Today’s readings: Isaiah 7, 10-14; Romans 1, 1-7; Matthew 1, 18-25.
The Christmas story we revisit every year is the platform on which faith’s architecture is built. In its simplicity and ordinariness, it may sound too childish, yet it contains one of the mostly debated philosophical and theological issues: Why God became man? In today’s gospel, Matthew seems to downplay this complex dilemma, stating in simple form: “This is how Jesus Christ came to be born.”
As philosopher John Caputo writes in his book On Religion: “the old pre-Copernican cosmology in which the traditional religious stories were cast has utterly lost its grip on our imaginations, and that has inevitably altered how we think about religious transcendence”. By the end of modernity, religious belief was in various ways denounced as unreal, even as fiction woven from our unconscious.
Where are we now, in our dealings with the God of history and in our attempts to bridge the gospel stories with our post-Christian faith? Our ‘religious’ way of doing things can at times be a hurdle to authentic belief. What we celebrate in Christmas, and how at times we simply recycle it, always risks reducing the message to a fairy tale. There is so much imagery, symbolism and religiosity that can very easily be out of sync with today’s mentality.
In the first reading, Isaiah is dealing with Ahaz, king of Judah, when his kingdom was threatened by forces from the north and the survival of the dynasty was at risk. Ahaz, in the face of Judah’s invasion, seeks help from Assyria, a superpower at the time, thus compromising his faith and betraying God’s faithfulness to His people.
This is where Isaiah enters, as adviser to the king. He reassures Ahaz that the dynasty of David is not preserved by giving in to power politics with Assyria but only through trust in God. But Ahaz refuses to accept the advice of the prophet. For Ahaz, politics was politics and he believed that he could embezzle in politics without in any way affecting his faith in God.
In the face of his political worries, the sign of the maiden with child meant nothing to him. He is for us today a case in point of someone who out of religiosity failed to grasp God’s sign and refused the prophet’s message. The God of history in whom we all would like to believe is very often perceived in terms of power and grandeur, someone who can really change things from above.
Instead, the protagonists in this greatest story ever told are the virgin mother, Joseph, the angels and shepherds. These are the people at the centre of history making the big truth happen. It was challenging for Isaiah to persuade Ahaz; it was challenging for Joseph to accept his role in a story revealed as mystery; it continues and will continue to be a major challenge for us to accept that the God we believe in enters history through the humble and poor, through those whose heart is capable to let go of preconceived ways of thinking.
Paul speaks of the ‘obedience of faith’, which is not a military type of obedience, nor an obedience that is servile. It is the obedience of faith that initiates us into the mystery of God. God is not predictable. If God were predictable, Christianity would more easily reduce itself to rhetoric and void speech.
Joseph in the gospel is literally living a contradiction, letting go of what seemed very logical and opting for complete trust in God. He believed and was immersed in God’s way of acting in history, even when that was in contradiction with the logic of his surroundings. Joseph had his own ideas and most probably had a project for his own life. At a point, something happened that radically changed the course of his life. Had he been blocked in the way he expected things to unfold, he would have reacted. But his obedience of faith made him open not to the future as he imagined it, but to the adventus of God, to the God who comes in ways and through people we least expect.