December 30, 2007
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See also: [2001]
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Isaiah 63:7-9
Psalm 148
Hebrews 2:10-18
Matthew 2:13-23
Isaiah 63:7-9
These verses are a hymn of praise to God for God’s mercy in times past. In their original context they are the opening stanza of a longer prayer; verse 10 turns attention to the people’s rebellion against God; verses 11-14 remember how God inspired Moses to lead the people “through the depths”; and verses 15-19 beg God to lead the people in that way again, to “un-harden” their hearts, and to rule over them once more. Thus the initial praise to God is not only about mercy in times past, but is the statement of faith that provides a foundation for asking God’s continuing mercy in the present. Assigned to the Christian lectionary for the First Sunday after Christmas, the verses invite Christians to praise God for divine mercy shown in the birth of Jesus in the past; but they are not only about the past; they also invite Christians to pray for God’s mercy made actual through the “field of force” initiated in the life and ministry of Jesus and continuing into today. Verse 9 includes a translation dilemma, and this can affect the preacher’s options. In the NRSV translation, the verse reads “It was no messenger or angel but his presence that saved them”; the NRSV marginal note (and some other versions, e.g. the NIV) give the alternate reading “In all their distress he was distressed; the angel of his presence saved them.” Either reading can give rise to some interesting process reflections. The alternate reading states that God is distressed when God’s beloved are distressed. This provides a picture of a God intimately and feelingly related to God’s creation; it is in direct opposition to the classical theistic picture of an impassible and unmoved God who feels no emotion even though divine actions may appear compassionate to human recipients (as in Anselm). The primary reading, that God’s salvation is manifested in “no messenger or angel but his presence,” stresses God’s real and personal involvement, rather than involvement-by-proxy, as it were, in saving action. For the Christian interpreter this invites reflection on the doctrine of the Incarnation, the affirmation of actual divine presence in the human life and ministry of Jesus. The saving significance of Jesus is not simply in the message he proclaimed or the divinity he revealed; the saving significance of Jesus is in the active presence of God in and through him, a presence into which he invites the faithful to come be present to God themselves. Process theology has always tended to see the Incarnation as not uniquely limited to Jesus; every actual occasion, to the extent it embodies an initial aim from God, is to that extent an incarnation of the Word. What is unique about the Incarnation of the Word in Jesus is not its metaphysical status, but the intensity, intimacy, and intentionality which which Jesus received and actualized in his human occasions the divine aims of God’s saving love. Thus the prophet’s recognition of God’s presence, not merely God’s messenger or angel, in the history of salvation serves to enhance, not to diminish, the recognition of God’s saving presence in the humanity of Jesus. More than that, it encourages the Christian believer today to recognize God’s real presence in contemporary acts of prayer, liturgy, community, and justice. Therefore the celebration of Christmas is not only about a birth two thousand years ago; it is about God’s mercy and love made present today.
Psalm 148
The psalm picks up on the opening theme of praise from the Isaiah verses; but where the prophet praises God for saving the house of Israel, the psalmist depicts praise as the work of the entire creation. Psalm 148 can be pictured almost as a series of concentric circles, from the cosmic and supra-cosmic at the circumference to the community of the faithful at the center, each circle inhabited by its appropriate order of creatures, and each circle singing its appropriate part in the universal chorus of praise. Heavens, heights, angels, sun, moon inhabit the outermost circles; earth, depths, sea monsters are a little close to home, yet still at the fringes of human experience (as much today as in the mindset of ancient Hebrews!); mountains, hills, forests, wild animals, fruit orchards, domesticated animals form the immediate environment of human habitation; kings, peoples, rulers, old and young fill the human world; and at the center of the human world are the faithful, the people close to God. All these circles of creation are called to “praise the name of the LORD, for his name alone is exalted; his glory is above earth and heaven.” The psalm is a wonderful picture of the cosmos in any interpretive context; set in the context of Christmas, it suggests the universality of the cosmic Christ, the One in whom all things hold together and through whom all things are being brought to their completeness. I heard someone remark not long ago that the favorite Christmas carol “Hark the herald angels sing” was originally written by Charles Wesley to read “Hark how all the welkin rings”; while it may be true that the altered words are more fun to sing, the original words resonate with the same spirit as Psalm 148. The entire “welkin,” the entire sky and heavens, ring with the chorus of praise that embraces all creatures in their joy that the Creator has entered into creaturehood with them for the salvation of all.
Hebrews 2:10-18
The Epistle lesson for this day stresses that Jesus “shares flesh and blood” in order to “become like his brothers and sisters in every respect”—in other words, that Jesus is fully human and shares fully in the conditions of human life. At the very beginning of the Letter to the Hebrews, the author states that Jesus is fully divine: “long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word.” The Letter to the Hebrews, like the Gospel of John, asserts that the divine Son preexists the human Jesus, and that the revelation in Jesus is therefore a revelation of the true God, not a mere representation or, as the Isaiah passage says, a messenger or angel. But for all this high Christology, Hebrews also asserts the full humanity of Jesus, that in Jesus the divine Son is living a fully human life. The salvation offered in Jesus is therefore not a kind of “heavenly rescue operation,” in which human beings are passive recipients of divine action, but is the establishing of a new relationship in which divine and human act together to overcome the “slavery” in which people are held by “the fear of death.” In the context of Christmas and the celebration of the Incarnation, this assertion of the full humanity of Jesus keeps us mindful of our stake in the mystery: because he is fully human, Jesus is also “able to help” us in our fully human lives, as we struggle to realize in our actual occasions divine aims for justice, peace, compassion, and communion. The filial relationship with God revealed in Jesus and celebrated at Christmas is not confined to Jesus, but through Jesus is opened up to all. In the Christmas season, when so much attention is directed to the narratives of the Nativity, it is helpful to be reminded of “the rest of the story” and the larger, even cosmic, significance of the full Christ-event initiated in this birth.
Matthew 2:13-23
This Gospel passage presents multiple challenges for the contemporary interpreter, mostly having to do with the questionable historicity of the events Matthew narrates, and the use Matthew makes of isolated verses from the First Testament in his construction of the story of Jesus’ infancy and childhood. Those who are interested in recovering the historical Jesus would tend to dismiss the Flight into Egypt, the Slaughter of the Innocents, and the Return to Nazareth as fanciful, and therefore having little genuine value in coming to know Jesus as he really was. Those who are uncomfortable with a Christian tendency to appropriate Hebrew Scripture texts and treat them as if their “real” meaning was to point to Jesus, and that their Jesus-meaning therefore supersedes any meaning they might have in a Jewish context, would tend to cringe at Matthew’s repeated formula “this was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet...” But for all the challenges these episodes present, they still retain a certain power in the sweep of Matthew’s storytelling. One of Matthew’s ongoing motifs throughout the Gospel is to present Jesus as a new Moses, mediating a new Covenant. The brief episodes in this passage echo, though they certainly do not copy, episodes in the life of Moses: as Moses’ birth was threatened by the decree of Pharaoh that Hebrew boys should be killed, so Jesus’ birth is threatened by Herod’s murderous order; as Moses was separated from his people and raised among Egyptians, so Jesus was separated from his people and raised in Egypt; as Moses returned to the land of promise but did not dwell in it, so Jesus returned to Judea but did not stay there, moving instead to Nazareth in Galilee. These correspondences are not exact, of course, and there is no sense in which Matthew is saying that the typology of Moses’ life is “fulfilled” and “superseded” in the antitype of Jesus’ life. Instead, a less direct, more suggestive kind of correspondence is at work here, a broader assertion that, as God was at work in Moses, so also (and more so) is God at work in Jesus. The child Jesus recapitulates in his development the way taken by Moses—indeed, the way of threat, sojourn in exile, and return to a new home experienced by his people in both Egypt and Babylon—in order that Jesus may be a true representative of the people in mediating a new Covenant (not a supersessionist one—it is Matthew’s Jesus who says not one stroke or iota of the Law will pass away) and establishing a deeper filial relationship with God. The case is similar with the verses Matthew cites as “fulfilled” in Jesus. “Out of Egypt I have called my son,” quoted from Hosea 11:1, is a reference to the Exodus. “Rachel weeping for her children,” quoted from Jeremiah 31:15, is a reference to the destruction and exile of the northern tribes at the hands of the Assyrians, and is followed immediately in verse 16 with an assurance of the “children’s” return. “He shall be called a Nazorean” may not even be a direct quote, but a pun on the Aramaic pronunciation of the word for “branch” used in Isaiah 11:1, “a branch shall grow out of Jesse’s roots.” None of these verses constitutes a “prediction” of some definite event “fulfilled” in what happens to the child Jesus. We should not expect of Matthew a kind of modern, Western one-to-one correspondence of statement and fact. Instead, these verses function for Matthew as “propositions” in Whitehead’s sense of the word: feelings of the possibility of connection between eternal objects and actual occasions, suggestions of a way things might be. In their original contexts these verses suggest how God acts to save the faithful people from suffering; Matthew sees this divine saving action as recapitulated and deepened—made fuller, “fulfilled”—in Jesus. It is therefore important for Matthew to depict Jesus as going through similar representative cycles of suffering and salvation; the episodes are not historical but symbolic. In these infancy and childhood stories, Matthew uses prophecy not as prediction, but as the elucidation of patterns in God’s saving action, patterns which are enacted and re-enacted with both continuity and novelty in new actualities. These patterns, which Christians see exemplified definitively in Jesus, are not limited to Jesus: they are enacted and re-enacted in the history of Israel and in our lives today. Therefore, because the saving work of Jesus is mediated through the symbols of the Flight into Egypt, the Slaughter of the Innocents, and the Return to Nazareth, he can truly be Emmanuel, God-with-us, in our contemporary struggles with dislocation and exile, our resistance to the murderous destructiveness of empires and despots, our efforts to create places and communities and ecosystems where we can truly make a home.
Paul Nancarrow is rector of of St. George's Episcopal Church, St. Louis Park, MN, and canon theologian for the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota. He is a regular contributor to Creative Transformation and co-author of The Call of the Spirit: Process Spirituality in a Relational World.
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