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"The Illegitimacy of Jesus: The Untold/Unheard Story of Our Faith"
Isaiah 7:10-16
A Sermon Preached by The Rev. Douglas M. Donley
December 2, 2001
University Baptist Church
Minneapolis, MN
Here we are in Advent: we have changed things around here. I don’t quite know where I am preaching to you from so far away. The banners, the candles, the stage, the pews, these are all to facilitate the beginning of a wonderful creative drama of our faith. It is when we get ready to celebrate the fact that God smuggled God’s self into this world in the form of a little homeless child half a world away. The Bible talks about how God constantly and consistently has come to the world in unusual ways. Everything we know about Jesus from the Gospels points to the fact that God was doing a new thing. And it’s up to us, each Advent, each Christmas to find out that new thing about God that will sustain us for another year, will give us a little more hope, will have us look at our world in a new and different way.
For the next three Sundays and Christmas Eve, we will look at the story of the Birth of Jesus from a different perspective. Thanks largely to Gayla Marty a number of actors, actresses, readers, singers and players will act out the nativity stories through the eyes of scripture, tradition and even the voices of the largely silent women.
Most of what we know of the Bible has come from men. Male writers, male scribes, male interpreters, male priests, male professors. Only in the past century or so has the prominence of women’s perspectives come to the fore. They bring with them a new set of eyes on the old stories. They bring with them a new set of concerns that are bound to show all of us an aspect of God’s mind.
We need to hear their voices. We need to be reminded of scripture and tradition, those male centers of power and control. But in order to find the word of God alive we need to have the woman reminders out there to tell us about their traditions, to tell us of their perspectives, to bring voice to those silent and silenced women in the nativity story. We have just a few of them named: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, Elizabeth, Anna and of course, Mary. But there are so many others whose stories beckon to be told. And through all of these stories, familiar and new, we just might find out more about God and the subversion of the ways of the world which come with the advent of Jesus’ birth.
What we might find is a little bit more about the illegitimacy of Jesus. It is Feminist Biblical Scholar Jane Schaberg’s well-researched contention that not only was Jesus born to a peasant family who had to flee from state-sponsored terrorism, not only was he born to a teenage mother in a non-traditional marriage, not only was he homeless, but his conception might not have been as immaculate as tradition has lead us to believe.
Only two gospel writers talk about the birth of Jesus, Matthew and Luke. Each version is vastly different than the other. Both point vaguely to the possibility of virgin conception, but not without leaving a little bit of doubt here and there. This is where seeing the Gospel through a woman’s eyes are helpful.
If the texts were not about virginal conception, they were certainly about illegitimate conception.
Schaberg writes, "Women who willingly or unwillingly conceive outside of marriage, women raped or seduced and impregnated, illegitimate children who are often "fatherless" in the sense that their biological father plays no part in their lives: this vast population began to stand behind the texts for me and to widen my horizons."(Schaberg p. 4)
It is dangerous when people ask hard questions that make you sit back and think. Shaberg believes that the language of "with child by the holy Spirit" was not originally about a virgin birth.
Schaberg believes that Matthew was not thinking about a pregnant virgin as much as a betrothed virgin seduced or raped. This would trigger the legal maneuvering of Joseph in light of Deuteronomy 22. According to Deuteronomy, a man could divorce a woman to whom he has been betrothed if she becomes pregnant.
The law as recorded in Deuteronomy says that a man can divorce his wife if she has been raped. Rape is defined as sexual intercourse happening in the country where the woman could not cry out. For some reason, Joseph seeks to divorce Mary.
Mary went "with haste" to see Elizabeth. This has been seen as a joyful sharing about pregnancy. But the greek verb seems to connote a fleeing in terror, a fleeing for safety.
Mary’s magnificat is harsh and seems to come from someone who has experienced injustice.
I encourage you to read the stories of Jesus and the women in Matthew 1 and two and Luke 1-3. Look at how Matthew’s genealogy differs from Luke’s. Look at how neither story gives the same information, the same emphasis, the same characters or the same circumstances. Look at the presence of the women. Four women in Matthew’s genealogy, but Mary only referred to in Matthew’s gospel. It focuses much more on Joseph. Luke’s Gospel focuses a lot on Mary, Elizabeth, shepherds and angels.
Matthew’s story is a brooding one about legalities and the threat of this child. Herod’s slaughter of the innocents is found in Matthew. In Luke, it starts out and continues with celebration. There is little fear, save on the part of Mary and Elizabeth.
Matthew and Luke are the only writers of the Christian tradition who talk about the virgin birth. If this was such an important view, why didn’t Mark, Paul or John talk about it? Many an ordination council and heresy trial have been waged over just this discourse.
Matthew’s gospel quotes Isaiah 7:14 to proclaim the virgin birth. He uses the Greek version which says, "Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call him Emmanuel." We have sung that to many a tune and we can almost hear the Alto sing the recitative from Handel’s Messiah. But the older Hebrew version is a bit different. It says, "behold, a young girl shall conceive…" In the Hebrew, she is not a virgin. But more than that, the scripture passage talks about an immediate event having to do with politics in Ancient Israel and Assyria.
In today’s scripture we encounter YHWH speaking to King Ahaz. Ahaz is mentioned in Matthew’s genealogy, but not Luke’s. 700 years before Mary gave birth to Jesus, Ahaz was king of Israel and was facing invasion from two nations. YHWH says, "I’ll give you anything you want, just name it. But Ahaz was suspicious, just as you and I are suspicious of gifts given to us "no strings attached". Ahaz refused saying, " I don’t want to test YHWH.." He had money, security, power. He didn’t need YHWH.
Ahaz, I’m offering you hope. This is not a test. If you don’t take my gift someone else will, maybe even years from now. God was offering peace and security, but Ahaz wasn’t interested.
"Behold a young woman shall conceive and bare a son and shall call his name Immanuel…For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted. You will have peace. Free—as a gift. I am offering you peace and continuation of your kingdom if you just get down off of your high horse. But Ahaz wasn’t in the Christmas spirit.
Paranoid Ahaz didn’t take the gift and he threw his lot in with a northern Assyrian alliance. He didn’t trust in God and the alliance with Assyria was a disaster. Ahaz denied God’s presence. Maybe he was concerned that the young girl was his wife or his concubine who was to conceive the heir to his throne.
God gives the sign of Immanuel in order to get Ahaz to get rid of his absurd plans to commit idolatry and consort with his enemies. The angels and Matthew himself uses this Immanuel passage to stop Joseph from divorcing and further shaming Mary.
Into patriarchy and through his own male blinders, Matthew rather sloppily spills out this tale of wonder and intrigue. A tale of an illegitimate child, however conceived, who with his mother, his adoptive father and the women of the genealogy are on the side of God. A radical and liberating notion that begs attention.
During this season of Advent, let’s hear the story with new ears, eyes and feelings. Let’s uncover the mystery. Let’s loose the bonds of injustice and let’s proclaim the acceptable year of God.
Let’s find out what it is about those four women in Matthew’s genealogy that makes them unique. Who were Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba and why don’t they get to sit center stage at Christmas pageants at any place other than UBC? Who are their present-day comrades? What do they long to say about Jesus, about Mary, about God, about us? Could it be that they have been defined as illegitimate and that God made Jesus illegitimate, too in order to show us a new thing about God’s priorities and ours in the face of our tendency to illegitimize those different or challenging to us?
This Advent will challenge you to look at the nativity story with new eyes. You may not agree with everything that is here, but I guarantee, you will hear new voices leap out from scripture and the experience will deepen your knowledge and maybe even your faith in the one called Immanuel, God-with-us.
What better gift to receive from God this December. Let us join with Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, Elizabeth, Anna and Mary in a journey to a stable in Bethlehem and beyond.