FINDINGS II
Christmas
- C - December 24, 25, 26, 27, 2009
Isaiah 9: 2-7; Luke 2: 1-20; John 1:
1-14
 By Harry T. Cook
12/21/09
RUBRIC
This week's FINDINGS II will gather up various scriptural
offerings for consideration into one essay as homilists and their consumers
will have at least three opportunities (Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and
Christmas I) to seek some reflection upon the themes of this major feast. This
exegete has chosen the three readings most likely to be selected from among the
several appointed in the RCL (Revised Common Lectionary) for use over the span
of the four days from the Eve to the First Sunday of Christmas -- the season
running across the span of 12 days as the partridge in the pear tree will have
by now reminded us innumerable times.
While profound theological reflection and philosophical
probing are not much appreciated in the church's observances around these feast
days, it wouldn't hurt for lay and clergy homilists to "do the work" as if they
were. To that end, a few remarks about three of the best known Christmas texts.
WORKSHOP
Isaiah 9: 2-7. Be
so kind as to treat this passage not as a foretelling of the birth of Jesus
but, if commented upon, in its context as the celebration of the accession of a
reforming king to the Davidic throne of Judea with all its oriental
superlatives describing him or expectations of him: "Wonderful," "Counselor,"
"Mighty God," "Everlasting Father" and "Prince of Peace." The king was probably
Hezekiah who, mindful of what had happened to the Northern Kingdom during the
fourteenth year of his reign, undertook to cleanse Judea of the kind of
syncretism that he and others believed had kindled Yahweh's angry, causing
Israel's downfall at the hands of Sennacherib. It almost happened to Jerusalem
itself. Lord Byron's unforgettable verse gives one an idea of how it was for as
many as 46 cities of the region and of how it might have been for Jerusalem
itself:
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the
sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee . . .
"The great light" may have been exaggerated praise of Hezekiah's
clever dealings with Sennacherib, which evidently spared the Holy City.
Hezekiah, a king, then, of messianic expectation and
perceived fulfillment, was seen to have caused a "great light" to shine upon those
who had theretofore walked in darkness of the lapsed.
The connection of any and all of this to Christmas and
Christ comes in Isaiah's words "the throne of David and his kingdom." Both Luke
and Matthew connected Jesus to the great David in the genealogy (Matthew 1:
1-16, Luke 2: 1-20) and placed the nativity in Bethlehem of Judea, the
legendary city of David.
But when Isaiah wrote, "For to us a child is born, to us a
son is given," the idea was that a whole new enterprise had begun with the
anointing (a symbol for new birth) of Hezekiah, who may have been for one
brief, shining moment the Davidic hope.
Those among nascent Christians who felt it necessary to make
some connection between the Jesus, the hero of their movement, and the
tradition out of which it came, appropriated for Jesus the superlatives
"Wonderful Counselor" (that is, source of all wisdom), "Mighty God" (that is,
exercising power in a divine way), "Everlasting Father" (that is, a kind and
beneficent parent) and "Prince of Peace."
Matthew and Luke took the hint, and spot-welded the words
describing the expectations laid on Hezekiah to the infant of their narratives,
and, helped along by the soaring music of G.F. Handel in "Messiah" (Part I, 3rd
chorus), turned Jesus into, among other things, Isaiah's "Prince of Peace."
Luke 2: 1-20. "And
there were in that same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch
over their flock by night." So goes the matchless King James Version of the
passage at hand. Next to those of the late Charles Laughton or Richard Burton,
perhaps the best recitation of it was left to Charles Schulz's character Linus
in the Peanuts Christmas pageant.
The homilist would be stoned -- and no doubt justifiably --
if he or she were to perform an exegetical exercise on this passage during a
Christmas Eve liturgy. Suffice it here to say that Luke attempted to place the
mythical birth of a messiah in an actual context: The reference to one Cyrenius
(Quirinius) and a census of which magnitude ("all the world") there is no
historical record, though such "registrations," according to Suetonius, were
conducted on limited regional bases ca. 28 and 8 B.C.E and again around 14 C.E.
The rest flows directly out of one of the most inspired
imaginations represented among early Christian writers. The KJV text read with
feeling by a professional does it justice. But maybe the Rutter setting of
Christina Rossetti's verse does it proudest:
In the bleak
midwinter
Frosty wind made moan
Earth stood
Hard as iron
Water like a stone
Snow had fallen
Snow on snow
In the bleak midwinter
Long ago.
John 1: 1-14. Here, like it or not, is the
theological ground-zero of orthodox Christianity -- here and in the
resurrection narratives. Elaine Pagels points out in her excellent 2003 book Beyond
Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas that the church very early on chose
the fourth gospel and its theology -- especially its theology of incarnation
-- as its intellectual charter. Thus the gospel reading at hand cannot be
avoided. It has become known textually as "the prologue" and liturgically in
the low Tridentine Roman and Anglo-Catholic masses as "the Last Gospel." It may
have snatches in it of a poetic hymn the origins of which are unknown. There
are some who think the prologue may be a translation of an Aramaic text.
The
extant Greek text, however, is redolent of Hellenistic thought. The use of
several potent Greek terms: "logos" (elan), "zōay" (life), "skotia" (darkness),
"phōs" (light), "kosmos" (world), "sarx" (flesh), "charis" (grace) and
"alaythaya" (disclosure) tells us that the author(s) or editor(s) of this
gospel was/were deeply affected by Greek thought and decided to cast his/their
account in terms and forms that would be accessible to Greek-speaking and Greek-thinking
Gentiles.
While
the "in the beginning" (en archay) is reminiscent of Genesis 1:1 (bayrashith),
John doesn't mean "at the inception" but "before the beginning of time" or
"during the formation of what would become time (and space)." "Logos," which
Rudolf Bultmann called "creative potency" and Paul Tillich called "the Ground
and Source of Being," was part and parcel of that pre-time so much so that its
potency was seen as the agent of all being (v. 3) -- the source and impetus of
the entirety.
In
"logos" was "zōay," i.e., psychic and material existence. That life was "phōs"
(light), revealing the divine design and purpose. Arrayed against it is
"skotia" (darkness or gloom), but it is unsuccessful in its attempt to extinguish
or efface the "phōs."
In
due course, John has "logos" become "sarx," so creating a "doxa" (glory or
positive public image) which he took to be a plenitude of grace and the final unveiling
of the mysteries of creation and redemption.
Go
ahead. Put all that into a five-minute homily on Christmas Eve. You will not be
heard.
HOMILETIC COMMENTARY
The homiletic task for Christmas Eve or Day is monumental
because in liturgically oriented churches the "thing" is the liturgy, with its
music and vestments and holiday array of greens, gilt and garland. From almost
a half-century of parish experience I can say that people who come to church on
Christmas (Eve or Day) come with full (or empty) hearts and with not much wish
for or expectation of intellectual engagement.
A decent bet would be to say that, in its biblical aspect,
Christmas is about human beings in their totality -- reduced, for a moment in
time, to a baby -- that is, to the point at which life begins for anyone. To
one degree or another, a baby is John Locke's "tabula rasa," and will become a
combination of the outgrowth of his or her genetic heritage and the environment
in which he or she is reared. A baby can become a person such as the Jesuses variously
depicted in the canonical gospels. A baby may become some one like John the
Baptist, or like Herod or like Pontius Pilate or like the Prodigal Son or the
Good Samaritan or Judas Iscariot.
Christmas can be a time to assess how one's words and
actions affect others inasmuch as lives are constantly in formation around us,
and surely we would rather write upon the tabula rasa of any life forming in
our presence such things as will help make that life as full of grace and truth
as is possible.
FOOTNOTE
Another aspect of Christmas having nothing to do with the
biblical readings is a thing called "nostalgia" -- from the Greek, meaning "nostos,"
"back" or "return" and "algos," meaning "pain." Thomas Wolfe's fourth and final
novel is entitled You Can't Go Home Again, but of course he did and so do we all,
or think we do. H.G. Wells to the contrary notwithstanding, time machines do
not exist. If, however, by some astonishment of astrophysics one could be
transported at more than the speed of light, it is theoretically possible that one
could see and be part of the past - thus having not only gone home again but to
home as it was.
For reasons that are best left to the psychiatric
profession, Christmas is, in fact, a time of nostalgia, and the older one gets
the more nostalgic he or she is likely to become. I confess it myself. Homilists
might take note of the phenomenon and suggest that "the Christmas story" is
about beginnings rather than endings, about the present pointing to a future
rather than about the past. The idea is to help make a world that will be even
better than the one we "remember" from former days.
My mother, dead these 56 years, used to say that the
Christmases of her adult life were what she had always hoped for in her
childhood that was spent in the grip of the Great Depression with all of its
attendant woes and deprivations.
| |
