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Wrestling With the Mystery
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis December 4, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 44:1-8 Matthew 1:18-25
"We are most unwilling to accept mystery," wrote Frank Kermode, Cambridge don of English literature. We are unwilling to accept "what cannot be reduced to other and more intelligible forms." Yet he says of the biblical text "that is what we find here: something irreducible, therefore perpetually to be interpreted; not secrets to be found out one by one" but Mystery! So we turn in this season of waiting and expectation to the mystery held in solution by Matthew's gospel and the church's confession: conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the virgin Mary. "Perhaps," Kermode goes on to say, that mystery "is nothing more than our own bewilderment [our deafness and blindness] projected into the text." Perhaps at the end of the day that is all mere mortals can do when human reason is confronted by the mystery of the incarnation. Our bewilderment these days is legion and all over the theological map! The projected bewilderment of literalists before this doctrine can be likened to the interpretation of Genesis 1 espoused by the proponents of "intelligent design": literalists make of the mystery of the incarnation a biological and so scientific fact! In an unholy alliance of gynecology and theology, they contend that the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke tell us exactly how the Son of God was conceived and born: Mary was Jesus' mother and the Holy Ghost Jesus' father. No matter that biology was the last thing on Matthew's mind or that the church's later struggle with sexual intercourse and original sin was not even a twinkle in this gospel writer's eye. If any organ were involved, John of Damascus was to say wisely and truly seven centuries later, Mary's ear must be named as "the bodily organ of the miraculous conception of Christ": Mary received God's address, was made the handmaid of God's redemptive purpose and so bore to us God's Son. Not enough, hold the literalists: you must believe Mary was impregnated biologically by the Holy Spirit! I suspect when most people say they cannot believe in the virgin birth, this is what they cannot believe. Neither has the church ever believed this! Nevertheless a literally projected bewilderment that masquerades as certainty before this mystery prevails in popular culture as well as in conservative Christian circles. On the other and more likely hand to be found in this crowd of theological liberals, we liken the circumstances of Mary's "being with child" to the myriad of mythological conceptions in ancient religions, the conception and birth of Jesus being simply a later iteration. Gods have always had their way with virgins, we say; the claims made for the resulting offspring--the demigods of Babylonian or Greek mythology--lack only the theological sophistication of the incarnation. No matter, for our part, that in these verses Matthew means to tell us (in telling us Mary was a virgin) just the opposite: that Jesus was born of a woman and so was really human rather than a demigod. Or again we English majors have been known to identify the virgin birth as a literary device employed by Matthew and Luke alone that attempts to speak of Jesus' extraordinary substance-even as John's gospel and Paul's letters proclaim a pre-existent Christ to say the same. Or we make the case that the birth narratives are a "collection of largely uncertain, mutually contradictory, strongly legendary stories" [Hans Kung] that were added as afterthoughts to the already completed gospel of Jesus' life, death and resurrection. No matter the mystery with which these details intend to wrestle…details without which the mystery may be easily dispelled: we would rather bravely dwell alone in fact, "…satisfying ourselves with explanations of the unfollowable world" says Kermode, which in the end find us standing alone before the text, "aware of its…impenetrability, knowing that [it is a significant story] only because of our impudent intervention…Our sole hope and pleasure [then] is in the perception of a momentary radiance, before the door of disappointment is finally shut on us." This morning I want us neither to explain the mystery nor to dismiss the mystery lest we be found standing alone outside the door at the end of the season, believing ourselves on earth unaccompanied by the God who has come to us in Jesus Christ. I want us rather to wrestle with the mystery and the miracle of Christmas. "The church knew well what it was doing," wrote Karl Barth, "when it posted this doctrine on guard, as it were, at the door of the mystery of Christmas. It can never be in favor of anyone thinking he [or she] can hurry past this guard." This is the guard: Conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the virgin Mary. We are having to do, this morning, with the inconceivable meeting of God and man [humanity, human being] in the person of Jesus Christ-not only of a meeting but of God's Word become flesh, very God and very human become one in the birth of Mary's son. Here our knowledge of this utterly unique event can only be acknowledgment; our words can only be understood as confession: I believe…in Jesus Christ, God's only Son, our Lord who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the virgin Mary. If we think we are speaking of something we can know by any of our merely human ways of knowing unaided by God's Spirit, if we think we are wrestling with a reality that can be likened to something else in our experience and explained, we are not speaking of this mystery. So how can we possibly say anything? In a sense, we cannot: the incarnation is humanly impossible and this is the point. The Word "could only be fulfilled," writes the poet, "when it was no longer possible to receive because it was clearly understood as absurd." Still we must speak, but may only speak as we work backwards to Christ's birth from the inconceivable mystery of his resurrection! The claim of the Christian confession turned inside out is this: "The man Jesus of Nazareth is not the true Son of God because he was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. On the contrary, because he is the true Son of God and because this is an inconceivable mystery…therefore He is conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary….The mystery does not rest on the miracle. The miracle rests on the mystery." [Barth] Let us therefore turn to the miracle in Matthew's first chapter, to the story which is given as a sign to point us toward the mystery of the God who has come to us in Jesus Christ. A sign, you must keep in mind, is not the mystery itself. The words of scripture are just words; the water in the font is just water; the little cubes of bread and shot glasses of grape juice on a table that is just a table are just bread and juice. But as regards the inconceivable mystery of God's incarnation, they have been given as signs: signs that turn us toward the mystery of our meeting with the God who has pitched a tent in the fields where we abide. From the beginning, this is the turn our reason resists. We say we would prefer the facts-be they literal or liberal!--though W.H. Auden also told the truth when in his Christmas Oratorio he made the shepherds to chant, "We who must die demand a miracle!" A miracle that acts as a sign is precisely what Matthew has to offer. "The birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way," Matthew says after he has traced the seed of Abraham to David and then all the way to Joseph only to tell us that Joseph had nothing to do with the birth of Jesus. What is Matthew telling us when he writes that before Mary and Joseph came together, Mary was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit? What is he confessing when he says that Joseph took Mary as his wife but knew her not until she had borne a son…God's Son…the Son of the God who has chosen not to be God without us? At the door of the mystery of Christmas, Matthew tells us precisely what we know because we do not know the God who comes to us in this way: that we as human beings have nothing to contribute but have only to receive. That is to say there is nothing about us or in us that can conceive of God with us. If we have, then make that a small "g" god we have conjured up. We do not have a God gene despite the current best-selling claim! "The virginity of Mary in the birth of the Lord is the denial…of any power, attribute or capacity in [us] for God." [Barth] Or to put it another way, "Human nature possesses no capacity for becoming the human nature of Jesus Christ, the place of divine revelation." This is not to say that Christ has not claimed us in "the other" for love when in the other we see him naked, hungry, homeless, in prison. But this is to say that the limit set in the garden still holds: we cannot become as God nor can anything in us conceive of God. Hence the resistance of our reason ironically partakes, I think, of the truth Matthew means to tell us: born of the virgin Mary means born like us and yet "born as no one else was born, in a way which can as little be made clear biologically as the resurrection of a dead man"; born not because of male generation but solely because of a maiden's reception; born in the mystery that is the meeting of divine and human in the babe whom Joseph will claim for David's lineage by naming him Jesus, for he will save the people from life without him! This sign guards the mystery from what we would confidently believe without God. Yet guarding the mystery of Christmas is also the positive claim that this child born of Mary with no help from us was conceived by the Holy Spirit. That is to say, God takes the stage not as Mary's partner but as God, whose only begotten Son was conceived by God alone into our poor flesh and blood! This human life is begun in the freedom of God, the free choice of God to be with us and not without us. Again, this would be inconceivable except as the Spirit of God intercedes, now not only with Mary but between the sign of God's Word and the sinful turn of our lives, to be born in us. My friends, the Holy Spirit is acting still among us to create "a possibility, a power, a capacity…where otherwise there would be sheer impossibility." Here the miracle of Christmas has to do not only with Mary but with you and me. The same preparation of humanity for God by God addresses us, in the form of pure grace, the grace which meets us in Him who is God's only Son our Lord and whom therefore we now may receive and confess to be conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the virgin Mary for us! "Every time people want to fly from this miracle," Karl Barth concludes, "a theology is at work, which has ceased to understand and honour the mystery as well, and has rather essayed to conjure away the mystery of the unity of God and [humanity] in Jesus Christ, the mystery of God's free grace. And on the other hand, where the mystery has been understood and [we] have avoided every attempt at natural theology…the miracle [has come] to be thankfully and joyfully recognized." May the One who was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the virgin Mary be born anew, by the working of God's Spirit, in your heart and mind this day! Thanks be to God! |