Among Us

The Coming of God. The Advent of God. The Birth of God. The notion of such a thing stretches the imagination beyond all bounds. Yet, we have domesticated this scene to our human scale. Creches abound in churches, on family lawns, and, once upon a time, in public squares. They are cozy. The animals are cute. The little figures familiar — Mary, Joseph, Balthasar, Gaspar, Melchior.

Yet lying before us is the Almighty God .... even the incomprehensible birth of God among us — larger and greater than the universe, yet lying within the narrow confines of a feeding trough (a manger).

This is not the familiar and the cozy, but rather the mysterious and the sublime: radiant with Uncreated Light and attended by ranks of angels. How shall we begin to describe this? What words could we possibly choose to express this? The Holy Gospels abide as our inspired narratives and stories for these scenes of Divine life. They were written by men who were filled and elevated with the atmosphere of Heaven's Kingdom.

But what are the Gospels exactly? Arising from these ancient Hebrew lands situated in a Graeco-Roman world, what expressions of literary art do they represent? For by understanding their literary aspirations, we shall come to appreciate more fully their monumental stature.

If we are to follow the dictum of the Fathers that the Scriptures must be understood on four levels — literal, allegorical, tropological, and eschatological — then we must ask, "Which kind of allegory?" Into which genre of literature do the Gospels fall? The consensus among scholars is that they are Graeco-Roman bioi (biographies). But we must protest. For classical biography was a genre specifically set out to gauge lives worthy of imitation. But in the pagan estimate, as St. Paul famously attests (1 Cor 1:21-24), Jesus' life was not a life to be imitated at all. For it ended in shameful ignominy: public execution on a Cross.

The Gospels cannot be philosophical biography in the tradition of Diogenes Laertes' Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. For Jesus was not a philosopher. He proposed no coherent or systematic philosophy. He left no corpus of opéré or works, not even a single, written page. He left behind no philosophical school, no students, no adherents, for His disciples all ran like rag-tag disreputables.

Then, perhaps the Gospels follow the pattern of historical or political biography in the tradition of Plutarch's Parallel Lives, which compared the towering figures of Greek and Roman history — Alexander, Pericles, Julius Caesar, Tiberius. But Jesus appears in the Gospels not as a great leader but as the opposite: He rejected public acclaim, and sought to hide the "Messianic secret" as St. Mark's Gospel attests: "Tell no one what you have seen," was His signature command. And He told Pontius Pilate that His Kingdom is not of this world. No. If the Gospels are classical biography, then they must be styled as "anti-biography."

Our view of Jesus' life, of course, is permeated with Uncreated Light — the Light of the Mount of Transfiguration or of Resurrection morning. But these categories are rejected by pagans .... then and now.

We Christian have the privilege of viewing everything backwards — from the ending (and past the ending) to the beginning, as it were, ordered to the Kingdom of Heaven. We live at ground level understanding the first-century historical and cultural situation (at least in part), yet inevitably reading this incommensurably holy literature at "Heaven level." And standing on this vantage point, we grasp a crucial element of these sacred texts which most pagans would not have suspected: they are by their nature, by their intention, paradoxical. Perhaps this is is their salient quality. For reading the Gospels inevitably leads us into an atmosphere of mystery .... for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

Within this milieu, we nominate the highest form of classical literature: epic. The epic is rendered in high rhetoric. Its matter is that of kings and heroes of unimaginable stature, like Achilles or Aeneas, who descend from pagan gods according to their stories. Aeneas brings the holy fire of Troy into Italy, where he founds Rome. (The Aeneid will be later claimed as the epic of England, accepting Aeneas' grandson Brut as the eponymous founder of Britain.)

The epic regales us with the rise and fall of great nations. It celebrates national heroes. It displays human nobility and splendor on the grandest scale. Its atmosphere is the pagan divine including supernatural elements.

But considering the Gospels to be on this level?! Classicists will protest! Where are the feats of valor and military might? Where are the rise and fall of nations? Where do supernatural events appear? And who are the noble heroes? We reply, they are all present, but they are unseen. Understanding these noble epics aright will depend upon the nobility of the readers (or listeners during the Apostolic Age, for these documents were written).

St. Luke, to take one example, was alive to all these possibilities. As Biblical commentators have recognized during the past sixty years (following the publication of Werner Jaeger's Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (1961)), Luke was well-acquainted with classical authors. His writings constantly echo Homer, Aesop, Epimenides, Euripides, and Plato. Indeed, the variegated Greek curriculum known as Paideia had been present in the Levant since at least as early as the Maccabees, more than a century before Jesus' birth (see Tyler A. Stewart, "Jewish Paideia: Greek Education in the Letter of Aristeas and 2 Maccabees," Journal for the Study of Judaism (2017).)

This cultural milieu would have been known to all four Evangelists. And we can imagine the care taken by the great icon painter Luke in laying down a subtle background which might aspire to epic heights in recording the birth of God.

We begin today with precisely these subtle brush strokes, as St. Luke announces that the matter of his story is the life of kings:

Notice he does not say Bethlehem but rather "the city of David" — the king nonpareil in the Hebrew mind. But the English translation does not do justice to the tour de force of his spare but overpowering sentence

It makes the hairs stand on end! We hear echoes of Ecclesiaticus:

Surrounding this scene is the fulfillment of the yearning Hebrew soul: ranks upon ranks of angels rising up to Heaven and descending upon the King, the Son, the Heir. The place is humble yet electric with Divine glory with expansive abundance rising to Heaven, to its Kingdom.

In this, two scenes are rendered simultaneously: a star hovers above, yet to many unseen, and the voices of angels ring out, yet to many unheard. All that is visible, by comparison, repels worldlings: outcasts, mean circumstances, people living on the margins. They are manifestly the refuse of the world, rejected by a nearby innkeeper and will soon to be rejected by all the world.

We Christians protest: But this is the birth of God's Own Son! But revelers at the inn can plainly see that outside their window is a scene that falls ludicrously beneath that claim. Why, these people fall far beneath .... everyone, as their humble circumstances plainly attest.

The birth of an emperor must take place in the inaccessible precincts of alabaster palaces with soaring colonnades. The newborn royal must be laid in a cradle worked with fine gold encrusted with jewels. Only a purple coverlet might be laid upon the imperial crib. And an audience before such a child?! That will be be granted virtually no one. And as he develops and grows, he must continue to be distanced and held aloof bespeaking high dignity and awesome power.

Let us pause to ask a question. Who is the most accessible person on earth? Who is open to nearly any possibility, whose dignity does not preclude him or her from any person or thought? The answer is, the one who has the least, the one who has nothing to lose, who always has everything to gain. The one who has suffered, who has been deprived, this one will have a heart for the destitute and the poor. The one who has known abject humilty, this one will have eyes and ears for the lowly and oppressed. And in this, we begin to understand the genius of the Nativity of God.

How does one aspire to render the unrender-able — the unpaintable portrait of the birth of God? Perhaps one might understand this high matter and execute an epic .... but it must be an epic in which all things are invisible. The grandest scale military engagements will be depicted — but with vast multitudes of unseen demons fleeing in panic, fanning out in every direction from Bethlehem. Ancient painters depicted statues of pagain gods exploding as the Holy Family silently made their way past on their journey to Egypt. In a story described in the Apocryphal Gospels, the Holy Family steps in to a pagan temple and gods instantly are topplied in the awesome presence of the Lord Jesus.

Our epic hero does not merely descend from the gods, as did Aeneas and Achilles, but He is God. Our epic does not merely relate the rise and fall of nations (though it hints of a lifeworld ending some seventy years hence). No, it will relate the rise of the Kingdom that has no end. Our epic does not merely present a king or emperor, but the King of Heaven and earth, the Emperor Whose character rises incomprehensibly above us even as it sets out a lowliness which is manifestly beneath everyone. And in its mean lowliness, it is open and accessible to all, even to those most despised outcasts of Hebrew society: shiftless shepherds .... yet these are shepherds whose companions are star-led wizards, attended by glittering angels.

Here is the genius of God-with-us. Here is the inspired art of the Gospels and the Nativity of God. And here is our God and King: a child of the poor, born of low estate, one who would be

So let us kneel down in the mud beside His radiant cradle. Let us whisper a vow: "May His life be my life." For we must seek the privations allotted to Him. We must seek His sorrows and griefs. We must seek the lowly yet glorious path to His imperishable Kingdom.

O Lord Jesus, be born into our lives! For you are the Savior of the world and our King.