The Book of Common Prayer includes some quaint phrases, and a memorable one appears in the Collect for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity. In that prayer we invoke God as our guide, that we may “so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal”.
That prayer could apply to everything from our life-long passages from cradle to grave, to the occasional personal challenges we encounter along the way. But at this moment I am applying it to the prospect of us navigating our way as people of faith through another overwhelmingly secular Christmas season.
Oh, when I say that, please do not react impulsively by hanging the pejorative ‘Scrooge’ around my neck like a dead albatross. I don’t dismiss Christmas as humbug at all! On the contrary! But I confess it does disappoint me is to see pivotal elements of our faith celebration swept away like so much flotsam by the yuletide tsunami. It saddens me when teachings that are central to our faith are trivialized or even mocked by people who simply do not understand them. Our doctrines of the Incarnation and of the Virgin Birth are both subject to critique during the festive season, but it is the virgin birth one that is most likely to be used as fodder for the joke mill on late-night talk shows.
What can I say? Well, let me share a secret with you on the condition you don’t tell anyone else lest I become a laughingstock. It is that I really do believe what the doctrine of the Virgin Birth affirms. It isn’t a difficult thing to believe. I do not cross my fingers behind my back when I recite the Creed!
You remember those coffee mugs that say, “I know you think you understand what you thought I might have said, but what you don’t know is that what you think you heard is not what I meant” … well, something like that. In this case, the difficulty people have with the Doctrine of the Virgin Birth is that they cannot subscribe to what they THINK it’s saying. But it’s not saying that. The doctrine is NOT a gynaecological statement about Mary. It IS a theological statement about Jesus.
All doctrines strive to represent faithfully what the people who knew Jesus in the flesh perceived to be true about him. The Virgin Birth doctrine is no exception. People knew Jesus to be a phenomenal person with unassailable integrity, a profound spirituality, an unnerving wisdom, and a confounding personal authority. They were convinced that to meet him was to have a close encounter of the Divine Kind. Yet they also knew him to be genuinely and unequivocally human. The residents of Nazareth recognized him as one of their home-town boys, and the Romans knew him to be killable. So in a word, his supporters and enemies alike regarded him as being utterly ‘unique’. He was far more than your average Jewish youngster who graduates Summa Cum Laude from Synagogue School and goes on to greatness. They could not account for him simply as somebody’s natural born child.
Accordingly, they concluded that Jesus’ coming into the world must have been a ‘God event’. And that is what the Doctrine of the Virgin Birth affirms.
The eyewitnesses to Jesus’ ministry tried to find an adequate way of saying that. Was he “a man attested by God” (Acts 2: 22)? Was he the eternal Word of God who “became flesh and lived among us” (John 1: 14)? Was he “The reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being (Hebrews 1:3)? Was it a matter of God being “in Christ” reconciling the world to himself (2 Corinthians 5: 19)? Those were all valiant attempts, but none of them is adequate.
The firm conviction that Jesus’ coming into the world was a dramatic ‘God event’ was supported by something Moses said ages earlier. “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own” (Deuteronomy 18: 15). And that promise, in turn, seemed to be supported by other subsequent prophetic utterances. One in particular seemed to attract attention. Isaiah said, “The Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel (Isaiah 7: 14).
There are two things to note about this passage.
The first is that we have no way of knowing if this was something about which Isaiah had truly been given privileged foreknowledge, or if he was referring to a young woman of his own time. The early Church seemed satisfied it did, at least, underscore an aspect of God’s Modus Operandi.
The second matter is a translation issue. The passage has undergone two translations; from Hebrew into Greek, and then from Greek into English. The familiar King James Version translates the passage as ‘virgin’, but in most contemporary translations she is simply a ‘young woman’.
Both translations are correct.
The critical Greek word is ‘parthenos’. In the case of ‘the Parthenon’, that ancient Temple to the Virgin Goddess Athena in Athens, it did specify ‘a young woman who is not sexually active’. But in general parlance it simply meant ‘a young woman’. In ancient Hebrew and Greek cultures, it was safe to assume unmarried young women were virgins.
Within the first three Christian generations, it does appear that Christian piety was beginning to lean toward the specifically ‘not sexually active’ meaning of the word. St. Luke appears to give that trend a tentative nod in his Gospel (1: 34 – 35). But in his version of Jesus’ genealogy (3: 23-38) he traces Jesus’ lineage back through Joseph. Moreover, Luke grants Mary herself the distinction of being the first person ever to challenge the notion of a ‘virgin birth’ by asking the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” (Luke 1: 34).
Matthew also, in his genealogy (1: 1- 17), traces Jesus’ lineage back through Joseph.
So, all things considered, those who witnessed Jesus’ ministry, the Gospel writers who relied upon their testimony, and the early Church theologians, all insist that the normal process of human reproduction does not account for the whole truth about Jesus. If they had been doing the Math, they would have rejected outright the proposition that “Joseph + Mary = Jesus”. Instead, they would have insisted that God be included as an intimate factor in the Messianic equation. Perhaps they would have designated Joseph and Mary as one factor, and God as the other, as in “(Joseph + Mary) X God = Jesus”. By so doing, they would also have satisfied our 21st century awareness that for Jesus to be authentically human he must have had DNA from two parents.
Thus, for me, Christmas is both a devotional-right-brained / academic-left-brained proposition. It enables me to honor the Virgin who humbly consented to be the ‘Theotokos’, the ‘God Bearer’, even as I celebrate the birth of the authentically human incarnate Son of God. In that way, with the guidance of God, I try to pass through the temporal phenomenon of Christmas without forfeiting the eternal truth.
Dale