Advent 3: 12th December, 1999
The Rev'd Dr Colin Holden, St Peter's Eastern Hill
Come, Emmanuel, Wisdom from on high; Root of Jesse, Dayspring, Desire of
nations. We sing advent by advent in a hymn that uses titles of Jesus derived
from the antiphons sung in the last days of advent before the Magnificat in the
evening office. To whom does Jesus come as He comes in His Incarnation, and as
we contemplate its meaning each year?
The question may appear to have a simple answer, enshrined in much of the
imagery of scripture, particularly in the infancy narratives of St Matthew and
St Luke. God bypasses the powerful, the apparently mighty, those who seem to be
in control. He reveals Himself to a faithful remnant: those hidden from the
wider world's attention; those whose lives are subject to the decisions of
others.
Jesus born in a stable because there was no room at the inn is a powerful
expression of this Jesus, and much of our meditation, prayer and hymnody has
expanded around this approach. The writer of the hymn Thou didst leave Thy
throne and Thy kingly crown envisaged Jesus as coming to another dimension that
was hidden to the outside world - the private world of the individual heart.
Though there might be no room at the inn, 'come to my heart, Lord Jesus, there
is room in my heart for Thee'.
These are all important, valid insights that challenge many easily accepted and
questionable human standards, reminding us that God's order, His Kingdom,
embraces standards and priorities radically different from our own. But I want
to turn for a moment to a contrasting picture of Jesus: not a Jesus who might
be found in the midst of the alienation and poverty of some of our modern city
life, among the unemployed and marginalised. What if Jesus were a bon viveur,
fond of the good life, multi-lingual, enjoying the theatre, and directing his
own firm of builders and surveyors? Monsignor Giovanni Magnani, a lecturer in
Christology at the Gregorian Institute in the Vatican, has recently suggested
that Jesus can hardly have been a carpenter, given the degree to which
Palestine had already been deforested, and that the word used in St Matthew's
gospel for St Joseph - tekton - means not a woodworker, but someone a level
below an arkitekton or civil engineer. He also points to Jesus' frequent use of
language derived from business, commerce and banking. He pictures Jesus
communicating in at least three languages, Aramaic, Hebrew and greek, and with
disciples amongst whom the fishermen are the heads of co-operatives, owning big
boats capable of carrying a dozen fishermen and hauling in a dozen fish at a
time. Close to Nazareth was Sefforis, a sophisticated centre dominated by
Hellenistic culture and offering the experience of Greek theatre to visitors. A
Cambridge scholar, James Carlton paget, responds to Magnani's approach: 'I've
always suspected Jesus was a champagne socialist, someone who spent most of his
time in Hamstead', and interprets the wedding at Cana as an event in which
Jesus is shown in the midst of a well-heeled circle.
Now it is fair for all to ask - are these academics, themselves well-connected,
simply making up a comfortable Jesus in the image of the levels of society in
which they themselves move? Could Jesu really have come to Hamstead? Or
Camberwell, or Hawthorn, or Toorak?
There may well be an element of projection from one's own circumstances that
drives this kind of scholarship: in the 18th century, Voltaire reflected that
if horses were to conceive of a god, it would be in the form of a horse. But we
might well ask that same question about some of thew drive behind other images
of Jesus that I believe to be true, that is, ones that reflect a part of the
authentic person. Let's go back for a moment to the 1960s and 70s. The renewed
stress on social justice that emerged in some circles certainly helped to drive
and enthuse those theologians who envisaged Jesus as a challenging figure, a
figure who questioned the standards and methods of the establishment of His day
- a radical Jesus. The recent European production of Jesus Christ Superstar in
its representation of the disciples as long-haired hip young men is a
descendant of this approach. But even if the picture were partly motivated by
issues and by an awareness characteristic of a particular group at that time,
the Jesus to whom they drew attention wasn't just a reflection of themselves
and their concerns, but, I believe, an aspect of the authentic Jesus.
And this is the basic point for us to understand if we are to defend the
possibility that serious scholarship on the Gospels is possible, and that we
can have something a little better than just so many individual versions of
Jesus projected on the base of particular needs, of which no single version has
any more or less validity than any other. In this area I have to confess to
serious reservations about the suggestion made from this pulpit made by one
preacher, the suggestion that Jesus came from a dysfunctional family. Yes, we
need to be saved in our own particular failures ro function in our families and
other areas of relationship, but we have to be careful that need does not drive
us to shape a Jesus who may in the end be at odds with the reflection on Him
recorded in scripture. I wonder whether the response of the adult Jesus in the
face of violence and circumstances bound to provoke fear - his own refusal to
take recourse to resentment, anger or violence of his own - is a likely one for
someone coming from a dysfunctional family, or whether instead it argues the
influence of some remarkably mature and balanced individuals in the formative
years of his family life.
Moving away from dysfunctional families and back to my earlier concerns, it is
possible to say that while the scriptural picture of Jesus contains important
elements relating him to the deprived and the oppressed, there are also
elements of the scriptural account that do not make my Vatican monsignor's line
of thought seem an unreasonable one. And Monsignor Magnani's Jesus has
something important to say to us. We have to look for Jesus in the deprived,
the neglected, those on the fringes, the powerless and those under threat. But
Jesus also comes to Hampstead, to Camberwell and Toorak and Hawthorn, because
in those places there are different kinds of oppression, deprivation and
exclusion that desperately need the saving power of God: materialism,
complacency, kinds of emptiness and lack of fulfilment that seek escape in
unsatisfactory and destructive forms.
To conclude, I return to an image in a relatively recent modern film that
sought to interpret the meaning of Jesus' life for 20th century urbanised
Westerners, Jesus of Montreal. As the title suggests, it was set in the
French-Canadian city, and centred on a young man who did not conform to
predictable lines in an outwardly sophisticated and materialistic society. In
one scene, Jesus is shown a breathtaking view of the city from a high rise
office tower, as a corporate business head offers him control over others in
exchange for complicity in commercial exploitation (shades of 'I will give you
all the kingdoms of the world . . .') It is to this kind of world and its need
for a different approach that does not focus solely on market driven forces and
economic rationalism that Jesus comes, as well as to the part of life
represented by the stable. In Advent we sing of His coming as the Wisdom from
on High and the Desire of nations. This Christmas, this Advent, Jesus continues
to address Himself to all.
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