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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 25, 2005
What child is this?
Christianity is unique among religions in the emphasis it places upon the child; and through motherhood and childhood, on the “nuclear family”. Much has come of this, through the centuries of Western civilization; indeed, in Christendom both West and East. Our frequent escape, from the worldly tyrannies that have been endemic to all civilizations, may have something to do with the strength accorded to the natural family in the Christian scheme of things. The stress laid on the prototypical Christian mother -- on Mary, of the Annunciation and the Magnificat, the “new Eve”, intimate with the mystery of her divine child -- turned the ancient order of things upside down, by the honour it accorded her sex. At the heart of the Nativity, is the “Madonna and Child”.Children’s Nativity pageants, like the public display of a crèche, thus declare what we are and have been as a civilization. There is nothing shallow in the story of Christmas. The story became visible in the Gospel accounts of Matthew and Luke. These are more than prodigies of oriental storytelling; they are unlike anything that was ever told to the ancient world. The argument in them is that God takes human form -- not “human-like”, but fully human -- and contrives to be born in humble circumstances in the little shepherding hillside town of Bethlehem, near to Jerusalem. It is this self-humiliation of God that was astounding, to the ancients, and continues to be astounding to people today, outside the Christian orbit. For men had always imagined God as omnipotent, and invulnerable, on all occasions. For God to put himself in the manger, as a defenceless human child, in the care of poor defenceless parents; then expose himself to persecution, from Herod forward; till finally he submits to being crucified under Pontius Pilate -- is for God to reveal himself in a radically new light. He comes down from heaven; He embraces a human fate; He accepts suffering; in order to save us. There are many foreshadowings of this “divine condescension” in the Old Testament, especially in Isaiah, the most Messianic of the Hebrew prophets. The birth of Jesus fulfils the idea of “man made in the image of God”. But the starkly human Messiah that Christians embraced came as a shock to every ancient sensibility. How could God become “just a man”? What kind of God is that? Or looking at it another way: What child is this? I’ve been reading The Birth of the Messiah, an impressive scholarly book by Raymond E. Brown, published 1977, which has the virtue of giving references to nearly every major comment ever made on the Nativity passages in Matthew and Luke, in the course of surveying the field. While a grand reference book, it falls short of giving a satisfying account of the Nativity itself. On the evidence he presents, Dr Brown allows there may be some dim historical truth behind the Nativity stories. But the book is not only sceptical by disposition; it is the product of our peculiarly modern form of scepticism, which doubts anything that cannot be reproduced under laboratory conditions. And by that standard, there is nothing in all history we can ever accept at face value. We cannot know much about the circumstances in which the Gospels were written; only that they were accepted as authoritative in the oldest annals of the Church, by men who were themselves no intellectual slouches. Many alternative accounts of the Nativity were rejected. A vast literature survives, from the early centuries, of “apocryphal” stories about the birth, childhood, and early life of Christ. They were written to satisfy the curiosity of early Christians, and quasi-Christians, who wanted the blanks filled in an interesting biography. Today, we have tabloids to do that sort of thing. But the Gospels are not biographies, except incidentally. There is nothing to be found in them that does not have a purpose beyond factual reportage. We must realize that Matthew and Luke selected their facts for the clear purpose of advancing religious, theological, spiritual themes. Their attention is riveted to one event, instead of another, for the very reason that it seems to fulfil some idea or prophecy from the Hebrew Scripture with which they were familiar. They were surely aware of many more details than they impart. Obviously, they could not claim to have been themselves present for Christ’s physical birth and earliest childhood. Even in describing later events, they present themselves as gathering a tradition, seldom as eyewitnesses. The Gospel of John alone leaves the reader with the impression that its author may have seen extraordinary things with his own eyes. (The most “abstract” or “purely inspirational” Gospel to our ancestors, modern archaeology has revealed St John to be instead the most specific and accurate about persons, places, and things.) And yet all the Evangelists are privy to many eyewitness accounts, and have complete faith in what they are reporting. Consider, if the Gospels were written as early as our best scholars increasingly place them, whom Matthew and Luke might have consulted for information. Matthew might have spoken with Mary herself, or Joseph. What they wrote had to escape challenge by others who were well acquainted with the events they described. The Nativity story may appear at first sight fanciful -- the genealogy in Matthew; the Annunciation to Mary; and parallel annunciation to Zechariah, the father of John Baptist; the angelic descent upon the shepherds; the birth and naming of Jesus; the homage of the Magi; Herod’s edict; the flight into Egypt; Luke’s elegant description of the presentation in the Temple; of the prophecy of Simeon; and witness of the old widow, Anna. But pondered in faith, these events become plausible. For it is in faith one considers, “what child this is”. If we can believe that Christ was actually Resurrected, we can believe that his entry into the world was accompanied by extraordinary signs. And the telling of the story has a purpose. It recalls the morning glory of creation, the first innocence of man. It is the necessary prelude. One, and only one incident is presented of Christ between his earliest childhood, and his sudden appearance as a public teacher, decades later: the glimpse we get of him as a boy -- in the Temple, studying the Scripture and conversing with the rabbis. Thus, Christ touches upon heaven, at his worldly beginning and at his worldly end, but in the middle span disappears form sight. He has a human life of anonymous chores and duties -- as lost to us as any human life buried in time. This was his part as a real man. As for that aubade, that premonitory display of the infant Jesus, in which so many of the doctrines of Christian faith are incidentally laid down, there are no rewards for partiality and scepticism. The Nativity stories must be accepted or rejected, whole. It is anyway no use trying, even with so excruciating a forensic mind as Raymond Brown’s, to judge at this distance small points of fact lost in the wash of twenty centuries. The Nativity story could not have inspired such pageantry over many centuries -- and to this day, among schoolchildren in the city of Ottawa -- did it not, in itself, answer to something profound within us. Long before I was a Christian, my skin bristled at the words from Isaiah: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given,” and the consummation figured in St. Luke: “There were shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night.” Why should it bristle? At the very notion that “we are saved”, I think, whether or not I accepted it at the time. At the notion of the divine child, and the beautiful simplicity of the crèche. At the angelic words, “fear not”. And in my intuitive belief that being human means something, large; and that here it is being explained, enacted. “And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid. “And the angel said unto them, fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people: for unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, and saying: “Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth, good will among men!” Our postmodern mind is tightly bound by the idea that a story must be false, and deceitful, simply because it claims to be good, beautiful, and true. The Christmas story breaks these bonds. It may be inaccessible to the cynical and world-weary. But it will always be spontaneously understood by children, and those who can become children, in the presence of Our Lord. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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