About Jesus' Birthday

Here’s a surprise: I don’t like Jesus’ birthday any better than my own, but for an equal and opposite reason. On the one hand, I don’t like my birthday because birth and death are enmeshed, but on the other hand, I don’t like most churches’ celebrations of Jesus birthday because they separate his birth from his death.

First, to review, I don’t like my birthday because it dredges up birth/death dread and, purporting to celebrate the day of one’s emergence, as it surely does in one’s early years, while the years mount one’s birthday becomes a grim countdown toward the last one, and no one ever talks about this other side of birthdays though birthday humor – and sometimes humor is a last-gasp honesty – usually points to it: you’re growing old, you’ve got grey hair (my friends sang this to my before I was ten) or numerous birthday cards that remind you of that inverse rule of aging: the more years the fewer functions, especially those functions one most wants to carry undiminished into one’s dotage (cards addressing these, though addressed to a sextuagenarian [say that fast and hear the irony] or septuagenarian, often feature someone young, nubile and half naked). Birthdays seem dishonest with a frosty, sugar coating: yay, another year, may be your last.

Now, to Jesus’ birthday: I see churches celebrating Jesus’ birth with no mention of his death. Good god, the horrors I’ve seen: come worship the Christ child, come kneel at the manger, come welcome the Babe (not the babe on the birthday card). And the pageants, excuses to parade the church’s children around in ridiculous costumes (if you were ever a sheep in one of these you know what I mean) and have them recite a conflation of Matthew and Luke with a little of John’s prologue thrown in (mercifully, Mark has proven particularly resistant to this harmony). The whole season of Advent I find particularly foolish, like Jesus is going to be born again (I love that theological irony) and surely not that Jesus is actually going to return some day ‘cause that would be way too eschatological for the mainlines (churches who look fervently for the Lord’s return usually don’t celebrate Christmas at all, at least in worship). This whole season reminds me of a medieval passion play for illiterates – the people could never understand the Scriptures so we’ll put on little vignettes to help them - and last time I checked most of us church-goers are literate enough to text or email each other though not so much with the Scriptures (so maybe this mess is a good thing after all), cause if we did understand the Scriptures we’d never sit still for so much of this nativity nonsense.

Now, after that rant I hope you’re saying, “Ok, wise guy, you tell me what the Scriptures say!” Oh, I’ve got you now, and I dare – I triple-dog dare you – not to admit even grudgingly when I’m through that I’ve got a point. If you have even a shred of self-respect you’ll concede now.

Ok, to the Scriptures. Jesus’ birth is mentioned just about exclusively in two gospels, Matthew and Luke. I think we can leave the prologue to John’s gospel and the couple of places where the epistles speak of Christ’s pre-existence out of the discussion, though those scriptures, one may easily argue, invariably include Christ’s post-existence, i.e. the descent and ascent of the divine-human figure. Matthew and Luke have explicit stories of Jesus’ birth, on which the churches base their Christmas services. My thesis: Matthew and Luke entwine Jesus’ birth inextricably with his death. Let’s start with Matthew and for ease of reference I’ll quote from the NIV.

Mary is found to be pregnant so Joseph is going to divorce her but sleeps on it and has a dream, one in which an angel visits him, and here’s what the angel says to Joseph and, concurrently, here’s what the narrator says to us readers:

“Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”

Now, I want you to set aside all your long theological or ecclesiastical training in how Jesus saves us from our sins and stick with Matthew’s gospel. Taking this last clause – “he will save his people from their sins” – how does this birth announcement enmesh Jesus’ birth and death? (You see it already, don’t you?) Note also that, aside from the narrator’s quote from Isaiah (which is actually kind of contradictory to the angel’s message, unless you can tolerate Jesus having two names – Jesus, which means “the Lord saves” and Immanuel, which means “God with us,” the latter name closing the gospel with Jesus telling his disciples “I am with you always,” which actually argues against the divine-man’s descent and return to heaven, since Jesus doesn’t go anyplace but stays here forever, see the problems with harmonizing?), this announcement and a brief sentence (“But he had no union with her until she gave birth to a son”) are all we’ve got from Matthew about Jesus’ birth (please don’t get me started on “We Three Kings from Orient Are”). So you may be saying, “Jeff, with so little to go on, how can you argue that Jesus’ birth and death are inextricably entwined?”

I don’t want to go into great detail here, and am confident my short explanation will suffice to make my argument, but I do suggest you spend some time concording the words “save,” “people” and “sin” in Matthew’s gospel. I’m using Schmoller’s “Handkonkordanz zum griechischen Neuen Testament” primarily to intimidate you with German, though it’s way handy and fairly exhaustive as a pocket-sized concordance to the Greek NT. But using a concordance you’ll find these three words – save, people and sins – grouped in Matthew’s unique usage (I’m discounting here those places where Matthew explicitly uses Mark, since the author’s creation is usually more indicative of her intent than her quotes from other sources) in two places. The first, at the last supper, when Jesus describes a blessed cup of wine as “my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” – and, remember, we’re talking a heavily Jewish context so you’ll have to read up on the use of blood in forgiveness of sins in the Hebrew Bible, as well as Passover celebrations, etc. This gets close to Jesus’ saving his people from their sins, though the reference to “many” is not so explicitly a reference to Jesus’ “people,” but you see where I’m going, right: those churches that celebrate the Lord’s Supper on Christmas Eve are heading in the right direction.

But that’s not the best part in Matthew. I encourage you to read up on the narrative use of irony in the first century and in Scripture, because the second, sure, rock-solid tie in between the angel’s telling Joseph how to name Jesus and the entwining of his birth with his death comes in the scene before Pilate. Pilate – a classically ruthless bastard to his subjects and a sycophantic suck-up to his superiors – asks the crowd of Jesus’ people – Pilate’s Jewish subjects – a question impossible to answer: “Which one do you want me to release to you: Barabbas, or Jesus who is called Christ?” Remember now – “Christ” is a pre-Christian term meaning “anointed one” and was used to refer to deliverers or kings, so I imagine Pilate just itching for the crowd to shout for a messiah so he can retaliate, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got your messiah right here!” I also imagine the crowd is way too smart to fall for such an obvious trick. And though the author seems apologetic for Pilate, ironically things are quite different. Think about the redemptive power of blood in Jewish sacrificial theology as you read this:

“When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood,’ he said. ‘It is your responsibility!’ All the people answered, ‘Let his blood be on us and on our children!’”

You will call his name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. Jesus saves from sins through the covenant (no mention of a “new” covenant in Matthew), in which his blood atones. Pilate says, ironically, tragically, as do all who do not see both our complicity and blessedness in Jesus’ death, “I’m innocent (!) of his blood.” And way more tragically, this redemptive cry, “His blood be on us and our children,” rather than affirming that for its first century the Jesus movement was mostly a Jewish movement, led in later centuries to the Church’s persecution of Jesus’ own people. Call him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. And lest you wish to argue that it is Jesus’ resurrection that saves his people and not his bloodshedding death, read this, unique to Matthew, from Jesus’ crucifixion:

“And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split. The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs, and after Jesus’ resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many people.”

You see, at Jesus’ death, the resurrection – the final deliverance from our sins – begins.

Now, I don’t want you to get hung up on whether Jesus actually saved his people in subsequent history. My point is the author of Matthew inextricably links Jesus’ birth with his death, so I don’t think the two should ever be separated (no Christmas without Easter, no Easter without Christmas, though I have serious reservations about the ways we celebrate both Christmas and Easter). And you may not find my argument about Matthew very convincing (remember: this is shorthand for a lot of scholarship that you can address with your own concordance and some basic exegesis). “Jeff, that’s a lot of words, they can mean anything, so what.” Sure, so let’s turn to Luke and address images instead of words.

Ah, Luke. Here’s where we get so much of our Christmas pageants – angels and shepherds and mangers and starry nights and noels. I want to concentrate on these verses from Luke’s birth narrative (I challenge you not to think of Linus as you read these):

“While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.” (Ok, Linus was reciting from the King James version and I said I’d stick to the NIV, so the two are different enough that you may not have heard Linus at all).

Now, you and I are probably heavily influenced by Western European culture, especially in so traditional (meaning – straight from the Old Country) a matter as Christmas, so you’ve probably got in your mind a picture of your parents’ crèche from when you were young, which probably looks like a barn of some kind straight out of Germany or Scandinavia: wooded sides, thatched roof with the baby Jesus lying in a wooden feed trough. The author of Luke would never have had that image in mind, because it’ constituent parts would not exist for, I don’t know, a millennium or so. Indeed, if the author is telling the truth in the introduction, she has compared sources and “investigated everything from the beginning,” so she knows something about inns and mangers in Bethlehem of Jesus’ day (and actually for centuries thereafter), and the facts are these: wood was scarce, so was hay and wheat therefore so was thatch. But caves are abundant, especially in Bethlehem, they’re dry and cozy and they’ve made great homes from Jesus’ time to ours. And since we’re not talking housing standards such as we have in the U.S.A., but much smaller and simpler dwellings as humans have used well until very recently, and drawing on good archaeology from Bethlehem, the customary family cave had two main sections, one for people and the other for animals. Contrary to our expectations, the front of the two sections was reserved for people, the back for the animals (usually not very many animals) and, get this, the word usually translated “inn” (bringing to mind hotels and motels and quaint English inns, all anachronisms) means actually “higher room” or “upper room” (both Mark and Luke use this word to refer to the place Jesus ate his last supper!) and actually referred to the room for people (often a step or two higher than the deeper, lower room further back in the cave), so Mary and Joseph and the baby found no room in the people area (too many people in town because of the census) of a local family’s perhaps relative’s cave home and had to go further back in the cave.

So get this image in your mind: a cave with a trough hewn out of rock, Mary wrapping up Jesus with cloths and laying him down in it. The author wants to make sure that we remember this image, because she repeats it three times (“she wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger . . . this will be a sign to you: you will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger . . . so they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger”). Now ask yourself where else in Luke’s gospel do we see a similar scene. Remember Joseph (there’s that name again) of Arimathea:

“Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus’ body. Then he took it down, wrapped it in linen cloth and placed it in a tomb cut in the rock.”

The wondrous sign the shepherds saw – and all signs make us wonder not just about their magnificence but about their meaning – was a baby appearing as one entombed. I imagine that besides being inconvenient, using a manger for a crib would also bring a bit of superstitious creepiness to Jesus’ parents, like our using a baby’s casket for a bassinette. But the author understands – and wants us to understand – that, at least looking back, we cannot understanding Christ or what his life means without keeping both his birth and his death united. In neither Matthew nor Luke are we considering history: the actual events of Jesus’ birth are wrapped so completely in theology that Jesus’ history is unrecoverable. But the mere fact of Jesus’ being born is trivial and ordinary, in spite of those who claim there’s no proof Jesus ever existed. So is the mere fact of his being killed. What is important, ecstatically important, is that his birth and death and all they encompass are immensely meaningful, that Jesus in his life – birth, living, death – did all that was right, was always about God’s business, fulfilled God’s plan and, following the analogy from a prior post, changed the course of human history, including my own.

For one like I, so caught up in wondering if what I do with my time and life will ever mean anything, Scripture reminds me that Jesus’ life has great meaning and that, by joining my life with his even though that means a cross in my future, my life can mean something, too. But Scripture offers this hope through the conviction that from the very get-go Jesus’ death was foreseen and embraced, even in the earliest moments of his life, not as a problem to be overcome or an outcome to be avoided, but as a redemptive conclusion without which his saving life would be incomplete. Our celebrations of Jesus’ birthday are surely incomplete when we forget this. Thank you for reading.