God's Promise of Transgression
In this season of celebration we are treated to twelve days of a great feast. However, as we move through those twelve days of Christmas, we are also given consistent, small reminders that, while we celebrate its beginning, the earthly life of Jesus is not all loveliness and joy. Our God is one who seems to have little use for the boundaries that we create and is intent on breaking down those barriers and transgressing our rules about propriety. For this persistent overturning of the human order of things, Jesus will, eventually, find himself crucified.
As has been said many times, Jesus was born to die. We recall this in the magi’s gift of myrrh, an oil used to prepare the dead for burial. We see it in the historic connections drawn between the Annunciation and Good Friday, which often fall on or very near the same date in early spring. We even fill the first four days of Christmastide with memorials of martyrs—St Thomas à Becket today—as reminders that life following the path of Christ will take us through the valley of death.
Today, on the First Sunday of Christmastide, we are offered a bit of foreshadowing. Luke shares the story of a twelve-year-old Jesus, briefly lost to his parents, who is busy learning from the teachers in the Temple. At twelve, this would be the first year Jesus was permitted to participate in the Passover as an adult. Being present in the Temple is a big part of the festival proceedings and all of the ritual and production were, no doubt, a source of interest and wonder to the young man.
This story is sometimes presented as Jesus teaching the teachers, owing to his comment to his parents about being in his father’s house. This is not the case. This story is not a preface to his reading of Isaiah in the synagogue in Nazareth, for example. Jesus is present and learning from the teachers, which is his right and duty as a young Jewish man. What is remarkable is his capacity for learning and understanding; doubtless Mary and Joseph received many compliments on their son’s aptitude for the faith.
Of course, Jesus will return to Jerusalem and the Temple around the time of Passover some twenty-one years later, this time setting his face toward this city. On this occasion, Jesus will be doing the teaching. The lesson, for humanity, is about the great love of a God willing to be born to die for our sake.
Luke consistently paints a picture of God as one who searches for the lost until they are found. The lost sheep, lost coin, and the prodigal son, are critical examples of how Jesus describes the relationship between God and God’s people. But the people God is seeking are seldom in palaces or the halls of government. Occasionally in the Temple, but usually then as people seeking refuge and safety, not as key members of the establishment. In searching for the lost, those who need help to be reunited with their flock or to return home, Jesus is found in places and roles that are not expected of him. Often places and roles that earn him the suspicion and ire of others.
Jesus at the Temple, learning and conversing like an adult was a happy occasion, certainly, but doubtless at least one envious or insecure teacher raised an unhappy eyebrow at the precocious Galilean. We see throughout his ministry that Jesus spends time with the marginalized and outcast. His disciples frequently try to direct him away from people that they think inappropriate for him to associate with. But Jesus is right there, where he is needed, regardless of social norms or “appropriate” boundaries.
Even Jesus’s family and place of origin make him suspect as a leader. Galilee is not a highly-regarded region by most Judeans, so the idea of a skilled teacher coming from the area is hard to sell. When Philip tells his friend, Nathanael, to come and meet this incredible man, he replies with the famous line, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” Just by being a member of his own family, Jesus is transgressing boundaries and disturbing the established order.
Jesus runs into the boundaries that we have erected and transgresses them consistently. In his world it is inappropriate for an unmarried woman to be pregnant, but the archangel Gabriel appears to an unwed Mary just the same and, following that Annunciation, Jesus is conceived by the Holy Spirit in her womb. Mary’s song to Elizabeth describes the ways in which God, even at the conception of Jesus, has upset the order of this world, toppling tyrants, feeding the hungry, humbling the proud, and lifting up the meek and lowly. Jesus is born the King of kings and Lord of lords, but his palace is a stable and his throne a manger full of hay. The Christ Child, born to humble parents in occupied territory is brought gifts fit for royalty, divinity, and the most honoured dead by the wisest people from the
known world. At his presentation in the Temple, forty days after his birth, instead of his parents giving thanks for his safe delivery and survival, it is the priest, Simeon, and the prophet Anna who give thanks for the infant in their midst, revealing to them that God’s promises are being fulfilled. Jesus, by his existence, transgresses the once firm boundary between God and humanity by holding both natures in one person.
While God is always searching for the lost and crossing boundaries to do it, when we go searching for God, we often expect God to be found in the places we deem appropriate. Mary and Joseph, on realizing that Jesus is not with them, begin to search among their extended family, and then through the city before finally finding him in the Temple. Surely, when Mary speaks of her anxiety, she is remembering again and again the aged Simeon’s words that a sword will pierce her own soul. Could this be the moment of her greatest pain? Her miraculous son lost, never to be found? Of course, Jesus is found intact and well, happily learning and growing in his father’s house.
Later, after Jesus’s return to the Temple and his crucifixion, the women go to his tomb to find him and prepare his body. They are looking for Jesus where they expect him to be and they are confronted by angels who demand of them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”When Jesus is crucified and dies, he transgresses even the boundary of death. The insatiable appetite of Death finds that, in Jesus Christ, it has bitten off more than it can chew. Death cannot hold the Lord of Life and Jesus cannot be found in tombs or graves, breaking down even that age-old boundary.
Whether a king born in a stable, a child learning in the temple, the Messiah hanging on a cross, or the risen Christ reigning on his throne in heaven and the hearts of his faithful people everywhere, Jesus is where he is meant to be, not where we expect him to be.
Thank God, this Christmastide, for the Christ child. Yes, born to die, but also born to transgress Death’s domain and live in every place where we need him most.
