Episcopal Church of the
Incarnation
The Fourth Sunday of Advent (A)
Isaiah
7.10-16 Psalm
80.1-7, 16-18 Romans 1.1-7 Matthew 1.18-25
May the Lord be in my mind, on my lips, and in my heart, that
I may rightly and truly proclaim His holy Word. Amen.
“Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah
took place this way.” That’s how Matthew
begins the Christmas story. He describes this after describing the
descent of Jesus in the flesh from Abraham.
He notes that Mary is a virgin, but unlike Luke makes no mention of an
angel announcing to her that she is to bear Jesus. Mark
and John don’t even mention Jesus’ birth. Matthew and Luke tell us that Mary is a
virgin, but Matthew makes a point about this; that this is in fulfillment of a
prophecy of Isaiah, that a virgin shall conceive and bear a son.
The fact of the matter is that the
gospels each bear witness to Jesus a little bit differently. Skeptics cite these differences as evidence
that Scripture is made up, is legend, and of
human origin only. Those who
question Scripture like to point to differences in the gospels with a sort of an “Ah hah!,” like they have
somehow proven something; like they have proven that the message has somehow
been managed. That’s a pretty popular
theme in our culture today, that the Church has manipulated the evidence and
managed the truth, and if we can just get back to what really happened
then we can get on with our lives and feel better about ourselves.
The next time you run into a skeptic
ask him a couple of questions, that is if he is willing to have his own
beliefs questioned. Ask him, “If the
Church has acted to somehow manage the message of Scripture, do you think she
would be dumb-enough to allow for differences?
Isn’t the first rule of managing a message that you have to keep the
story consistent, regardless of who’s talking?
With the gospels having been written over a period of decades, don’t you
think the Church could have just settled on the first one, and made the others
all agree in all details with the first one?”
The Church could have settled on
Mark–the first Gospel written–and then there would have been no mention of the
virgin birth. Skeptics love the virgin
birth, and love to cite examples of ancient legend in which a hero is born by
supernatural means. They love to point
out that Isaiah doesn’t say “virgin” in Hebrew (he says “young woman”), and
claim that Matthew is just following a mistranslation of Isaiah into Greek. What they don’t like to point out is that the
Hebrew word for “young woman” can also mean “virgin,” and that as a
Hebrew-speaker Matthew knew the difference.
What they also don’t like to acknowledge is that from the very beginning
it would have been easier for the Church to ignore the virgin birth, to manage
the message and settle on Mark.
From the very beginning skeptics and
opponents have claimed that Mary’s virginity is either legendary or a
theological construct. From the very
beginning opponents have mocked the idea of Jesus’ virginal conception. Writing in the first century Justin Martyr
had to defend this story to pagan opponents, as did the theologian Origen in
the second century, so the virgin birth can hardly be an adaptation of pagan
mythology. Indeed, it would have been a
lot easier to “sell” belief in Jesus as the Messiah to the ancient Jews and
pagans alike if the subject of Mary’s virginity had just been dropped, and if
all the gospels had been reconciled in all details. The fact that the subject was not dropped,
and that the gospels were not edited into one seamless text is evidence not of
myth-making, but that the message has not been managed. The message has been reported as received.
So why do we see differences in the
gospel accounts? Ask your skeptical
friend if he can name any one event in his own life which has been reported in
the same manner by more than one witness.
Witnesses always notice different things and remember things
differently, even if they have been in the same room or at the same
intersection at the same time. Any lawyer
or judge will tell you that if multiple witnesses agree in all details then you
can be sure that their testimony has been rigged.
So how do we look at and beyond
differences in the gospel texts to try to reach the truth of the message? First we need to recognize that differences
don’t really matter because the initiative is with God, not us. We need to get our own wills out of the way
and allow God’s will to work in us. The
initiative is with God, as recognized in today’s Collect:
Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily
visitation, that your Son Jesus Christ, at his coming, may find in us a mansion
prepared for himself; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy
Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Notice that the Collect doesn’t describe us as active but God as active. Like Joseph in today’s Gospel we are to make
ourselves available to God, to hear His message and respond to it. We need to be ready to receive the
message of the Gospel. We need to open
our hearts and minds to allow God to enter into and dwell within us, to allow
the message of hope that we receive in this season of Advent to become the hope
that lives within us; the hope that life is everlasting in Christ Jesus. How do we do this; how do we open our hearts
and minds to God? Again, the Collect
tells us that it is not by our own power and of our own will alone that we can
be open to God. We pray that our
conscience–that is our heart and mind–may be purified by God. Purified how?
By God’s daily visitation; by the fact that at all times God reaches out
to us and calls us to Him. To the extent
we don’t resist that touch, that call, we can then receive God, and in
receiving Him come to know His truth:
that Jesus is the Way, and the Truth, and the Life.
If we focus on trying
to explain and reconcile all that we find in Scripture we’ll never allow
ourselves to receive God’s message. If
we spend our efforts in faith in searching for the “historical Jesus,” and
focus on sifting for evidence, for the factual bases of what the gospels report
of Jesus’ life and mission, then we’ll never meet the risen Christ, and the
Jesus of history will never be Emmanuel, “God with us.”
In less than
forty-eight hours we’ll gather here again.
We’ll gather together to rejoice that God is with us; to rejoice that
the hopeful message of Advent is fulfilled in the coming of the Christ, and
that God with us is the God who saves.
God does save, and we live in this joy of salvation. God does save, and in receiving His message
and doing His will, we do not sift through ancient texts looking for “evidence”
and seeking to reconcile accounts, any more than in experiencing personal love
should we look for evidence of love, and obsess over whether that evidence is
consistent and univocal. In this Advent,
at this Christmas, let us not seek to prove who Jesus really was but to
experience who He really is, the One who saves us. Let us
open our hearts and minds that God may purify our consciences, that He may work
within us and prepare in us a dwelling for Himself.
In
the Name of the Father, and of the Son,
and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.