Recently, an inner-city Anglican church in Auckland put up a billboard depicting Mary and Joseph in bed together, and the slogan: "Poor Joseph. God was a hard act to follow". Needless to say, it attracted the attention of the media, and much comment -both for and against - in the public arena. Below is a piece I wrote, which was subsequently published in The New Zealand Herald, 23/12/09, A13. The version below is what was submitted: it was edited by The Herald. Before posting it here, I have added references to the relevant Herald articles, and biblical references (and an addition to the piece submitted appears in square brackets).
The original meaning of Christmas
Last week St. Matthew’s-in-the-City posted an ill-considered and, to many, insensitive billboard. The intention, so Archdeacon Glynn Cardy is reported to have said, was to spark debate about the true origins of Christmas (The New Zealand Herald, 17/12/09, A3). The problem was the matter for debate was wholly ambiguous.
Like others, I found the billboard objectionable. This was not because it depicted Joseph and Mary in bed together. This was portrayed modestly enough, anyway. Nor was it the suggestion that they had just had sex. Despite what Lyndsay Freer [a spokeswoman for the Catholic Diocese of Auckland] said about Christian tradition maintaining that Mary remains a virgin (Herald, same article) this is difficult to substantiate on the evidence of the New Testament.
Matthew’s Gospel merely states that Joseph abstained from sexual relations with Mary until after Jesus was born. All the gospels report that Jesus had brothers (Mark and Matthew add sisters as well). [See Matt. 13:54-58 ; Mark 3:31-35; Luke 8: 18-21; John 2:12; 7: 3;5] The contexts of these references suggest that they were natural brothers. Later church tradition has suggested that they were cousins, or half-siblings. The tradition of Mary’s perpetual virginity dates from the middle of the second century. The idea is first found in a book called The Protevangelium of James, which the church did not consider authoritative.
My difficulty with the billboard lay in the slogan that “God was a hard act to follow”. What was this supposed to imply? Was it meant to suggest that, after the honour of supernaturally conceiving Jesus, the Son of God, any subsequent natural conception was bound to be a let-down? Knowing Archdeacon Cardy to be an intelligent and well-read Christian, it was hard to believe that he intended the words to convey the theologically unsophisticated and crass idea that God and Mary had sex in order to conceive Jesus.
Indeed, he did not. However, it appears that he intended the slogan to satirize the view of “a male god sending sperm down to impregnate Mary” (NZ Herald, 19/12/09, A4). This was apparently to counter the idea of a “literal virgin birth”. The problem with this is that, as an argument, it sets up the proverbial straw man. (Perhaps the stuff of the stable is there after all!).
Christians who take seriously the idea of a virgin birth do not believe that any more than Archdeacon Cardy. The gospels of Matthew and Luke say that the conception of Jesus was due to the work and power of the Holy Spirit [Matt. 1:20; Luke 1:35]. The same Spirit depicted at work in Genesis creating the conditions of life itself [Gen. 1:2]. John’s Gospel, in the soaring poetry of its opening verses, states that “the Word” which was the same as God became human and lived among us [John 1: 1, 2, 14]. It is difficult to know what St. Paul thought about “the virgin birth” as he simply notes that Jesus was “born of a woman” [Gal. 4:4]. But there is no doubt that he understood that Jesus was God, and that by an initiative of God, “the Son” became human.
This is really what the virgin birth is conveying. It signifies the understanding that in Jesus God became a human being. And this happened in a real and historically situated way. It is not simply a metaphor, or a fiction. God’s hands got dirty, as it were, in the real and everyday stuff of human existence.
This astounding reality is what Christians celebrate at Christmas: that God has shared our human life. And it was not a nice, comfortable middle-class life, such as I enjoy. I am constantly amazed, and moved, how in a few brief sentences the gospel writers, Matthew and Luke, capture so much of the joys and the trials, the terrors even, of human existence.
Think of it: the scandal of a pregnancy “out of wedlock”, a birth in transient circumstances, the family of Jesus refugees from a paranoid ruler quite happy to unleash “state terrorism” on unsuspecting villagers. Luke says that the news of the birth was told first to shepherds, often considered to be thieves, and not religiously upright or observant. Matthew says that early visitors were foreign astrologers bearing symbolic gifts. Early on in Jesus’ life his mother Mary was told that a “sword” (of sorrow) would pierce her heart.
God became human in Jesus in order to engage in a mission of reconciliation to overcome the alienation that had come through human waywardness. John’s Gospel speaks of the coming of the Word in order to bring life and give people “the right to be children of God” [John 1:12, 13].
This was to come about on account of the death of Christ. This is why many Christians will celebrate Christmas by remembering, in the Eucharist or Holy Communion service, the death of Jesus. Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter are all part of a big story of God’s saving acts on behalf of humanity.
Unfortunately, as an exercise in getting a genuine conversation about the original meaning of Christmas going, the St. Matthew’s billboard seems to have generated more heat than light. Such is the way with provocative acts like that. Perhaps a billboard such as this might do the trick. A conventional (or contemporary, if you like) stable scene, with the words: “What on earth is God doing here?”
