On the occasions of Christmas and Easter, newspapers and other media often feel compelled to publish stories related to religion. Yesterday, the NYT published an article on Jesus’s humility by David French titled Why Are So Many Christians So Cruel?. Today, Nicholas Kristof interviewed Elaine Pagels about the historicity of the virgin birth in his article A Conversation About the Virgin Birth That Maybe Wasn’t. In this blog, I aim to show that both articles lead to reflections on political power that are closely connected.
Power and Grace
The first article rejects the claim that the faithful are entitled and justified to rule. Unfortunately, for too many Christians, the love of power trumps that of justice. This kind of self-justification disregards the stories about Jesus who was was born in humble conditions, “far from the corridors of power.” As a child, he was even a refugee, we are told by the infancy narratives. He did not aim to rule his nation or the Roman Empire; on the contrary, he rejected power and called for compassion and forgiveness. This is where the second article comes in: according to the gospels of Matthew and Luke, each in its way, his birth was both miraculous and humble. For believers, telling the story of the virgin birth was a way to glorify Christ and reduce ancient embarrassment about the realities. For Pagels, it means that “the Gospels most often speak in the language of stories and poetry” and that metaphoric interpretations are best. But doesn’t thinking that everything is metaphors risk losing sight of the realities of this story and especially of its political aspects? That is what I would like to explore in more detail in the rest of this text.
The birth stories imagined by the gospels of Matthew and Luke cry to be placed in their literary, religious, and political context. The hopes and fears that a society can entertain about principles other than biological transmission and social order are given voice in these stories. The narratives of the empty tomb and resurrection need to be analyzed along the same lines. Women are featured most prominently at both ends of Jesus’s life because their humility places them in a much more dramatic position that allows them to understand and shape everyone’s hopes.
The words of Elizabeth and even more Mary’s Magnificat in Luke 1:46-55 encourage the reshaping and deepening of trust that is concealed in the nativity story and that is essential to a dignified society. What happens in the womb responds to an infinite realm of causes. Great events and power will unfold in villages like Nazareth as well as in the temple in Jerusalem, not in palaces. A new version of honor can see the light of day, and the Magnificat reverberates throughout the sweep of the gospel. It is part of a program of radical change in many passages of the gospels. And all of this vision is started by a young woman on the margins of society.
Nazareth is at the center of the proclamation in Luke 4. It continues the infancy story of revelation to a socially weak woman in an unknown village. Jerusalem and the temple are incorporated into the story but are not at the center of the annunciation. Two things are of importance therefore: 1) the openness and inclusion of foreigners (“nations”), and 2) the decentering from Jerusalem and the temple. Nazareth becomes a mediator between Zion and the nations.
My take is that the vocabulary of humility should be understood together with the vocabulary of grace and gift. In the infancy narrative, what is paramount and unfortunately not sufficiently insisted upon by commentators is that the divine agent shows itself to be a poor woman— or at least not rich and entitled— in an unknown village far away socially and religiously from the centers of power. This goes against all the rules of a society built on the notion of divine gift. A belief in a unilaterally given grace is now shaping the landscape for a newly ordered society.
I see Mary as a parallel Moses in the sense that power doesn’t rest anymore with pharaoh-like or king-like figures but with a young woman who hasn’t been accepted in the social and ethical networks of her society. Note that the secular worshipping of Mary in the Catholic Church and her glorification in art have transformed the figure for male theologians and priests who are still in charge of education and liturgy, but not yet for women who are much more likely to see the revolutionary elements of the story.
Tracking Biology, Power, and Grace
The Hebrew Bible has a strong tradition of deep reflection on the proper grounds for political order and authority. In considering why their religiously framed monarchy repeatedly collapsed in the 8th-6th centuries BCE, and further in experiencing the dynastic and religious systems of their conquerors and enemies, Israelite and Judaean circles began to realize that the foundation of their life in the community was to be sought beyond biology, beyond the material, social, and religious order in which monarchies were set up and justified. Allow me to be more precise: the Israelites were mostly concerned about their own society. The effort to transcend their catastrophic circumstances, which we interpret as their incipient theology, was little preoccupied with universal questions, at least early on. Still, it was revolutionary to re-imagine the possible meaning of one’s post-royal history as the hidden will of a single divinity. Neighboring monarchic societies did not do so (Moab, Ammon, Edom, Philistine city-states, Phoenician cities, Aramaean monarchies, etc.).
This effort to understand one’s history is apparent in the way two important themes, namely the birth of male potential heirs and the order of inheritance, became structured within the folktale tradition. I call them folktales since they were and are basically themes widely found in world tales and collected, for example, in Stith Thompson’s Motif-index of Folk Literature (1955). First, we have several important stories of women, usually loved and beautiful (a rarely noted characteristic in the Bible), who cannot conceive or only do so in a Mary-like miraculous way, after an impossibly long wait. Sarah first of all (for Isaac), Rachel for Joseph, Tamar in other ways, Hannah for Samuel (whom she renounces).
The second theme often attached to the first but not necessarily so is that of the eventual centrality of the second-born or late-born son in a system that depended on the great importance of the transfer of power over land and labor to the first-born. Abraham himself, Isaac, Jacob as a test case (by only minutes), Joseph, Moses, and David are all somewhat miraculous and belated sons. One may add the parable of the prodigal son, a further reflection on this problem of the re-ordering of first-son politics, and the dynamic integration or re-integration of the “lines.”
So, in Sarah’s case, the conception of Isaac is not only miraculous because of the long, impossible wait, but also because it is paired with a visit from the divinity. It doesn’t have the usual language about conception but is close to the gospel tale.
[to be continued in the coming hours]