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Sermon: The Fourth Sunday in Advent Year A - 19th December 2010
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping 7am
Readings: Isaiah 7:10-16 Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19 Romans 1:1-7 Matthew 1:18-25
As we ponder the opening scene of Matthew's story of the birth of the Christ Child, we may be struck by the similarity between Joseph's quandary and our own. We want to "do the right thing”, and we believe that somehow it is revealed in the Bible. Matthew writes for such a church. As Jewish Christians who had always reverenced the Law, they sometimes found themselves torn between strict adherence to the letter of the Torah and the supreme demand of love to which their new faith called them. If they neglected the Law, they were accused by others, and perhaps by themselves, of rejecting Bible and tradition as the "unrighteous”. Joseph is pictured as "righteous”, even though he had decided to act out of care for another person's dignity rather than strictly adhere to the Law. As it turned out, Joseph did not have to carry through on his decision, to put Mary aside. Matthew wants to instruct his church in being "righteous" in a way that respects both the Law of the Old Testament and the Christian orientation to love, even if it seems to violate the Law. Matthew does not here tell us, how this can be done, but the story has touched on a live issue in Matthew's church and ours. Thus Matthew's meaning for this story cannot be properly understood until we have worked through the Sermon on the Mount, indeed until one has worked through the Gospel as a whole. Thus Joseph stands, at the beginning of Matthew's Gospel, as a model of what Matthew hopes for all disciples, indeed, for each reader of the Gospel. Joseph is already facing the “you have heard that it said but I say to you" tension that will be displayed in the Sermon on the Mount that is found later in the Gospel, the tension between the prevailing understanding of God's com mandments and the new thing that God is doing in Jesus. By Joseph's decision to obey the startling and unexpected command of God, he is already living the heart of the law and not its letter, already living out the new and higher righteousness of the kingdom. In a difficult situation, he listens to the voice of God, and he is willing to set aside his previous misunderstanding of God's will in favour of this word from the living and saving God.
The first miracle in the New Testament is not the story of something Jesus did. It describes the act of God. In the birth story, as in the passion story, Jesus is passive and God is the actor. This is the nature of the Gospel as such. It is not the story of amazing things done by Jesus, but of what God has done for humanity in the event of Jesus Christ.
What is the particular meaning of this story? The birth of Jesus is important as a human birth and not just as a miracle. While Matthew's theology does not explicitly oppose the view that the humanity and suffering of Jesus Christ were only apparent, not real, the birth story as such is inherently against such thinking. By picturing Jesus as a baby and a child who is passive and vulnerable, as he will be again in the passion story, Matthew begins and ends his story with the fragile human life of Jesus surrounded by God, who is the hidden actor throughout. Matthew tells the story in such a way that no one could mistake Jesus for a baby God.
While Matthew relates the miraculous virginal birth as a literal historical event, he does not base major theological claims on it. The virginal conception is not the proof, or even the meaning, of the Christian claim that Jesus is the "Son of God”. The miraculous birth is never referred to again, not even in the rest of the "infancy narrative" . Yet, the claim that the Messiah was supernaturally conceived is not occurring by chance to Matthew. It is one of several ways Matthew has of confessing his faith that Jesus is the Son of God. The fact that Matthew has other ways of promoting Jesus means that Matthew does not bind faith in Jesus as the Son of God exclusively to one way of confessing it. When Peter later confesses the fundamental Christian faith that Jesus is "the Christ, the Son of the living God" , there is no indication that Matthew intends any reference to the extraordinary birth story. Matthew holds this way of picturing Jesus as the Son of God with other ways; for instance, Jesus' descent from David. Thus truth is communicated through story, which can hold together a variety of metaphors that logic finds difficult or impossible.
Matthew has no interest in relating the story of the virginal conception to later views of the sinfulness of sex as such from which the Messiah must be preserved, or from the taint of original sin, thought to be transmitted biologically. We know what Matthew and all his first readers surely knew, that there were at that time many stories of heroes and special personages who were "sons" or "daughters" of God through miraculous conception. In parallel to this, Judaism had apparently already developed traditions suggesting that great figures such as Isaac and Moses had been supernaturally conceived, so that Jesus' supernatural conception is a part of Matthew's Moses typology. There is a sense in which the tradition that preceded Matthew of the virginal conception, adopted and interpreted by him, uses this Hellenistic idea, already adopted by Hellenistic Judaism, as a means of interpreting Jesus' divine sonship.
Yet there are great differences as well. In the New Testament birth stories, God does not assume the male role in the conception, but the Holy Spirit, the divine power, works in Mary to conceive a child without a human father. Jesus is not pictured as a hybrid product of divinity and humanity, and could never utter the self-description attributed to one of the Sibyls, born of one divine and one human parent: An immortal nymph was my mother, my father an eater of corn. "I am by birth half mortal, half divine.” In the story of Jesus, as in the Jewish traditions that had developed about Isaac and Moses, the point of the miraculous conception is not the divine nature of the child; neither Isaac nor Moses becomes a "son of God" by virtue of their special birth. It is, rather, the special role will play in God’s saving plan.
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”
This sermon based upon The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol VIII, pages 136-8, Abingdon Press, 1995, Nashville.