Christmas #2

Here is the second of three Christmas Bible studies - this one focusing on Luke's Gospel....

12/10/09

Luke’s nativity has a different atmosphere than Matthew’s. Luke is the author of the classic nativity story - the shepherds, the stable, the manger. He is the master of spin – presenting a story that would be recognizable and acceptable to a predominantly Greek and Roman audience while hanging on to the key gospel elements.

Luke begins in Chapter 1:1-4 with a formal introduction similar to others of the day. There were no publishers in the ancient world – instead there were patrons. Writers would dedicate their manuscript to an important person who would then distribute it. Luke’s Gospel has this same style – it opens with an introduction to “Theophilus” which means “lover of God”. The name may indicate that this is not a real person but symbolic of the emerging Christian community. Luke is using an accepted and easily recognizable opening to ease his audience into the narrative. He is pitching his story to the educated cultured people of his time to communicate the story of Jesus in a way that they will embrace.

Luke’s Gospel is about political and social transformation. His focus is transforming the human space. It is arguably the most human of the Gospels and is sometimes considered the Gospel of the Catholic Church. It roots Christianity in recognizable human society. Luke places itself in the age of the gentiles – looking to a time when the gospel is communicated through the whole world.

The nativity narrative begins with the temple –with Zechariah and Elizabeth, privileged priestly figures. They bring to mind authority and holiness and immediately set the reader at ease. They are easily recognizable (every culture has temple figures) but Luke links them to Old Testament themes. He repeats motifs from the Old Testament – in particular the stories of Abraham and Sarah and of Hannah and Samuel. These are stories of barren women living in a time when motherhood gave women status and value. Elizabeth’s story fits with this archetype. Her experience (LK1:24) is the same – the childless woman rescued by God.

Luke intertwines the stories of Elizabeth and Mary in 1:26-80. Elizabeth overcoming adversity cues the reader to expect something similar with Mary. Zechariah and Elizabeth are totally legitimate characters (they come from the house of Aaron who was Moses’ right hand man). Intertwining their story with Mary’s gives her credibility and acceptability. The text does not give any background to Mary – her parentage and lineage. She is identified as a relative of Elizabeth’s, but this is unspecified. It is Joseph who can claim the house of David. St. Anne and St Joachim were later identified as Mary’s parents – but this is a tradition from the second century and is not scripturally based. There is a murkiness to Mary’s story and background. Luke builds her up. He portrays Mary’s story as even more amazing than Elizabeth’s– birth by virgin trumps that by old woman!

Unlike Matthew’s nativity, there is no element of scandal attached to Mary in Luke’s narrative. She explicitly states literally “I do not know man” which is translated as “I am a virgin”. Here an angel addresses her as “the favored one” – if anything her prestige goes up. Luke transforms the irregularity of Jesus’ conception into something beautiful and mysterious. Luke’s account of the miraculous conception has elements of both the Greek and Jewish. Nietzsche said that the story is reminiscent of the Greek Gods, such as Zeus, who impregnated mortal women in the guise of a swan, a bull and a shower of gold. Other scholars disagree – in the Lukan account there is nothing explicitly physical – it does not make sense for God to be supplying the y-chromosome. There is also no trickery involved. It involves the consent of Mary. The touch of God is so light and mysterious echoing the movement of the Spirit over the waters at the dawn of creation.
Mary achieves enormous status in Luke. Joseph, so important in Matthew, is a tangential figure in Luke. In Luke’s Gospel it is all about Mary. More than any of the other Gospels, Luke boosts the role of women and shows a concern for women’s issues. He gives Mary a voice – and she proclaims a knockout hymn of praise – the Magnificat (V46-56). Mary’s Magnificat repeats some of the words of Hannah (the mother of Samuel) in 1Samuel 2. The theme of the Magnificat is reversal – the powerful will be dethroned, the lowly lifted up. Mary gets to be the voice of the overturning of the world order. It encapsulates the social reversal that Luke is all about. Luke has set the stage so that by the time Mary makes her revolutionary proclamation you are totally on her side. While Matthew’s nativity story addresses and counters the violence of Herod and worldly power; Luke is about overcoming inequality. This message is reinforced by the story of the shepherds.

Chapter 2:1-20 is the account of Jesus’ birth. The census places Jesus not just in Herod’s Palestine, but in the context of the whole Roman Empire and points to Augustus Caesar as the most powerful person in the known civilized world. Historically there is no record of this particular census. Others took place but not at this specific time. Luke uses the device of the census to connect Jesus to the historical, political world of his time. The contrast is stark - the savior of the world lying in a manger because of the dictates of the worldly emperor. Jesus is born in a byre with the animals, placed in an animal’s feeding trough. His birth is recognized and celebrated by shepherds. The symbolism is strong – of Jesus as the good shepherd, the sacrificial lamb, as the bread of life. But shepherds were also poor, landless people, living on the mountainside like gypsies. They were people remote from culture, living outside the system and its taxation. Yet it is to shepherds that the angels appear. Traditionally it is the temple where you meet God, where God is revealed – Zechariah’s place. In Luke’s story the heavens open and God is revealed in a field to the forgotten and marginalized. If God is in the feeding trough then the temple becomes redundant. Ultimately it is a revolutionary and challenging message that offers hope, presenting the possibility of a different world.