by Jack Miles
“The Lamb of God,” John called him. “Destroy this Temple,” he himself had dared the authorities in Jerusalem, just after causing the disruption that has made him a marked man. Now, days after his return to Galilee, he has provoked an attempt on his life. Attempts were made on Elijah’s life as well, but in the end Elijah did not die but was taken alive to heaven in a fiery chariot. According to some interpreters, as already noted, Elijah was the very messianic prophet whose coming Moses had foretold, the second Moses who had come and gone but would come again when “the Day of the Lord,” God’s definitive and final intervention in human history, was about to begin. When Jesus claims that the fulfillment of Isaiah’s great prophecy is finally at hand, he may well be claiming that he himself is, among other things, Elijah redux, having taken this role over from John the Baptist.
As God Incarnate, Jesus can and does assume and combine the functions of every human intermediary that God has ever used. But to suggest that Elijah, on his return, would deploy his powers on behalf of other nations rather than Israel or even of other nations no less than Israel is to speak a combination of blasphemy and treason. Jesus cannot be surprised that the hearts of his hearers are filled with a mixture of terror and rage.
Clearly, Jesus does not believe that his “good news” for “the afflicted” will be bad news for Israel, but how then will it be good news? The Lord, who sent the prophets and spoke his grand promises through them, may reserve the right to determine what those promises meant and what they mean. But if they no longer mean what they once seemed to mean, then what do they mean? If “liberty to captives” is about something other than releasing Israel from the prison of foreign rule, then what is it about? God Incarnate would seem to have some explaining to do.
He does his explaining in a long outdoor sermon preached to a crowd too large for any synagogue to hold, expounding a moral vision that has the same paradoxical relationship to Torah that his proclamation of redemption has to prophecy. Before hearing that sermon, however, we must answer the question the men of the synagogue ask: Is this not Joseph’s son?
INTERLUDE: THE STORY OF HIS BIRTH
Is Jesus Joseph’s son? The answer is yes and must be yes, even though it is not by Joseph’s seed that Jesus was conceived in his mother’s womb:
And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God
unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth,
To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph,
of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary.
And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail,
thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee:
blessed art thou among women.
And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying,
and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.
And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast
found favour with God.
And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb,
and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS.
He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the
Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the
throne of his father David:
And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever;
and of his kingdom there shall be no end.
Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be,
seeing I know not a man?
And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost
shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall
overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall
be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.
(KJV; Luke 1:26–35)
The “virgin birth,” as Christian tradition has called it, does not prove that Jesus is God Incarnate but only that he has a divine vocation. There is famous precedent in the Old Testament for divine collaboration in the human conception of those for whom God has special plans. The postmenopausal Sarah—“It had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women” (Gen. 18:11)—conceived Isaac with the help of the Lord. Hannah, who was unable to conceive because “the Lord had shut up her womb” (1 Sam. 1:5), conceived Samuel when she prayed to the Lord and “the Lord remembered her” (1:19). Mary’s virginal conception of Jesus is merely an intensified variation on an old Israelite theme—in this case, the theme of divine participation in the birth of great leaders of the people. To put this negatively, God could easily have induced conception in a virgin without bringing it about that when she gave birth, he himself should be her baby.
It is the identity of the baby, not the manner of the birth, that is unprecedented, but this Gabriel reveals only in part. The titles that he applies to Mary’s unborn son—“Son of the Highest” and “Son of God”—signify divine election, but not necessarily divinity itself. In the repertory of the titles used of Jesus, “the Holy One” as used by the demon in Capernaum is far more august, and even “the Son of Man,” used with all the weight that Jesus gives it when calling Nathanael to be his disciple, is more mysterious and far-reaching. Mary is told only that her son is to be the Messiah, the descendant of King David who, ruling as David ruled, will restore Israel to greatness: “He shall reign over the House of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.”
Here is where Joseph comes in, for it is he, not Mary, who is descended from David (Mary’s descent is not mentioned), and therefore it is as Joseph’s son that Jesus is of the royal line. Unless Joseph is legitimate in the role of Jesus’ father, even though he is not the biological father, then Jesus is illegitimate in the role of messianic Son of David.
So then, yes, the answer to the question, Is this not Joseph’s son?, is legitimately affirmative. Because it is, we may say that on Christmas Day in the year One, God became a Jew. When Luke gives Jesus’ formal, human genealogy, which he does just after Jesus’ baptism, he does so through the paternal, not the maternal, line, describing Jesus as “about thirty years old, being the son (as was supposed) of Joseph, son of Heli, son of Matthat, son of Levi,” and so forth. As the genealogy continues, we learn that Jesus’ lineage extends back to “son of Nathan, son of David, son of Jesse,” and further back to “son of Perez, son of Judah, son of Jacob.” At the end of the line, Jesus is “son of Seth, son of Adam, son of God” (Luke 3:23–38).
No special claim is made for Adam by calling him “son of God.” Adam was the child of God in the sense that all human beings may be called children of God. But a solemnity is conveyed nonetheless. In the Old Testament, genealogies tend to be given at times of either transition or inauguration, and the baptism of Jesus—the point in the narrative where Luke inserts this genealogy—is both. Luke’s point in giving him a genealogy that stretches back to the very beginning is to enhance the importance of the moment when Jesus begins his career, but there is a secondary and equally important point—namely, that Jesus, besides being a son of David, is also a son of Judah and a son of Adam, which is to say: a Jew before he is the Messiah, and a man before he is a Jew.
As we noted earlier, God could have become human without beginning his human existence in a woman’s womb. After his resurrection, he will ascend into heaven, floating upward before the eyes of his followers until “a cloud [hides] him from view” (Acts 1:9). Why could he not simply have floated downward at the start of his career? Would anything be different? The power that “the Christmas story,” a story built around an ordinary human birth, seems still to exert after so many tellings is answer enough.
And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:) To be taxed with M
ary his espoused wife, being great with child.
And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.
And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. 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 this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.
And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us. And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child. And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds.
But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them. (KJV; Luke 2:1–20)
The fact that God should have become a man acquires most of its literary interest from the unexpected kind of man that God becomes; and it is the character of the adult Jesus that contrasts most strikingly with the character of God as previously revealed. However, that God should have begun his human life as an infant is compelling in a different and opposite way because although men are all different, babies are all alike. Full participation in the human condition requires a beginning in the leveling anonymity of infancy. The adult Jesus of Nazareth, as we have begun to see, has a highly developed, distinctive, and by no means always appealing personality. He provokes reactions that are as contradictory as he is. The infant Jesus of Bethlehem, by contrast, releases emotions that are as simple and uncomplicated as, at this early point, he himself still is. Had God begun his human career, miraculously, as an adult, he would have forfeited all this.
Part of the pathos and the appeal of an infant is the infant’s ignorance of the circumstances of his or her birth. Though all babies are alike, all birth scenes are different. Is the baby the daughter of a refugee, or the son of a great athlete? Is the father a wealthy merchant, or a drug-addicted pickpocket? Has the mother died in childbirth? Is the world around the child at war? The circumstances surrounding the birth of Jesus are well calculated to enhance his pathos and his appeal, for noble as his Jewish lineage is, his birth coincides with a humiliating event in the life of the Jews—namely, a census conducted by a foreign power.
In ancient Israel, it was a grievous sin even for the country’s own king to conduct a census, perhaps because the practice of people-counting was understood to be a foreign usage connected always and only with taxation and forced labor. In 2 Samuel 24, David conducts a census over the strenuous objections of Joab, the commander of his army; and God, enraged, reacts by sending a pestilence upon Israel that kills seventy thousand on the first day. When God makes Mary and Joseph ciphers in the census of Caesar Augustus, he emphasizes their helplessness—and the helplessness of his own infant self—before foreign power at its most onerous. Whether or not the Messiah will end this kind of humiliation, he will at least have shared it first.
That the census that brings Joseph to Bethlehem is a census of the whole world and not just of Judea makes clear that it is the human condition and not just the Jewish condition that God is taking on—the condition of Judea oppressed by Rome, in the first place, but thereafter that of all oppressed people at the mercy of officious power. What mitigates such vulnerability, as all the world knows, is money, but Joseph and Mary appear to have little in their purse. If they could buy their way into the inn, one assumes that they would do so, but apparently they cannot. They must lay their newborn in a feeding trough, a manger. Where do they themselves sleep? In a classically biblical way, Luke leaves it to us to imagine where they sleep. Tradition has placed the three in a stable, but not all mangers are found in stables. For all the text tells us, they could be sleeping in the open, the adults lying on the ground near the animal feeder that they have turned into a makeshift crib.
An adult of either sex feels an involuntary, instinctual impulse to protect the newborn—the human being in a condition of maximum vulnerability. In the Gospel of Luke, the impulse to protect is both reined in and spurred on by the fact that this newborn is not just a messiah (a christ), but “Christ the Lord.” The angels call him by the name or title ho kurios, which was commonly used in the Greek Old Testament to refer to God himself. As ho kurios reduced to the condition of a helpless newborn, baby Jesus has become an icon for infant vulnerability scarcely equaled in all of literature. As W. B. Yeats put it in “A Prayer for My Son,”
Though You can fashion everything
From nothing every day, and teach
The morning stars to sing,
You have lacked articulate speech
To tell Your simplest want, and known,
Wailing upon a woman’s knee,
All of that worst ignominy
Of flesh and bone.
The infant Jesus is the more intensely an icon of vulnerability because even on the night when the angels are singing “Peace, good will toward men,” no one hearing the story of his birth quite forgets the story of his death. Every victim of judicial murder was once a newborn. Jesus’ involuntary defenselessness at the beginning of his life mirrors and anticipates his voluntary defenselessness at its end.
And, behold, there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon; and the same man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel: and the Holy Ghost was upon him. And it was revealed unto him by the Holy Ghost, that he should not see death, before he had seen the Lord’s Christ. And he came by the Spirit into the temple: and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him after the custom of the law, then took he him up in his arms, and blessed God, and said,
Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace,
according to thy word:
For mine eyes have seen thy salvation,
Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people;
A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people
Israel.
And Joseph and his mother marvelled at those things which were spoken of him. And Simeon blessed them, and said unto Mary his mother, Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against; (Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also,) that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed. (KJV; Luke 2:25–35)
Simeon, inspired by God, not only knows that the infant in his arms is the Messiah; he also divines, as the child’s parents do not, what this will mean in practice both for Israel and for the boy himself. Simeon’s words are a patchwork of famous phrases from Isaiah, but his rearrangement of them has a point. Though it promises “the glory of thy people Israel,” it lays rather more stress on what God will do through Israel for the rest of the world, muting nationalistic or militaristic promises made even in the very passages that he so selectively quotes. The phrase “a light to lighten the Gentiles,” for example, occurs at Isaiah 42:6–7 (KJV):
[I will] give thee for a covenant of the people,
for a light of the Gentiles;
To open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison,
and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house.
; An inspiring vision, but the same passage contains verses in which God announces that, after a long and anguished delay, he is about to unleash his fierce power against Israel’s oppressors:
For long I have kept quiet, held myself at bay,
moaning like a woman in labor,
panting and gasping for air.
But now I will ravage hill and mount,
will blight all their growth;
I will turn the torrents into firm ground
and dry up the bogs.
I will lead the blind by a path they do not know,
by paths they know not will I conduct them.
(Isa. 42:14–16)
Simeon, who is inspired by God, hints that Israel’s glory will no longer include all that God once said it would include that it will be other than he said it would be. If that is unsettling, still more so is the revelation that the Messiah will be an ambivalent liberator, one destined for the fall as well as the rise of many in Israel, and that “a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also.” When Gabriel first visited Mary, he said nothing of this sword.