Index
Preview:
the Symbols of Christmas
“I cannot tell you who God is or what God is. That is not within my capacity nor is it within the capacity of any other human being. What I can tell you is how I believe I have experienced God. Even then I have to be aware that I might be delusional.”
These words are part of what has become for me something of a mantra, with which I now conclude almost every lecture I give. They also seem to me to provide the only proper context within which to approach the Christmas narratives that are a gift to us from Matthew and Luke. These two writers were creating not history, but rather poetry born in the hearts of those who believed that they had experienced God in the adult life of a man named Jesus.
By the time these two gospels
were written, no one living knew the details of what happened when Jesus was born. That birth had occurred more than 85 years before Matthew wrote and perhaps 95 years before Luke wrote. In this era there was no such thing as a birth certificate or other legal records, and life expectancy was half what it is today.
Birth narratives are always fanciful interpretations of adult lives. To think about it critically is to realize that no one waits outside a home or a maternity ward to observe the birth of a great human being. It is only when one becomes great that the moment of that person's birth becomes significant for history. Does this mean then that birth stories are of no significance? Of course not! They tell us everything about what a
particular life has come to mean to those who helped frame the mythology. Birth stories do not attach themselves to insignificant lives.
It does force us to state categorically, however, that the accounts of Jesus’ miraculous birth, recalled extensively during the yearly celebration of Christmas, are not descriptions of literal occurrences. Stars do not announce human births. Angels do not sing to hillside shepherds. Wise men do not follow stars. Virgins do not conceive. These gospel writers were simply employing the methods that 1st century disciples of Jesus used to give content to their experience. They were saying in story and with vivid word pictures what Paul had articulated years earlier, when he
