The First Christmas

by Marcus J. Borg

  Promise and Fulfillment in the Law

  The Law (also called the “Torah” and “Pentateuch”) consists of the first five books of the Bible, Genesis through Deuteronomy. The first portion of the Jewish tradition to become sacred, to become “Bible,” it combines Israel’s story of its origins and the laws by which it was to live within its covenantal relationship with God. It was the foundational narrative of Israel’s existence and life.

  Promise and fulfillment are its overarching theme, structuring the Torah as a whole. Early in Genesis, the story of Israel’s father and mother, Abraham and Sarah, begins with God’s promise to them. They are nomads without a home and childless as well, but God promises a homeland and descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky (Gen. 15:5–7; see also 12:1–2, 7). By the end of the Pentateuch, many generations later, their descendants stand on the border of the “promised land,” about to become a people living in their own land. The promise to Abraham and Sarah is about to be fulfilled.

  In between the promise in Genesis and its fulfillment as the Torah ends is story after story of threats to the fulfillment and God’s overcoming of the threats. Abraham and Sarah are promised descendants—but they are old and barren. Nevertheless, Sarah conceives. So also Rebekah (wife of Isaac) and Rachel (wife of Jacob) are barren—but God opens their wombs.

  Then the worst threat to the promise happens: the ancient Hebrews fall into slavery in Egypt and face genocide at the hands of Pharaoh, the ruler of their world. But God through Moses liberates them from Egypt and rescues them at the sea from a pursuing Egyptian army. In the wilderness, the threat to the promise is generated by Israel’s lapses into faithlessness. But despite all these obstacles, God’s promise is fulfilled.

  The Prophets: Hope for an Ideal King of Justice and Peace

  In the Prophets, the other portion of the Jewish tradition that had reached canonical status by the time of Jesus, the promise and the problem take a different form. It is no longer about land and descendants, for the ancient Israelites had become a people living in their own land. Now the yearning and promise are for justice and peace, most often associated with the hope for an ideal king who would bring both.

  This yearning was generated by the establishment of a monarchy within Israel around 1000 BCE, a few centuries after the exodus from Egypt. Before long, the monarchy had become a native domination system that oppressed and exploited most of the people. Egypt had been recreated within Israel and the Israelite king had become a new Pharaoh, to use language from the contemporary Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann.

  The period of Israel’s history covered by the Prophets concerns the rise, failure, and fall of the monarchy. With few exceptions, the kings of Israel and Judah are pronounced to have done, in the words of a frequent refrain in the books of Kings, “what was evil in the sight of the Lord.”

  In this setting, the prophets expressed the people’s yearning for and God’s promise of a transformed world. This involved them in consistent indictment of the monarchy for its injustice, violence, and idolatry. The three go together: injustice and violence are the product of loving something more than loving the “the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Exod. 20:2). The Lord of the exodus and the lords of monarchy, of the domination system, are very different.

  And so the yearning was for a different kind of king and a different kind of kingdom. The prophets yearned for and promised one who would “do justice” and “love kindness” and “walk humbly with God” (Mic. 6:8). Sometimes it took the form of hope for a son of David, a new David, the great king who ruled Israel before the monarchy became opulent and exploitative—hope for a ruler who would bring justice and peace to Israel and the world.

  The hope and promise are expressed in one of the best-known passages in the Prophets, as we noted in Chapter 3. It is found in virtually identical form in Isaiah 2:2–4 and Micah 4:1–3. We first cite the portion that is essentially identical in the two prophets, and italicize the most familiar part:

  In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house [the temple in Jerusalem, built on Mt. Zion] shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised up above the hills. Peoples shall stream to it, and many nations shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

  Then, to this promise of a world of peace and nonviolence, Micah adds the promise of justice and a world without fear:

  But they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid. (4:4)

  People sitting under their own vines and fig trees is an image of everybody having their own land and therefore having a secure basis for their material existence. And it is not simply bare subsistence that is envisioned: vines and fig trees are about more than subsistence. It is an image of everybody having enough and being secure—“and no one shall make them afraid.”

  This is the promise that sounds through the prophets—a world of justice and peace radically different from the world of their own monarchy and the world of the nations. For them, this is the passion of the God of Israel, who brought Israel out of the land of Egypt.

  By the time of Jesus, the ancient Jews had lived under one empire after another for around five hundred years. Some were worse than others, but all behaved as empires do, with their attendant oppression, injustice, and violence. The only exception to imperial rule was a century of independence under native rulers (the Maccabees, also known as the Hasmoneans) from about 164 to 63 BCE. But their rule did little to bring justice and peace. And with the introduction of Roman imperial rule in 63 BCE, the Jewish people seemed more oppressed than ever.

  The hope for justice and the promise of peace had not come to pass. In this setting, the stories of the first Christmas have extraordinary power. Both Matthew and Luke proclaim: Jesus is the means through which God’s promises are, and will be, fulfilled.

  CONCLUSION: THE INFANCY HYMNS REVISITED

  We conclude by returning to the three hymns in Luke as magnificent expressions of early Christian hope and fulfillment. In the words of these ancient hymns, older than the gospel of Luke, we hear not only the conviction that God’s promise is being fulfilled, but also the shape, the content, of that promise and that fulfillment.

  The opening lines of the Magnificat (1:46–55) are already familiar to us. Mary sings, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.” She continues, “God’s mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.”

  Then, the middle part of Mary’s song recites the content of God’s promise now being fulfilled. We encourage you to attempt the difficult: try to hear these familiar words for the first time.

  God has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

  He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;

  he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.

  Mary’s song emphasizes the great reversal brought by the coming of Jesus—scattering the proud, bringing down the powerful, sending the rich away empty, lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry. Only when our ears are dulled by habituated ways of hearing do we miss the radical meaning of this language.

  This is the hope expressed in Hannah’s hymn, the model for Mary’s:

  The bows of the mighty are broken, but the feeble gird on strength.

  Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread, but those who were hungry are fat wi
th spoil….

  The Lord makes poor and makes rich, he brings low, he also exalts.

  He raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap. (1 Sam. 2:4–5, 7–8)

  Indeed, this is the hope of the Law and the Prophets: that the world will be changed. To say the obvious, this hope is for this world. It is not about life beyond death, but about the transformation of this world.

  Then Mary’s song concludes with the affirmation that this is the fulfillment of God’s promise to the ancestors of the Jewish people:

  God has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,

  according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.

  This is Luke’s way of proclaiming what the coming of Jesus means.

  In the Benedictus (1:68–79), we find the same emphasis on Jesus as the fulfillment of God’s promise for the transformation of this world. Though Luke puts this hymn into the mouth of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptizer, it is clearly about Jesus, not John.

  It begins by blessing God for what has happened: “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them.” Then it speaks about Jesus as “a mighty savior” who is the fulfillment of the prophets: “God has raised up a mighty savior for us in the house of his servant David, as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old.” The result: so “that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us.”

  The hymn then returns to the affirmation of promise fulfilled: “Thus God has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors, and has remembered his holy covenant, the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham.” The result? The same as in the earlier verse: “to grant us that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.” Finally, it concludes with the theme of light and peace: “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

  Like that of the Magnificat, its image of God’s promise and of Jesus as a mighty savior concerns this world, not heaven. The early Christians who sang the Benedictus emphasized salvation from their enemies so that in this life they might serve God without fear all their days.

  These hymns proclaim and remind us that the God of the Bible is concerned about the whole of life. There is a “spiritual” reading of these hymns and the Christmas stories as a whole that sometimes obscures this. Within this reading, their language is understood to refer primarily or only to “internal” states: the spiritually proud will be brought down, and the spiritually lowly will be lifted up; the “poor” are the spiritually poor, and they will be filled; the enemies are spiritual enemies, and so forth.

  But to suppose this is to ignore the fact that this language is about how the world should be. The exclusively “spiritual” reading of this language emerged only after Christianity became the dominant religion of late Roman and then European culture. Before then, it was understood to be about this world and the transformation of this world.

  The Magnificat and the Benedictus—and the Christmas stories and the Bible as a whole—combine what we often separate, namely, religion and politics, spirituality and a passion for this world. Are these hymns religious and spiritual? Yes. Are they also political, about a transformed world? Yes. Together, they announce, in the language of our Chapter 3, that the Great Divine Cleanup of the World has begun in Jesus.

  Like Luke himself, we give the last word to the Nunc Dimittis, the third and briefest hymn. On the occasion of the presentation of the infant Jesus in the temple, Simeon, described as “righteous and devout” and “looking forward to the consolation of Israel” (2:25), sings it. “Guided by the Spirit,” Simeon “took Jesus in his arms and praised God”:

  Lord, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word;

  for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,

  a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel. (2:28–32)

  The words of this hymn powerfully proclaim the promise and fulfillment theme. What Simeon has yearned for, what Israel has yearned for, has come to pass: in Jesus, God’s salvation has come; and it is revelation to the Gentiles and glory to Israel. Simeon can die in peace.

  PROPHECY FULFILLED

  So, is Jesus prophecy fulfilled? Yes. And in a much richer and fuller sense than imagined by those of us who grew up with the prediction-fulfillment formula and paradigm.

  Jesus is not the fulfillment of miraculously specific predictions. Rather, he is the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets in a much more comprehensive sense. He is not their replacement, as has too often been thought by Christians, as if he superceded, and thus made irrelevant, the Law and the Prophets (and thus Judaism).

  Instead, he is, according to Matthew and Luke (and the rest of the New Testament) the completion of the Law and the Prophets. He is their crystallization, their expression in an embodied life. He decisively reveals and incarnates the passion of God as disclosed in the Law and the Prophets—the promise and hope for a very different kind of world from the world of Pharaoh and Caesar, the world of domination and empire.

  That Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, is not a fact to be proved, as if it could be the logical conclusion of a syllogism based on the argument from prophecy. Rather, to call Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, Lord, and Savior, as the Christmas stories do, is a confession of commitment, allegiance, and loyalty. To do so means: I see in this person the anointed one of God, the decisive disclosure of God—of what can be seen of God in a human life, the fulfillment of Israel’s deepest yearnings, the one who reveals God’s dream for this world. This is what it means to call him Emmanuel and to affirm that Emmanuel has come.

  CHAPTER NINE

  JOY TO THE WORLD

  In this our concluding chapter, we draw together three themes. The first is joy. To say the obvious, it is the dominant tone of the celebration of Christmas. A second is the season of Advent, the month leading up to Christmas. It is a time of expectant anticipation and repentant preparation. A third is the meaning of Christmas past for Christmas present and Christmas future. What does it mean for us now to take seriously what these stories meant for them then?

  CHRISTMAS AND JOY

  As we have already seen, the stories of the first Christmas are filled with light and fulfillment—Jesus is the light in the darkness and the fulfillment of God’s promise and ancient Israel’s yearning. Therefore, and not surprisingly, they are also filled with joy. These three themes—light, fulfillment, and joy—are not separate themes, but more like threads, woven together seamlessly into a whole.

  We hear the sound of joy most emphatically in Luke’s story of the first Christmas. In the previous chapter, we highlighted the theme of fulfillment in Luke’s three infancy hymns. Here we underline their unmistakable joy.

  Their very names—the Magnificat, the Benedictus, the Nunc Dimittis—express joy. Mary sings, I magnify God because of what God is doing in me. Zechariah sings, Blessed be the Lord God of Israel who has visited and redeemed his people. Simeon sings, Now I can depart in peace for I have seen your salvation. They are songs of joy.

  So also the angelic message to the shepherds (Luke 2:10, 13–14) is filled with joy: “I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people…” And then:

  Suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,

  “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”

  As in Luke’s story of Christmas then, the celebration of Christmas now is filled with joy. Consider the opening lines of familiar Christmas hymns:

  Joy to the world, the Lord is come!

  Let earth receive her King!

  O come, all ye fait
hful,

  joyful and triumphant.

  It came upon the midnight clear,

  that glorious song of old.

  Hark! The herald angels sing,

  Glory to the newborn King!

  Angels we have heard on high,

  sweetly singing o’er the plains.

  …Gloria in excelsis Deo,

  From heaven above to earth I come

  to bring good news to everyone!

  Glad tidings of great joy I bring.

  Less familiarly, but gorgeously: “Break forth, O beauteous heavenly light, and usher in the morning.”

  JOY—AND CONFLICT

  The stories of the first Christmas are not only filled with joy, but also with the theme of conflict. We see this very clearly in Matthew. Though his story sounds the theme of fulfillment, its emotional tone is ominous. Driven and dominated by Herod’s plot to kill Jesus, it is dark and foreboding. It speaks of the murderous resistance of the rulers of this world to the coming of the kingdom of God.

  So also in Luke. Alongside and within his joyful emphasis, the theme of conflict with the powerful of this world appears (1:51–53):

  God has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

  He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;

  he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.

  What is hoped for in those lines is very different from the way things are and points forward to the conflict that will be engendered by Jesus’s public activity.

  The ominous tone becomes even more explicit when the aged Simeon warns Mary immediately after he has sung the Nunc Dimittis:

  This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel and to be a sign that will be opposed, so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul also. (2:34–35)