Often today, many feel "caught" in an uncomfortable tight space generated by the disparities between traditional religious and modern thought. For more than 200 years now, "higher" biblical criticism has progressively made untenable many former biblical "sureties." No figure has suffered more from a historical strip down than has the person of Jesus. In the search for the historical Jesus, as it has evolved for more than a century now, we have progressively discovered that many "facts" about the life and words of Jesus can no longer be understood to be historically "factual" in the sense that they might have been recordable on a video camera had technology of that sort been available at that time. This is particularly apparent to us in an historical examination of the birth narratives of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Not only do they appear to belong to a relatively late layer of the Jesus gospel tradition, but also the accounts of these writers are profoundly different, not just in small details but in general outline and internal "message." (I invite you to read this year the Matthew and Luke accounts separately, not conflating them together into one unified story as we usually do, but considering each one individually, if you are in doubt about this.) It is plainly the case, even at the simplest level, that if one of these narratives is accepted as the "true" story in a literal sense, then the other must be plainly false, and vice versa. An insistence then, on an historically factual birth narrative of Jesus, inevitably "lets us down" unless we are particularly fond of paradox.
What then are we to do with these narratives?
In their recent book, The First Christmas, historical Jesus scholars Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg set aside very quickly any obsessive preoccupation with trying to discover "factual" information in the birth narratives, and quickly pass to questions of "meaning," looking at the stories from the perspective of myth or parables that we understand to be "true" in the same manner that we find "truth" in the many parables spoken in the gospels accounts by the person of Jesus. Which of us, when considering the parable of the Good Samaritan, for example, would assert that the validity of that particular story depended on a factuality that events "really happened" exactly as described? We note, on the contrary, that the parable's truth resides at a level that is more than any simple retelling of historical fact, in the message that it conveys in story form. In a similar manner, when we relax our anxieties generated by a futile attempt to view the nativity stories as historical fact, we can open up to the deeper truth of the messages that they contain.
As Episcopalians (along with Lutherans, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and other Christians retaining strong liturgical traditions) we can enter into a particularly intense experience of these narratives as we participate in the rituals and liturgies of the Advent and Christmas cycle. Just as with the narratives of Lent and Easter where we ritually walk the "way of the cross," the rites of Advent and Christmas invite us to walk "the road to Bethlehem" and symbolically re-enact the truths of the nativity stories not as written and received records of a distant past, but as experiences made present to us today. We can assume, liturgically, mentally and symbolically, the roles of the many characters in these stories– standing in the cold wintery fields with the astonished shepherds, feeling the anguish of Joseph in the presumed infidelity of his engaged spouse and the wonder of a dream that reveals a miraculous and unbelievable alternative, following with the Magi behind the star to Bethlehem, escaping by the warning of a portentous dream the murderous intent of King Herod, and like Mary, pondering the "meaning of these things" "in our hearts.
In the early development of our English Prayerbook tradition, some of those with more Puritan attitudes objected to the inclusion of canticles such as that recorded in today's Gospel reading, which we know as the Magnificat or "Song of Mary," on the grounds that such texts were properly understood as being appropriate only to those historical persons who had "originally" uttered them. Their position was the same as that of many so-called evangelicals and fundamentalists today who insist that the only "true" understanding of these narratives is the literal acceptance of these texts as historical facts and "proofs" that thereby legitimate the proclamation of Jesus as Messiah and Lord. Fortunately for us, however, traditional practice prevailed, and the texts came down to us not merely in our Bible, but in our Prayerbook rites as well. When we sing the Magnificat in a ritual setting, we "assume the role" of Mary as she marvels at the "great things" that "the Almighty has done." We do not sing "Mary's soul proclaimed the greatness of the Lord," but "My soul proclaims (noting the use of the present tense) the greatness of the Lord." Taking on the persona of Mary, we affirm our own hope and trust in the rule of God in which the tyrant is made into a subject and the humble ones exalted to power, the hungry in spirit and flesh are fed and the prideful are brought low. The ritual and liturgical "making present" of the narratives of our faith tradition begins then to reveal levels of deeper understanding and leads us into a more profound form of "belief" ( as trust / confidence / commitment, rather than an intellectual assent to a collection of facts to be affirmed as "true") than any literal reading of these stories as events past could ever accomplish. Our use of these foundational stories and texts in liturgical settings becomes part of the larger "incarnational" character of our religious practice where the narrative is not just stuff from the "elsewhere past" but our narrative in the here and now. In theological terms, this is akin to the belief that the presence of God in Jesus the Christ is experienced as the presence of God/Christ in us and in the world today. (In the words of the apostle Paul, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.") We thus may engage in a special form of symbolical and liturgical "re - membering" in the Advent and Christmas narratives in a way similar to that in which we celebrate the Eucharist, as an "anamnesis" in Greek, or in approximate English equivalent a "re - presentation" of the narrative as a present and active reality, not just a fond recollection of things past.
This Christmas, once again then, I invite us to become like "little children" and "re-live" the stories of these birth narratives, and in this re-living, find ourselves transformed by the truths and messages that they incarnate in a symbolic and parabolic way. To close, I invite you particularly to look as you sing them this year for the many present tense and personal references that we find in even our more modern songs of the Christmas season, starting you off with a few examples here (my emphasis added):
"O Holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us we pray.
Cast out our sin, and enter in.
Be born in us today...."
"How far is it to Bethlehem? Not very far.
Shall we find the stable room lit by a star?
Can we see the little child, is he within?
If we lift the wooden latch, may we go in?"
"Yea, Lord, We greet thee, born this happy morning..."
Yes, Lord, we greet you, born this and every other happy morning into our lives by faith. Help us to get beyond the superficiality of misguided literalism, and lead us to truth that begins and ends only in life lived within and filled by you. Amen.
9This post originally was published in the Integrity @ Trinity weekly newsletter, The Sunday Roundup for 20 December 2009.
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