Protecting This New Child
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How do we see God continuing to move history forward in the Advent and event of Christ's coming? The coming of the annointed one, as a child, is the fulfillment of promises in Matthew, and is full of promises, in Luke. These promises still need fulfillment and take fulfillment today. Our hearts have prepared Him room and already this little Lord Jesus is little LORD Jesus. But what does this mean in real life? I will speak to the guidance given in the birth narratives themselves, but also look at two passages which put the coming of the Messiah in the context of world changing moment, time of excitement, hinge of history. Thus we will look at the meaning of the angels, the issues of conflict and ignorance, and the matter of how God's people are defined-and what their/our task is.
This messianic moment is not just that cliché'd combination of crisis and opportunity, because that would put this concentration of time in our hands. Even the recent millennium celebrations and Y2K fears fell flat as they had no link to God's purposes in history. This is not just a human birthday that concentrates our sense of time and personal destiny. This is not even the normal fore-shadowings that we might see in the birth of a prophet. This is an intensification of history. The Daniel text talks about an eschatological moment, what we would call an apocalyptic moment. Apocalypse really means unveiling; eschatology and eschaton are about the end not just of an empire, but of an age. Out of the everyday run of chronos, this is the time of kairos. Something is at hand, and it is in God's hand.
Daniel is put with the prophetic books, but it is the visions of a seer who is "out on the edge of darkness." Most often we hear quoted Daniel chapter 7, which talks about the coming of one like the Son of Man, the Ancient of Days speaking with fire in his mouth, and the beast with 10 horns, images that reappear in the book of Revelation. But our text comes from the last chapter, 12, which contains some of the first great images of resurrection among the Jews, part of the deliverance brought by, but not wrought by, the angel Michael. Apocalyptic revelations are usually from angels and involve cosmic changes. Gabriel in the nativity stories is the angel, or messenger, who responds to supplications. The presence of the angels in the birth stories helps us see how apocalyptic and eschatological Jesus birth is to be.
Michael, sometimes called an archangel, is the patron angel of Israel and actually seems to fight the patron angels of Persia and Greece. When Paul speaks of the powers and principalities in heavenly places, this is the kind of power, sometimes invisible encompassing blindness or Lucifer-like evil that he means. (Walter Wink's books are crucial in understanding these forces which other ancients called gods). Daniel gives great promise of resurrection, and of the wise who recognize God's deliverance in "a time of great trouble," will "shine like the brightness of the firmament." But this knowledge will be shut to most people until the time of the end.
Another part of the Advent message of preparation was the expectation that God would clean house. John the Baptist's words as well as his birth story are read: "prepare ye the way of the Lord." In whatever wilderness you are in, make straight a pathway to Zion, for the Lord will return and deliver his chosen from captivity. Jesus' coming is enormous good news, because it comes in the context of struggle: God has slipped his agent by the blockers, a secret agent has been inserted behind enemy lines... The coming of Jesus is set within the very real historical losses experienced by Israel and very long longings that we believe Jesus, when he was grown, read correctly. It was a time when Israel would explode. Jerusalem herself would be crucified in 70AD and then Israel scattered to the four winds. Jesus knew the signs of the times and he knew the Biblical script for the coming of the Day of the Lord, great and terrible. The question was, for him, how to change that time of cosmic battle to glad tidings of peace?
The infancy stories are very clear that Jesus is immediately involved in a struggle. In Matthew its against Herod. Both birth narratives give us the time of Herod, which is what puts Jesus' birth before year 0 on the calendar. But Matthew, who sees Jesus above all as King of the Jews, knows that the false king is the one threatened, the false king whose violence is unmasked. (One year I showed a poster of the painting of the Old King by Georges Rouault, the luxury and emptiness that grasps for power...) In Luke, the contrast is with Caesar. When Mary gets the word, before she begets the Word, the Magnificat-though soaked in biblical imagery from Samuel against a corrupt order-is a challenge to the high and mighty. Jesus is savior and the angels' proclamation is a counter proclamation to Rome. And at first this news is night news, subversive news, glorious yet seen by few.
"Blessed are your eyes," Jesus says in today's text, "for they see, and your ears, for they hear. Truly, I say to you, many prophets and righteous ones longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it" (Matthew 13: 16-17). So we are the recipients of this proclamation that others have died before receiving-we are in on the turning of the ages. In that passage, Jesus was saying that to those who had the understanding of the parables, more riches of understanding would be given. His quote from Isaiah is actually chilling as winter wind, as it is an ironic warning call put in God's mouth by the prophet:
"You shall indeed hear but never understand, ... see but never perceive.
For this people's heart has grown dull, and their ears of heavy, their eyes closed... lest they should understand with their heart and turn for me to heal them"
(Its from the Greek version of the Old Testament called the Septuagint, Isaiah 6: 9-10.).
We are the ones who have received the parable of the incarnation, the Birth Story of Jesus, we who have come this Sunday after the celebration. We are the ones who have long longed to see the Spirit of God moving in human history, we perceive the danger of a dreadful outcome and the struggle is also before us, for this is a time of intensity misread, ignored, denied. Bethlehem is a war zone, there is an abomination of desolation and desecration in our holy places, the Herods in Israel and Palestine need little identification, the Caesar is scarier to identify, and there is excitement about that false messiah, war itself. (Iraq, incidentally, is not most of ancient Persia, which is current Iran, but Iraq is partly ancient Chaldea, in the Assyrian kingdom which Darius conquered, and from which magi and diviners, sometimes called Chaldeans, also came.)
There is another part of the ancient longing that the birth stories speak to-and which Jesus spoke to very clearly. It is the question of who is the holy people and how are they made holy? Are the holy people first and foremost the priests, who can follow all the cultic rules, and on whom everyone else depends, or is the whole people holy: not just the chief priests who ran the Temple, or the Levites, who were in a sense the holy tribe within Israel from way back, Aaron's descendents? In Daniel's time the Temple had been re-built but it was built mainly with Persian money and Israel itself was resettled under Ezra and Nehemiah as a buffer state against Egypt. Daniel's prophetic side is sickened by the compromise with the state, as well as monopoly of religious purity-making by the Temple elite.
As we re-approach the birth stories, we see the apocalyptic element, the angels speaking, the struggle for power, and what are the next steps? Luke gives us immediately after the nativity the story of Jesus as the young boy in the Temple. We can not just stick with the beautiful baby Jesus-we need to start growing up, wising up, and we need the structure of religious faith. Matthew is even more into wising us up, with the story of the wise men out-foxing Herod. Matthew's message to us is about protecting the child-fleeing even into the land of our enemies if we have to do it. Matthew's story has echoes of Jesus as the new Moses, recapitulating the people of Israel's sojourn in Egypt so that "out of Egypt have I called my son" will come true, again.
Christmas, or the birth of Jesus, is not the climactic moment in either Gospel. It is a moment of fulfillment, but only to those who have eyes and ears to see. It does break salvation open to everyone-the shepherds for Luke the first night, but also those old faithful souls, Simeon and Anna the prophetess, who have waited long at the Temple to see the Lord's annointed. (Simeon's words pre-figure Jesus' words of our passage: Blessed am I to see the Lord's messiah...) What does the coming of Christ mean for us now in our history?
Whatever kind or degree of war we may soon intensify, we Christians must resist the urge to see this human-made event as the fulfillment of God's purposes. As I have recently read in the book, War is a force that gives us meaning (NY: Public Affairs/Perseus, 2002), by Chris Hedges-our lead speaker on Martin Luther King Day-war almost always involves demonizing the other side, suppressing dissent at home, and forgetting much of one's cultural heritage. It over-simplifies in order to activate, and almost always descends into brutality and massacre in the power struggles at home and abroad. So rightly does Matthew include the slaughter of the innocents, which follows soon upon the visit of the wise men next week. (How can we not shudder at these parallels?)
Hedges book also gives a great story of hope that I think reveals the Messiah's work and calling to us, a work of astonishing child protection. Here, from pages 50-53:
"I sat one afternoon with a Bosnian Serb couple, Rosa and Drago Sorak, outside of the Muslim enclave of Gorazde where they had once lived. They poured out the usual scorn on the Muslims, but then ... told me that not all Muslims were bad. This, they said, it was their duty to admit.
During the fighting in the bleak, bombed-out shell of a city that was Gorazde, where bands of children had become street urchins and hundreds of war-dead lay in hastily dug graves, a glimmer of humanity arrived for the Soraks in the shape of Fadil Fejzic's cow. The cow forged an ususual bond between Fejzic, a Muslim, and his Serbian neighbors, the Soraks.
When the Serbs began the seige of Gorazde in 1992, the Soraks lived in the city with their older son, Zoran, and his wife. They were indifferent, although they were Serbs, to the nationalist propaganda of Bosnian Serb leaders like Radovan Karadzic.
After Serbian forces began to shell the city and cut off the electricity, gas and water, the family refused to move out. They threw their lot in with the Bosnian government and were branded by the Bosnian Serbs, who pounded them each day from the mountains above the town, as traitors.
On the night of June 14, 1992, the Bosnian police came to the door for Zoran, who until the war was on Yugoslavia's national handball team. .... "We assume he is dead."
Soon afterward, their second son, who fought with the Bosnian Serbs, was struck by a car and killed. The Soraks were childless. ...
"As things deteriorated it got worse and worse," (Drago) said. "Some of the Muslims wanted to kill us and others defended us. There were only 200 Serbs left in the city. On some nights, groups of Muslims came to the apartment looking for us. We had to hide until they left. We were frightened."
The difficulties, the harrassment, and the disappearance of (their son) all helped turn the couple against (the) Muslim-led government...
Five months after Zoran's disappearance, his wife gave birth to a girl. The mother (their daughter in law) was unable to nurse the child. The city was being shelled continuously. There were severe food shortages. Infants, like the infirm and the elderly, were dying in droves. The family gave the baby tea for five days, but she began to fade...
Fejzic, meanwhile, was keeping his cow in a field on the eastern edge of Gorazde, milking it at night to avoid being hit by Serbian snipers.
"On the fifth day, just before dawn, we heard someone atg the door," said Rosa Sorak. "It was Fadil Fejzik in his black rubber boots. He handed up half a liter of milk. He came the next morning, and the morning after that, and after that. Other families on the street began to insult him. They told him to give his milk to Muslims, to let the Chetnik children die. He never said a word. He refused our money. He came for 442 days, until my daughter in law and granddaughter left Gorazde for Serbia."
The Soraks eventually left and took over a house that once belonged to a Muslim family in the Serbian-held town of Kopaci, two miles to the east. They could no longer communicate with Fejzic.
...(The couple grieved still for their sons and lost home.) But they also said that despite their anger and loss, they could not listen to other Serbs talking about Muslims, or even recite their own sufferings, without telling of Fejzic and his cow. Here was the power of love. What this illiterate farmer did would color the life of another human being, who might never meet him, long after he was gone. In his act lay an ocean of hope.
"It is our duty to always tell this story," Drago Sorak said. "Salt, in those days, cost $80 a kilo. The milk he had was precious, all the more so because it was hard to keep animals. He gave us 221 liters. And every year at this time, when it is cold and dark, when we close our eyes, we can hear the boom of the heavy guns and the sound of Fadil Fejzic's footsteps on the stairs."
Hedges goes on to update the story, as he found Fejzic living in total poverty, his cow dead, reduced to selling wormy apples for pennies. Yet that Muslim farmer had protected a child in a bombed-out modern stable. Amid the bad angels of nationalism and violence, he was a real man who embodied salvation. He was a Christmas that lasted 442 faithful days, protecting a newborn child. While others' eyes are closed, may we be blessed to see and share such nativity stories. Amen.
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