Our Gospel lesson is not long. In fact, it is mostly not really a lesson at all, but a family tree followed by a brief account of Mary's betrothal, which effects an inheritance: Jesus' legacy of Joseph's family line.
Let us pause to notice that the main thing about this tree, and its organizing principle, which is Babylon:
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So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations,
from David until the captivity in Babylon are fourteen generations, and from the captivity in Babylon until the Christ are fourteen generations. (Mt 1:17) |
Now, Abraham is from Babylon. And the Christ is most fully revealed in the Book of Revelation, which is about the triumph over Babylon. Do you see? This is all a cosmic drama, beginning with Babylon and completing in the end with the overcoming of Babylon (which is the world).
As His inherited genealogy discloses, Jesus, through this tree, has a checkered past. This is one of the set pieces in the Gospel of St. Matthew and a common subject among homilists. Last week, for example, St. Elisabeth's Convent in Minsk posted a reflection on Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth, as women who acted righteously, but in morally compromised ways. And let us not forget King David, the adulterer-murderer, nor his son, King Solomon. The genealogy singles out Solomon as born of a mother "who was Uriah's wife." And with his many, many concubines and wives, he stands out for indulging his outsized carnal appetites and surrounding himself with elaborate luxuries and accumulated riches. Do you see? He has concentrated within himself the worst traits of his father. All these values St. John the Baptist and Jesus plainly have rejected.
Of course, the broader and deeper truth is that we all descend from Adam and Eve and later Noah and Naamah, who are two of the most notorious couples ever to live — literally contaminating the whole of God's newly-created, pristine lifeworld. And while solidly Orthodox theologians reject Augustine's heretical innovation of Original Sin, we all clearly have paid the price for their shames. The primary point here is that we are all related in the same family. It is taken as bedrock fact by modern geneticists that all humans living on earth descend from the same one man joined to one woman. And none may boast, for this family is shamefully scandalous.
This is our family tree. From the point of view of Father God, we have grievously shamed our family name. We have not lived up to our name. From the point of view of His Son, we have handed Jesus a grievous history and a notorious name to be born to.
Closer to our subject, which is the Holy Nativity, Jesus was mocked as "Son of Mary" (Mk 6:3) — an epithet for "bastard." Can we not hear the tone of contempt in St. Mark's Gospel?
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"Is this not the carpenter, the Son of Mary?" (Mk 6:3) |
If we are tone deaf for the sake of the Son of God and for His Most Holy Mother, the text is explicit:
| So they were offended at Him. (Mk 6:3) |
Every Hebrew man is called by his father's name: Simon bar-Jonah, etc. Jesus was egregiously called "Son of Mary .... bastard!" And Ever-Virgin Mary was plagued by accusations of fornication with a Roman soldier named Panthera, recorded in The True Word — a second-century treatise written by the Greek philosopher Celsus. (The work survives through Origen's landmark of Patristic literature, Contra Celsum.)
It is useless to paper over the sins of our fathers and mothers. Like a man riddled with the visible ravages of Tertiary Syphilis, humanity's inheritance of disease is something we just can't hide. God's blessing in Eden was innocence, beauty, and everlasting life. But man transmuted this empyreal gift into our gritty world of endless rivalry, rage, criminality .... and we still do.
The great majority of us leave the place of our original innocence We all born into this world of original innocence. But we have left it in order to (we say) "experiment." We cannot escape the etymology of adult, which is the past participle of the Latin, adolescere, from which get our word adolescence. There is an inevitability implied here: from adolescent to adult. And the infinitive of the verb adultare means "to pollute, to defile, to commit adultery." This is the dark progression inviting us into devilish existence. Nonetheless, the pure heart is revulsed at these so-called rites of adolescence and becomes progressively more revulsed at adultery and what we call "adult entertainment." And everyone was born with the heart. Do you remember the grieving you felt when you left this world of innocence? And I have met people who have never consented from these things at beginning and throughout their lives continue to revulsed by them.
Our exemplar, Jesus, entered the world (as we all do) in newborn innocence. Do you see that God visiting His people would have been expected as "a king from a distant land" to use the language of the parables? It is striking that God was born into the world as infant. He enters the world in newborn innocence and then imbues the world with that innocence, redeeming it. Born in God's purity of a young girl commited to purity. He would be heralded by a Forerunner noted for his purity, living a life fragrant of Eden — eating manna, avoiding cities, abstaining from strong drink, wearing natural clothing.
And Jesus then continued to walk in that same innocence setting out an example for all time:
| And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men. (Lu 2:52) |
You see, He never abandoned His innocence of life. And He completed the Masterpiece of His Life — He said, "It is finished" (Jn 18:30). He completed His Masterpiece in blamelessness, attested by the penitent thief, Dismas.
He did it all by an act of His will departing from the unbounded happiness and light of Heaven in order to enter our dark streets of danger and disease. Unbounded Heaven .... our narrow streets of darkness and disease. And He laid down a Heavenly challenge to us: "Metanoeite! Be transformed! Leave these narrow streets!" It is within the reach of every man and woman born into the world to follow Him in that same purity, to turn away from worldly darkness, and to enter that same Heaven of unbounded happiness and light.
At his birth in Bethlehem, we called Him "Son of David" thinking to exalt Him. But His adopted family's past is nothing to exalt. Our most penetrating Fathers locate Jesus' passion at the beginning, at His conception and birth. His birth is from Heaven, not the world. Yet He entered the world in order to redeem it.
The Logos and Creator, larger and more expansive than the Kosmos, entered horrible confines, the tiny and suffocating box of our humanity.
His tender and vulnerable infant form was then immediately confronted with the ways of our world and the harshness forced upon His mother, about to give birth, and His helpless stepfather. He would be born amongst barnyard animals in their mud and dung-stained hay, He would lie in a manger, — an animal's feeding trough hewn from wood. We may well imagine even His crib to be teeming with stinking bacteria and mold in that lightless cave .... however diligent His stepfather's efforts to scrape it clean. This was all part of the frank inhospitality accorded the Holy Family. We may well imagine that there was no place to wash or relieve other needs. And beyond this cave lay more danger. For shepherds were the ancient world's "dregs of society" — cut-throats and thieves, who lived far away from the towns and cities that they might not be apprehended.
This was His passion. Setting aside Heaven, He emptied Himself (His kenósis) and endured a thirty-three-year torture that He might first might heal the Creation root-and-branch (as St. Athanasius points out in De Incarnatione) and then showed us the way to Heaven by His godly example. He removed all impediments, the impediments imposed by Adam and Eve's penalty. He removed all impediments and then showed us the way forward with His godly example.
Oh yes, this was no fragrant and comely creche set upon a manicured lawn, but rather unvarnished degradation and homelessness — a fitting welcome to the food-chain existence of hunger, suffering, and homelessness we continue to foist upon the marginalized and vulnerable the world over. Do you see this drama is constantly repeated? Hunger, suffering, and homelessness we continue to foist upon the marginalized and vulnerable the world over and we being born into the world in godly innocence and purity? This drama continues. It goes on and on. And we play important roles in it.
Yet the One Who knows all and understands everything has come of His Own free will. He does not have to be schooled in the ways of our world. For it is the sorry state of the world and the suffering who have cried out to Him which have occasioned His Incarnation, which will save and redeem.
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All things were made by Him;
and without Him was not any thing made that was made. In Him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. (Jn 1:3-5) |
We say, and we read in our Gospel lesson, that "God is with us." Theologically, He inherited a family tree replete with murder, adultery, and incest, that we might inherit a family tree descending from the King of Heaven. We know this famous doctrine: God became man so that man might become God. This principle, known as the communication of properties (Communicatio idiomata) — first mentioned by the Apostolic Father Ignatius of Antioch and worked out by the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon — holds that the Divine properties of the Son of God interpenetrate His human person (and therefore our human persons) and vice versa. This principle is ongoing in each one of us, who were created with the Divine breath. And here we find the inner workings of Theosis. Theosis is possible for this reason.
But Theosis is something we must desire. God will not undertake our spiritual development. He will lead with His grace. He will help us by His unseen influences. (We call them "little miracles.") But, in practical terms, how will He save us? How will He lead this selfish, dog-eat-dog world to Heaven? He will do it all with relationship. He will love us. He will guide us out of our personal degradations. He will inspire us with His noble and luminous example of life. And He will call us to holy vocation. And one last thing: He will give His angels charge over us.
Let us cast our minds back to that cave on the darkest night of the year. And in that stinking darkness let us recollect our own most shameful memories, when we chose to we chose "to experiment" rather than to retain our original innocence: Jesus would later teach,
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But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.
If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness! (Mt 6:23) |
But He has come like a long-awaited dawn to flood the shadowy landscape with His light, illuminating every grotto and cave. It is He, the Light-giver, for this is His nature:
| His countenance was like lightning, and His clothing as white as snow. (Mt 28:3) |
Our darkness, the darkness of our whole bodies (as He described it) or the darkness of our whole world .... though it be the sum of all of our dreamless and sleepless nights, that is nothing to Him.
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For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth;
And the former things shall not be remembered or come to My mind. (Isa 65:17) |
New life. The former things will not be remembered.
On this Christmas, my brother and sisters, let us follow Him into His light. Let us become "new creations" by His life-transforming art. Let us be released from the servitude of the world and be freed from the cruel demons who continue to tempt us with carnal thoughts and worse. Let us depart from Babylon and, like Abraham, head off to a new horizon, where angels are our fellows, and where ladders fall from Heaven. Let us steer clear of the cities and their toxic culture. Let us live and breathe and be gladsome creatures of light!
For that is His legacy to us.
He calls us His brothers (Mt 12:29),
and
He offers us the King of Heaven
as our Father (Mt 6:9).
And the strange adoption with which He began His earthly stay ....
He has redeemed,
He has transfigured,
He has raised even to a birthright and a claim to the Kingdom of Heaven.
The demons shudder and weep at our inheritance.
And who among us will not claim it?
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.