DON'T GET DISTRACTED

December 22, 2013

Advent 4

Isaiah 7:10-16

Matthew 1:18-25

(prayer)

As a kid, I was told “sticks and stones will break your bones, but...  words will never hurt you.”

It was the pretty standard parental advice to the child who was being made fun of or called names.  It wasn’t quite as crass but had the same message as another comment of childhood - ‘just suck it up, princess’.  “Sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you.”

We try to pretend that words don’t matter - that they can’t hurt.

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While it is true that physical bullying and assaults may leave more obvious marks, we are learning that psychological bullying and assaults can certainly ‘hurt you’.

Words - how we say things - for positive or negative purposes - matter!  Words are powerful.  They can inspire, uplift, inform, empower.  And yes, words can hurt you.

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Today, I want us to pay close attention to the words of our scriptures and be open to the power that they have with-respect-to the way we express and live out our faith.

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Let’s start with the name of Mary and Joseph’s child.  In Matthew, (as we read) a dream angel tells Joseph to “to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins”.  Luke’s gospel has a very similar story: an angel named Gabriel appears to Mary in the waking world and tells her “you will... bear a son, and you will name him Jesus”.

You may or may not know that the word “Jesus” is not an accurate translation of what an angel told the parent.  Mary and Joseph were (by all accounts) peasant folk.  They were likely uneducated and probably could not read or write.  The day-to-day language they likely spoke would have been Aramaic: a sister language to Hebrew (using the same alphabet and sharing a few common root words, but a distinct and unique language; think of comparing Spanish to French) - even Hebrew (by the time of Jesus’ birth) was a language pretty much limited to the Scriptures and Hebrew scholars - it was not commonly spoken in everyday life.  Even so, given names were Hebrew and often had special meaning in their linguistic origins.

So, the Hebrew name that was most likely given by Mary and Joseph to their child would have been ‘Yehoshua’.

יְהוֹשֻׁעַ - Hebrew

We know this because (in Matthew), the name has a special word-play meaning - you shall name him Yehoshua because he will save people. Yehoshua literally means “Yahweh (God) Saves”.

Words matter.

In his life time, Jesus may have been called by the shorter (nickname-like) Aramaic version - Yeshua.

If we simply used Yehoshua as the root name of Jesus, we would known him by the more direct English translation of the Hebrew: Joshua.  Yes, Mary and Joseph’s son was named after Moses’ assistant, who completed the exodus by leading the people into their promised land.  Sadly that obvious connection and meaning is lost in our use of Jesus, as the name.

So, why do we use Jesus?  I have mentioned this before, but it warrants saying it again: the path to our use of Jesus as the name of Joseph and Mary’s son goes through Greek and Latin. 

Since the New Testament was written in Greek, the Hebrew name Yehoshua is rendered by its Greek counterpart: Iesous.

Ἰησοῦς - Greek

When the Greek pronunciation is transliterated later into Latin: Iesous become Iesus: basically the same pronunciation, but using Latin lettering.

Iēsus - Latin

Sift that Latin version over time into other languages that use the Latin alphabet and we eventually settle out to J...E...S...U...S.  In English, we pronounce that Jesus

Jesus - English

Jesus is not any version of the name that Mary and Joseph’s son would have ever heard in his life time. 

None of the early Christians would have used that name.  It has lost the obvious Hebrew word play over time.  But, it is good for us to realize that behind the commonly used but strange version of the name of the Christ-child is a message of safety and salvation.

But don’t get distracted by the fact that the one we call “Jesus and Christ” was never actually called either (Christ is the Greek version of the Hebrew Messiah).

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Today, from the gospel of Matthew, we heard one of the Christmas stories from the New Testament.  Did you know there were two Christmas stories in the Bible?  The other is found in Luke’s gospel.

Some people are surprised to learn that they are not the same.  The fact is that our bibles do not tell just one version of Jesus’ birth narrative, but two.  They are unique from each other.  While they clearly draw on a few points of common tradition, they paint a different picture.  In spite of our best efforts, they do not fit well together on the same Christmas card.  Not if we want to be true to the actual Bible.

Even so, we do tend to combine them and mix together the details into one narrative for our Christmas pageants and cards and carols and manger scenes, but let’s be clear it is not biblical:

• to have a star above the manger;
• to have the magi visit Jesus on the day he was born.  Matthew clearly states they came to a house, not a manger.  Up to two years may have passed since Jesus was born.

As well, in Matthew’s version, Joseph, Mary and Jesus only move to Nazareth years after Jesus is born.  If all we had was Matthew, we would say that Mary and Joseph probably lived in Bethlehem before Jesus was born, moved to Egypt and then after a number of years abroad they moved up to Nazareth.  If all we had was Matthew, we would know nothing about a roman census or a manger. 

The way Luke tells it Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth before Jesus was born and it was just a case of a bad timing (i.e. the census) that they just happened to be in Bethlehem when Jesus was born.  If all we had was Luke, there would be no wise men in the Christmas story.  No gold, no frankincense, no myrrh.

Read the gospels.  The words are there. 

The common traditions (espoused in both stories) are that the child’s name was Jesus (but did the angel tell Joseph or Mary to name him that); the tradition held in both versions says that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, but grew up in Nazareth (but they tell different tales of how that came to be).

While I am already bursting some common Xmas bubbles you might want to read the texts and learn: did Mary and Joseph get married before Jesus was born or not; do angels sing to crowds from the sky or do they whisper to people in dreams?  Read the actual words of the Bible.

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The simple truth is that we have amalgamated two distinct biblical traditions about Jesus’ birth into one.

But don’t let the words (missing from one version or another) bother you; don’t be distracted from the fact that, years later, to his disciples, Jesus was the embodiment (the incarnation) of God and (even after Jesus was crucified) they proclaimed him as the Risen Messiah and wrote about him in Greek as the Christ.  They passed that message on to a new generation that were so convinced of the truth of their mentors’ words that people (who never met Jesus in the flesh) would risk their own lives to hold true to this belief that Jesus was the Word of God made flesh and remained, even in their day, a spiritual presence in their midst.

Don’t get distracted from that just because two authors (about 40 years after Jesus died) told different stories of Jesus’ birth.

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In the Matthew Christmas story, the gospel writer quotes the prophet Isaiah to make a point about the specialness of Jesus’ birth.

“Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel.”

That is an accurate English translation of the Greek text of the gospel: the virgin shall conceive.  It is clear that Matthew intended his readers to see that Mary was pregnant even though she was a virgin.  When Matthew first mentions the pregnancy, he immediately footnotes it to say that she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.  Matthew’s story includes a dream angel convincing Joseph to not break off the engagement; as well the Matthew text is specific that Joseph did not “know” Mary in the biblical sense, until after Jesus was born (which implies they consummated their relationship, eventually, but just not before Jesus was born - so much for doctrines of Mary’s perpetual virginity).  Anyway, Matthew was making a very clear statement:  Mary was the virgin that the prophet Isaiah spoke about.  And therefore: Jesus is “Emmanuel” - meaning God-With-Us.  More word play: Yahweh saves and now God is with us.

Luke doesn’t directly quote Isaiah, but does call Mary a virgin (twice); that gospel also includes very specific language that implies Mary’s pregnancy was not a result of human sexual contact.

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We have inherited this language and it is one of the assumed facts of the Christmas story that “all was calm [and] bright ’round yon virgin mother and child.”

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About 300 years before Jesus was born, even as the Roman Empire grew, Greek Culture dominated the lands of Europe, Asia and northern Africa.  Around that time, major translation project took place.  The story goes that the Egyptian king, Ptolemy II, sponsored a translation of the Hebrew Bible (known to Jews as “The Scriptures” and later known to Christians as the Old Testament) in to Koine Greek for the benefit of Jews living in Alexandria who were not fluent in Hebrew.  It began with just the first five books (The Torah), but eventually the entire Hebrew Bible and other related texts were translated into Greek and placed in the Library at Alexandria.  It became known as the Septuagint (LXX), based on a legend that 72 Jewish scholars, working independently on the first five books, all came up with identical translations.

The Septuagint (the Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures) was popular among Jews living beyond Judea and Galilee; over the decades that followed, copies circulated throughout the world.

Citations from these translations begin to appear two centuries before Jesus.

Since the various documents of the New Testament were written in Greek, most of the quotations in the NT of passages from the OT come from the Septuagint: it was the Hebrew Bible known in the Greek-speaking world.  The quote from Isaiah 7:14 in Matthew 1:23 comes from the Septuagint: “A virgin shall conceive and bear a son”.

Now, don’t get distracted, but guess what?  The older, more reliable Hebrew version of Isaiah is not quite the same as the newer Greek translation.  Earlier we heard Isaiah 7:14 (directly translated from the Hebrew) as part of our other scripture reading:

¹⁴Therefore 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.

‘Young Woman’, not ‘Virgin’.

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The thing is both Hebrew and Greek have different words for both ‘virgin’ and ‘young woman’.  If Isaiah wanted to say virgin, he could have, but he didn’t; if the Septuagint wanted to say ‘young woman’, it could have, but it didn’t.  We don’t know why.  Was this Isaiah already part of a Messianic miraculous birth tradition or was it just an error in translation?  We don’t know.

But search the internet and you will find dozens of sites that will explain that the whole idea that Mary was a virgin simply comes from a bad translation made some 200 years before Jesus was even born.

Of course, I would be remise if I didn’t point out that the original context of the Isaiah passage was more current to its time.  King Ahaz was told that his fortunes would improve soon (within a couple of years) - to metaphorically make that point, the prophet said that things will be better for Israel before the child of a woman (who is pregnant now) learns the first lessons of right and wrong.  When is that around two years?  When do they learn that “no” is a powerful word?

When will things improve, King Ahaz?  Two years; three at the most.

Likely, there was a pregnant woman in the King’s Court, perhaps even his own wife that gave Ahaz a tangible timeline to the prophet’s promise.

As they did with other Old Testament passages, early Christian authors saw in this old story of pregnancy, some truth for how they wanted to talk about Jesus.  There was nothing wrong with that.  In the Hebrew tradition of Midrash, old stories were often retold in a new context: to express new truths and meaning for a new time.

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I have been reading Dom Crossan and Marcus Borg’s book “The First Christmas”, subtitled “What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’ Birth” and they don’t quite take the view that virgin birth conversation was based on an unintentional (or even intentional) translation error of Isaiah 7.  First of all, they note that since Matthew and Luke both describe a virgin becoming pregnant in different ways, they are most likely drawing on an earlier tradition that both author’s knew independent of each other.  Borg and Crossan do see Matthew relying on the Septuagint’s version of Isaiah, but sees Luke rather drawing a comparison between the conception of Jesus and the conception of John (told earlier in Luke). 

Miraculous conceptions happen several times in the Scriptures - but they are always in situations where the woman is either barren or post-menopausal (cf. Hannah, the mother of Samuel; Sarah, the mother of Isaac).  Elizabeth’s pregnancy with John the Baptist is similar to both Hannah Sarah - she had never had children (barren) and was elderly (post-menopausal).

For Luke, Jesus’ conception was to be seen as similar to unexpected births in the past, but taken to an even more miraculous level.

Sarah, Hannah and Elizabeth had been sexually active and all had ‘tried’ to have children.

Mary, Luke proposes, had never even tried.  And he does this without relying on the curious Greek translation of Isaiah, chapter seven.

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This is all interesting to study and discuss, but don’t get distracted.  Mary’s virginal conception may be based on an historical fact, or a tradition based on a bad translation or it may be a literary device created by a gospel author to hold Jesus’ birth as the most ever that involed the interaction of God, or it may have been a story invented to cover up that Mary had had an affair or perhaps was raped by a Roman soldier, named Pantera (yes, there was some discussion of those possibilities at least as early as the 2^nd century). 

But we can get distracted in all of those discussions.

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Ask yourself:

Can Jesus’ birth be a sign of the presence of God in the world, even if Mary wasn’t a virgin? 

Does Jesus need to literally be from the sperm of God to be the Son of God?

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Here’s what the gospel stories of Jesus’ birth do tell us - even if we ignore the theme of virginity:

Jesus was born into a poor peasant family.  We know this because Luke tells us that when Mary went to the temple 33 days after the birth for her rite of purification, she offered two small birds as a sacrafice, as required by the Torah.  Leviticus 12 says:

⁶When the days of her purification are completed... she shall bring to the priest... a lamb in its first year for a burnt-offering, and a pigeon or a turtle-dove for a sin-offering...  ⁸If she cannot afford a sheep, she shall take two turtle-doves or two pigeons, one for a burnt-offering and the other for a sin-offering; and the priest shall make atonement on her behalf, and she shall be clean.

Mary and Joseph couldn’t afford a sheep. They were poor peasants.

• His birth is described as humble - perhaps in a borrowed stable.
• Even if we ignore the declaration of a virgin birth, Mary’s pre-marital pregnancy was controversial.  We could read her “trip” to go stay with relatives in the Judean hill country as a case of hiding the unplanned pregnancy from potential gossip.
• Jesus’ parent’s relationship was in jeopardy as a result: Mary was on the cusp of being rejected by her fiancé.
• John’s gospel, which ignores any attempt to tell a birth story, simply proclaims that Jesus is the eternal Word of God - which has existed since “before the beginning”.  And that this Word Became Flesh. God chosen way for Jesus’ entry into the world (the process of the Word becoming flesh) was that of pure vulnerability.  A newborn child, dependant on the designs of nature, on nourishment from Mary and on compassion from Joseph to merely survive, the first moments, days and years.

Don’t get distracted by the debates over exactly how and where and focus on the wonder and the life that begun that day.

A life that would call people into new ways of being (hey fishermen, come with me and let’s catch people with the Spirit); a life that would show what true welcome and hospitality is (let the children come to me, don’t block them); a life that would challenge what people believed about power and wealth and ritual and mercy.

In all of the Christmas fuss, let us not lose sight of the wonder of this season.

Jesus, Christ, Emmanuel is born. 

Hallelujah and Amen.

Let us pray:

God, grant us the light of Christmas, which is hope; 
the warmth of Christmas, which is purity; 
the righteousness of Christmas, which is justice; 
the belief in Christmas, which is faith; 
the ALL of Christmas, which is Jesus, our Christ.  
Amen.

#161MV

“I Have Call You by Your Name”