The
watchword for Advent is to keep alert, so here is a question to get our grey
cells working on this grey morning. The text of which book of the Bible opens
with the words, “The book of genesis”?
It is
of course Matthew’s Gospel. (Genesis begins with “In the beginning when God
created the heavens and the earth”.) However we can be excused for not knowing
that, as in the NRSV translation that we use at Mass Matthew opens rather
prosaically with “An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah”. But,
actually, in Greek, the language in which the gospel is written, it says “Βίβλος γενέσεως Ἰησοῦ
χριστοῦ”. The
book of genesis of Jesus the Messiah.
The
Book of Genesis in the Old Testament is of course a different kind of writing
to the gospels: under the language of myth and epic saga it conveys the truth
about creation, and the origin and call of God’s people. But by opening his gospel
with those words Matthew is catching our attention. This book, too, is about
creation and the origin and call of God’s people. The genealogy that follows
connects Jesus through 42 generations with Abraham, the founding father of the
people of God in Genesis.
And today’s
reading, which follows on, begins in a similar way. “The birth of Jesus the
Messiah took place in this way.” Again, what this literally says in the Greek
is “the genesis of Jesus”, just in case we missed the reference first time
round. This is a creation story. Of course it is, because Mary “was found to be
with child from the Holy Spirit”. The Book of Genesis begins with the Spirit of
God hovering over the face of the deep, to bring all things into being.
Jesus,
as St Paul says, is the new Adam, founder of the new creation, humanity
restored and redeemed. This new creation is a direct act of God just as much as
the first creation. God caused all things to be in the beginning, and God
causes the human nature of Jesus to come into existence in the womb of Mary.
This is
why Jesus was born of a virgin – and both Matthew and Luke, the only writers
who tell us about the birth of Jesus, insist on this. This is not a dispute
with biology. The virgin birth is only incredible if we suppose it is the old
way of creation being carried on in an impossible way. But it is not. It is a
new beginning, and therefore it is a direct act of God. The birth of Jesus is
no more incredible than the fact that anything exists at all – both rest on
God’s pure act alone, and have no other cause.
So the
human nature of Jesus, the new Adam, is created in the womb of Mary by the Holy
Spirit. Yet he is still one of us, he is “Man, of the substance of his Mother,
born in the world”, as the Athanasian Creed puts it. “Adam” in Hebrew doesn’t
only refer to the archetypal individual in the creation story. The word “Adam”
also means “humanity”. The whole of humanity starts again in the birth of Jesus
the new Adam.
This is
possible because he who is born of Mary is not only a man, the new Adam, he is
also God. The Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, has united himself
to our human nature, so that all humanity can be united with him and in him. The
Son has always been God; he became human in history in the womb of Mary.
By
faith and baptism we are adopted in Jesus as children of God; we share in his
redeemed human nature and so are saved from our sins; and because Jesus is one
person both human and Divine, we share also in his Divinity. The Second Person
of the Trinity invites human beings, mere creatures, to enter in and share the
life he has with the Father in the Holy Spirit.
This is
the heart of Christianity: what Jesus is by nature, we can become by grace. This
is astounding and scandalous, to a normal way of thinking. If we have any
conception of God at all, we know that God must be wholly other than what we
are. We would not dare to suggest it at all, if it was not that scripture teaches
it so clearly, and the Church has always believed it. The great saints of the
early Church did not shy away it. “Man is a creature who has received a command
to become God”, said St Basil. “God became a man so that man might become God”,
said St Athanasius.
Yes,
God is wholly other than what we are. The prophets spoke of him, indeed, but
God in himself was wholly unknown to humanity, until he was found in the womb
of Mary. Jesus is the meeting point. In him the divine and the human become
one, and eternity enters history.
This is
why the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus actually matter as events
in history. They are not simply symbolic stories. Though they are of course
full of theological meaning that the church will never exhaust, they have to be
anchored in history.
Salvation
is not just a nice idea. Salvation has entered the real world. The world of
suffering and sin and death. The world of Aleppo, the world of babies abandoned
on freezing bombed out streets. The world of the secret sorrows and sufferings
that so many people bear and for whom Christmas would be torment if it were
simply a cheerful nice idea. All this concrete world of tragedy and tears is
really redeemed because God was really born in it as one of us.
Christianity takes the world very seriously, and
takes humanity most seriously of all. Ours is not an other worldly faith, pie
in the sky when you die. It is not a collection of moral fables to improve the
reader. It is not interested in spirit alone, but in body and spirit, the whole
reality of what it is to be human in the world. This concrete world, and our
concrete lives, have been embraced by God in the birth of Jesus the God-Man.
Therefore
this world matters. Our lives matter. Our bodies matter. The choices we make matter.
In our modern world we ae often invited to think that the choices we make are
matters for ourselves alone, mental transactions in the privacy of our heads
that have no connection with the world out there.
Christianity
turns that inside out. Everything we think and do impacts on the concrete world
in some way or another. And as both our selves and our world have been embraced
by God for redemption, the call of the Gospels is universal. Everything we do
has Christ the redeemer as its ultimate object. Everything we do, in the last
analysis, is either working with God’s purposes in the world, or against them.
The
birth of Jesus the God-Man, the new Adam, calls us to take our part in the new
creation, in which all human beings are honoured and valued – especially the
outcast and marginalised. The birth of Jesus in this world calls us to care for
this world with the same intensity and reality that he did, and in concrete
ways. In working for peace and reconciliation, in protecting the environment,
in healing the sick and being with the lonely and unloved.
There
is nothing unworldly about the birth of Jesus. It is the message of hope and
redemption for this world as it actually is. And that is reason enough to
celebrate the feast, when we get to it, with great joy.
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