepherds, not kings or wealthy folk or even good solid citizens, but grungy, scruffy, legally unreliable shepherds -- reveals more than dramatic flair; under the radar Luke is making a statement about the kind of Messiah being born on this night.  The scruffy, smelly folk, the undesirables, the social outcasts ... these are his people, even when he's barely out of the womb.  There might have been less likely people on the planet that night to be the recipients of this angelic outbreak, but it's hard to think of who they might have been.

And this is worth breaking out the angelic multitude.  Not just the birth of a Messiah, but this Messiah, the one who seeks out shepherds and fisherfolk and others on or beyond the fringes.  That's worth a good rousing chorus of "Glory to God."

The 12 Days: Day 2

Luke 2:1-8:

In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered.  This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria.  All went to their own towns to be registered.  Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David.  He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child.  While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child.  And she gave birth to her first born son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.  

Luke is our drama maven.  You can tell because he begins the chapter with a big honking exaggeration.  "All the world" should be registered?  Really, now, the Roman Empire was big, but let's not be ridiculous here.  On the other hand, if you were an average joe living in the Empire, I suppose it might have seemed the whole world to you.

Considering the buildup of chapter 1, this might seem to be a bit of an understated narrative of the birth, not unlike Matthew's.  Of course Luke has more up his sleeve.  Eventually Luke will give us the only surviving canonical account of Jesus as a child -- not infant -- by the end of this chapter.

For now, though, block out the other stuff, and let these eight verses sink in.  The registration is called, and everybody has to go to the family home town to get counted properly.  Joseph, briefly mentioned in Luke 1:27 (just before Mary gets to have a non-dream conversation with an angel and go hang with her old pregnant cousin Elizabeth), leads the family-to-be on the road to Bethlehem, because it was the ancestral home, so to speak, because Joseph was of the house and lineage of David.

Think about that for a minute.  One of Joseph's ancestors was King David, the great hero of Israel/Judea history (or maybe second to Moses, depending on how you define "hero" I guess).  We haven't actually been told anything about Joseph in Luke's account; he hasn't been identified as a carpenter at this point.  Still, though, whatever Joseph was at this point, how must it have felt to have only the greatest king your people had ever known in your ancestral line?  Did Joseph ever wonder why he wasn't a king himself, or at least some kind of royalty, instead of a guy schlepping across Galilee and into Judea with a pregnant fiancee and some kind of wild story about her pregnancy being "by the Holy Spirit" (really, what does that even mean?)?  Joseph, in Luke's account, hasn't had the benefit of any angel visits, in a dream or otherwise.  The whole episode must have felt very confusing and confounding to him.

You might imagine Joseph thinking to himself on the whole trip, "Don't have the baby while we're in Bethlehem.  Don't have the baby while we're in Bethlehem.  Don't have the baby..." ad infinitium while on the road, while seeking a place to stay -- where were these vaunted relatives of the house of David?  Was there no one to take him in?  Was everybody else skipping out on the registration?

Notice also Luke's last bit of dramatic emphasis; after all, Matthew had nothing to say about a manger, or the lack of room in the inn (by this time Matthew hasn't said anything about the location or circumstances of the birth, and by the time the Magi show up they're in a house of some sort -- Matt. 2:11!), or "swaddling clothes" as the KJV put it.  These are all unique to the narrative of the drama master Luke.  (It's also worth remembering that in Matthew's narrative Joseph had gone ahead and married Mary, but here that doesn't seem to have happened if one believes verse 5.)

Yes, Luke has more up his sleeve.  But freeze the picture here for now.  An exhausted mother, a perplexed father, a newborn baby boy resting in a glorified feed trough.  And no idea what was going to happen next.

The 12 Days: Day 1

Matthew 1:18-25:

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way.  When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.  Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.  But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.  She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins."  All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:  "Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel," which means, "God is with us."  When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

It's just not poetic, darn it.

We're so accustomed to hearing the nativity story from Luke, year after year after year at Christmas Eve, that to read Matthew's rather more bare-bones account just feels, well, wrong.  No shepherds.  Only one angel, and that one angel is skulking around in Joseph's dreams instead of showing up in full daylight, bold as brass.  No particular suggestion of census or journey.  No manger, no stable, none of the stuff without which there's no Christmas pageant for the kids to put on.  The whole virgin birth business is there, sort of, although Matthew skirts around the edges of it rather than making it front and center as Luke does.

Looking backward in Matthew's gospel doesn't help either; the only thing before this account in Matthew is one of those tedious genealogies one is more accustomed to find in Old Testament passages, with all the "begats" in KJV-speak.  The vast majority of the names are quite foreign, outside of those old genealogies, although there are some familiar folk.

That genealogy only goes back as far as Abraham, for that matter, and does include Isaac and Jacob; four women manage to get included (Mary being the final one), and while the story of Ruth and Boaz has achieved something of a heartwarming reputation, there is nothing heartwarming about Judah and Tamar, and your church bluenoses probably don't want to spend a lot of time on Rahab and Salmon.  but of course Boaz and Ruth lead to Jesse and Jesse leads to David.  At that point the names get a lot less familiar until you finally get to Joseph.  Matthew is oddly concerned with pointing out that fourteen generations elapsed from Abraham to David, another fourteen generations from David to the Babylonian exile (the NRSV uses the word "deportation" (which puts a joltingly relevant twist on that story), and fourteen generations from the exile to the Messiah.

We don't hear from Mary at all -- no prophetic Magnificat here.  For that matter, we don't hear from Joseph either, although he is in many ways the principal figure in the story as Matthew tells it.  He is at least given credit for being a "righteous man," although his plan to "dismiss" his unexpectedly pregnant wife-to-be seems righteous only in comparison to having her put to death, which was an option.  An angel shows up in his dreams just as he resolves to do this, to avoid humiliating her in his eyes, to warn him off this plan.  Instead, Joseph gets the word to take her as his wife, and be the earthly male parent to a child conceived by the Holy Spirit.  He gets a name to give the child, a bit of scripture to back up the whole cockamamie story (Matthew loves to do that -- drop in bits of scripture to back up his story), and...well, that's about it.

Indeed this whole "birth narrative" is hardly that at all, more of a narrative of a family-in-the-making threatened by scandal and a rather quiet dropping of a bomb into their already-tumultuous situation.  It's a little confusing that Matthew first announces Mary was "found to be with child by the Holy Spirit" back in verse 18; exactly how did they know that, and if they knew then why did Joseph have to be told again in his dream in verse 20?  One almost wonders why Matthew bothered at all.  While Luke spilled a lot of ink on his birth story, neither Mark nor John bothered at all.  John gave us that fancy prologue about the Word, but nothing about the child.  Mark jumps into the story with the adult Jesus showing up to be baptized.  So it wasn't mandatory.  Why, then, does Matthew feel the need to include this dry, spare account?

One reason shows up at the end of this orbit of twelve days (so you'll get no spoilers here).  The other is at least partly suggested by that genealogy, leading us up to Joseph and Messiah-Son.  To wit:

This is what (or who) we've been waiting for.

It's why Matthew lays out a genealogy with big names like Abraham and David.  It's why Matthew wants to drop some scripture on us.

This is what (or who) we've been waiting for.

Even from the beginning, Matthew wants us to see that this is no ordinary child, as ordinary or extremely human as the circumstances of his birth might have seemed on the surface.  The Spirit is acting in this somewhat chaotic family-contract setting, moving against what seem to be righteous impulses to do something beyond ordinary righteousness and blowing a hole in polite society's expectations to do something that made no sense to polite society.

We will be back to Matthew, circling back around to him at the end of this cycle.  But for now, his word to us is simply this:

This is what (or who) we've been waiting for.