Lowly IS Holy
As a hospital chaplain, I am occasionally gifted with religious-themed presents from patients or staff. Despite my ambivalence about angels, for example, a huge host of winged creatures are elbowing each other off of my bookshelf. And this year, a kind and generous colleague gave me a serene nativity display, set inside a snow globe lantern that lights up and swirls glittering snow and plays beautiful music.
Most of our depictions of the night of Jesus’ birth create an image of complete tranquility: a calm, bright, silent night. But that doesn’t really fit the birthing process, does it?
Giving birth, as the poet just reminded us, is a bloody, sweaty, tearful business. If you put that process in a barn, we are about as humble and earthy as it gets: exposure to the elements, tangled up in spider webs, swatting at flies, picking straw out of your hair, and of course the excrement odors.
I love this earthiness of the nativity story. Not because it actually happened that way, but because it tells us something important about our faith—that Jesus was a human being. An earthy, sniveling, pooping, wailing, curious, creature just like all the rest of us.
Christian theologians since at least the third century have held councils and written treatises and deposed and excommunicated each other over how and when Jesus became both human and divine. Divine spirit in a human body? Conceived by God? Adopted by God – at birth or baptism? Exactly the same as God, but in a different form? A little less divine than God? Three-in-one or One-in-three? 50/50 divine/human split? 100% divine AND 100% human? I’m really not sure how the math adds up on all this.
Despite these scholarly debates, the last 2,000 years of Christian preaching has mostly emphasized the divinity of Jesus, to the exclusion of his humanity, and in striking contrast to our own humble, stumbling human foibles. Only in recent years, with the help of progressive scholars and the Jesus Seminar, have some forward-thinking Christians begun to reclaim the humanity of Jesus. A human Jesus who cried out in pain and who felt remorse and joy and hope and depression is way more relatable to my 21st century sensibilities than the claims that Jesus walked on water and raised the dead. And a human Jesus who preached a message of radical love and overturning the oppressive empire—now that is someone I can get behind!
I wonder, on this Christmas Eve, what it would be like to give Jesus his humanity back, and to claim a bit more divinity for ourselves? That dualistic either-or thinking is damaging, and leaves all of us short-changed.
And besides, isn’t every birth a miracle, whether it’s attended by a midwife, a board certified OBGYN, or some sheep and a donkey? Every life is sacred. A wonder. A miracle.
Most of us can’t remember our first days as newborns. So we have to get creative to take the baby’s perspective in this Advent/Christmas series. Based on what we now know about babies, the newborn Jesus likely could focus his vision only about 8-10 inches away. But he could see colors, likely preferred moving objects, had a keen sense of smell and fully developed hearing; and showed strong opinions about tastes. He was even likely able to process information and store it for later use. We know that infants can differentiate their tiny bodies from the rest of the world. That’s not to mention a newborn’s capacity for a wide range of emotions, including pain, joy, disgust, interest, and anger. They express these emotions with their whole bodies—flailing about, clenching fists, squeezing their eyes shut, wailing, tensing – or relaxing and snuggling and cooing.
Despite all this capacity to perceive, express, and understand, infants also are utterly helplessness and vulnerable. Jesus would have been just as vulnerable as the rest of us—completely dependent on loving and attentive caregivers in order to survive for even a day… much less the 15-20 years it takes most of us to be able to fully care for ourselves. That’s why seeing or holding very young babies moves us with awe and reminds us of how fragile and tender—and beautiful—our human existence is.
Given all that could go wrong in the complexities of pregnancy and childbirth, every one is a miracle. Given all the intricacies of our anatomical systems and our interdependence on microbiomes within us, sustaining life is phenomenal. And based on the societal harm that we humans perpetually cause to each other and to Earth, to live well and to live into older age is astounding. So we remain in awe when a baby is healthy. And we recognize life’s fragility.
Of course, it’s not likely that Jesus was actually born in a barn, and if we accept the humanity of Jesus, we likely also recognize that miracles like the virgin birth were literary devices used during ancient times to say “something special happened here,” or “this person is unique and amazing! Pay attention!” Virgin births were actually a dime a dozen in ancient stories, from China and Egypt to Greek and Roman mythology. And it was well known that biographies written during these times tended to use fictional elements to convey certain truths—truths that no readers would take as factual. To me, that makes the choice of birth in a barn even more astonishing. These authors could have chosen Herod’s palace for Jesus’ birth. Or perhaps Mary could have delivered him on a winged chariot in the sky. Or maybe Jesus could have been born at some Middle Eastern version of Stonehenge, at sunrise on the summer solstice. But no. This gospel records the first cries of “the savior of the world” to have taken place in a lowly shed.
Luke’s Gospel, like most of the rest of the New Testament, was written within the first century after Jesus’ death. Being a product of their time, these authors used “midrash,” a Jewish teaching tool like a parable. Midrash often employs supernatural or incredulous stories to make a symbolic point. Luke and Matthew, the two Gospels that contain the birth narratives for Jesus, are written from very different perspectives. And they contradicted each other. But they both employed midrash to make important points about who they understood Jesus to be. Jewish listeners would have been very familiar with this technique; but by the end of the first century, Christianity was mostly embraced by non-Jews, and the symbolism has been taken literally ever since.
For Matthew, Jesus was the King of the Jews, so Matthew traced Jesus’ ancestry back through the kings of Judah. Matthew also has foreign kings show up to worship Jesus, to reiterate his royalty. In Matthew it’s Joseph who receives the dreams and visions and angel visits.
Luke’s gospel is geared toward Gentiles, and is focused on God’s compassion toward and identification with the marginalized of society. This is the social justice gospel, and that’s why for Luke, the girl, Mary, is the one visited by the angels, and the news of Jesus’ birth was announced not to well-dressed or fake-bearded magi, but to “certain poor shepherds” in their bathrobes or out in the fields—the lowliest of the low.
There’s another super-earthy aspect of the nativity stories that rarely gets mentioned: Matthew and Luke offer different genealogies for Jesus. Having done my stint on ancestry.com, I can see how this might happen. But anyway, while Matthew emphasizes all the kings in Jesus’s lineage, Luke, who sees Jesus as an anointed social prophet, traces Jesus back through prophets who spoke truth to power. And while Matthew went back to Abraham, the father of the Jewish faith, Luke goes back to Adam, the father of all humanity, hinting that the good news of Jesus’ birth was not just for Jews, but for everybody. It’s so interesting to me that both of them traced the lineage of Joseph, when presumably he was the adoptive father, not the blood line to Jesus. ?? I guess it would have been a step too far to try to trace Mary’s ancestry, since most women weren’t even mentioned in these ways.
But even as I say this, if you look closely at Matthew’s genealogy, there are some women in there … actually some very colorful women.
Theologian Bishop John Spong offers a unique take on this. Spong notes that in the gospel of Mark, people referred to Jesus as the “son of Mary.” In Jewish tradition, men were exclusively referred to by their father’s name. So using Jesus’s mother’s name was likely a slur, indicating Jesus had no father, and was therefore illegitimate. According to Spong, Matthew responded to this insult—and fixed the problem—by claiming Jesus was not the son of Mary or the son of Joseph, but the “son of God.” Then it is possible that Matthew invented the virgin birth to support that claim.
But Matthew also hedged his bets. Even if he couldn’t prove, or no one would believe, that Jesus was actually, factually God’s son, Spong says Matthew took the radical approach of including four scandalous women in Jesus’ genealogy. Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathseba—seductresses and spies and adulteresses who were forced into untenable situations in order to survive. This is likely Matthew’s finest feminist moment—to trace Jesus’ lineage through four infamous women as if to say “even women, who were disregarded and forced into degrading lives, can produce something holy.” Do you hear the revolutionary message here? If these outrageous women could be part of Jesus’s lineage, right there alongside those kings and prophets, what kind of amazing feats can we do? Can you do?
I am reminded about the great Oglala Lakota warrier Black Elk, who is noted to have said, “I am not sure that it happened this way or not, but I know that this story is true.”
I’m pretty sure Jesus wasn’t born in a cattle stall in Bethlehem. But I know that marginalized people are rising up as prophets among us, and we need to listen.
I don’t believe Jesus was born to a virgin. Perhaps Mary was raped by the occupying forces, or was victim to some other crisis, or maybe she had a normal wedding to Joseph before she ever got pregnant. But regardless of how that happened, I know that women throughout history who have been beaten down by a patriarchal society still find their voice and choose to show up and take risks and go against the grain and make a difference, even when the odds are against them.
I don’t have any idea whether any animals witnessed Jesus’ arrival in the world. But I imagine humanity’s older siblings – the endangered species of the sea and the air and the forests and the plains and the jungles -- are praying desperately that some human’s birth will signal a change to humanity’s self-serving, extravagant and lethal behavior that is killing Earth and her creatures.
I DO believe that Jesus was born in a Palestine that was occupied by foreign oppressors. And how tragic that we continue to stand by and watch, or turn away and pretend it isn’t happening, while that same land is today occupied by invaders who have killed 8,000 innocent children. And how tragic that we haven’t even owned up to our own genocidal and racist history in the U.S. Still, if Jesus could grow up in an occupied territory and find his voice to speak truth to power, perhaps there is hope for all of us.
As I alluded to earlier, I’m not much of a believer in angels. But isn’t it possible that every time a new child is born, heaven and earth sing for joy that humanity has a chance to make things right? An innocence accompanies a newborn child who has never been shamed or ridiculed or marginalized, and who has never uttered a hateful word or said something they regret. There is a hope about this radical act of a new life coming into the world—something like a fresh snowfall, giving the world a new opportunity to get things right.
And if Jesus were human, then we humans have just as much responsibility and maybe nearly as much capacity to create change and cultivate compassion and work for peace and justice. To love kindness and do justice and walk humbly on this earth.
Even without the angels and foreign dignitaries and virgin births, I imagine Jesus would have gone right ahead anyway and listened to his heart and confronted the injustices in the world he just couldn’t stomach. He probably had to overcome the ridicule people hurled at him for being different. He must have found his inner hutzpah to take unpopular stands and share his best insights and epiphanies with anyone who would listen. Maybe he would even have been willing to die for his beliefs. To me, accenting Jesus’ humanity makes him more real, more holy, and more powerful. If he were a divine magician who could do anything, why did suffering continue for 2,000 years after his life here was over? But if he were a mere mortal, and still made the kind of impact he did, what does that say about him? And even more importantly, what does that say about us?
A meme on FaceBook attributed to Imtiaz Mahmood says this:
“Hindus have been waiting for Kalki for 3,700 years.
Buddhists have been waiting for Maitreya for 2,600 years. …
Jews have been waiting for the Messiah for 2,500 years.
Christians have been waiting for Jesus to return for 2,000 years.
Muslims have been waiting for a Messiah from the line of Muhammad for 1,300 years. …
Most of these groups embrace the idea of a "savior" and claim that the world will remain… wicked… until the savior comes and fills it with goodness and justice. Maybe our problem on this planet is that people are waiting for someone else to come and solve their problems, rather than doing it themselves.”
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What if we decided to do it ourselves?
Because God is one of us.
Because lowly IS already holy.
Because Christmas is not just about a baby in a bed of hay; it’s about the new life, new vision, new courage being formed in you and me. Right now.
