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Christmas Eve

Matthew 1:18–25

I John 4:7–16

The Virgin Birth is one of those milestones in Christianity that provokes a wide array of feelings in believers and non-believers, alike. There’s a wide range of interpretations: the fundamentalist, evangelical view that this miracle is one of the key signs that Jesus is the Son of God, the Messiah who will save Israel; the moderate view that, while something about this birth was special in that God has come to Earth in human form out of love for humanity, some scholars translate virgin as young girl, as it usually is in Isaiah, so this birth is not miraculous, but still a major event; then there are those on the extreme ends of Christianity (or even outside of the faith) who say this story is completely mythical, nothing more than an attempt to align Jesus with the traditional deities of the day, who always had some sort of miraculous birth themselves, often with a god involved, maybe even going so far as to argue that the story is a cover for a more salacious story of a woman who gives birth to a child out of wedlock.

Those of us in mainline churches usually reject that fundamentalist view, focusing instead on the more moderate view, that, regardless of the specific means of Jesus’s conception, this story reminds us that God wanted a relationship with humanity so much that God crossed the bounds of the humanity-divinity divide to connect with us. Even if we do go as far as arguing that the story is mythical, we need to remember what a myth is and why this story still matters. Myths are not stories that are untrue, save for in a factual sense; instead, myths provide deep truths that give a person and a community meaning for living one’s life. They are not superimposed upon a culture by someone either from within or outside of that culture; rather, they come from within a culture, naturally, often spontaneously, as a way of trying to articulate a truth people can find no other words for.

If the story of the Virgin Birth, then, is a myth (and I won’t ever say that something is only or just a myth, as that devalues the importance of myth), we need to see what the story is trying to tell us about God and the relationship between humanity and divinity. If we can see the truth at that end of the spectrum, it will help shape our thinking, no matter what we believe about the historical truth of the event. It might help us to remember at this point that Jewish readers (to whom the author of Matthew is writing) read stories without concern for their historical truth. It’s not that they disbelieved such stories; instead, they could read a story on both an historical and metaphorical level at the same time. Those of us in the West have largely lost the ability to do so, as we are much more concerned about whether or not something is true in an historical sense, only, as if other stories have nothing to teach us.

That said, one way of looking at this passage is to look at Jesus’s names. He has two of them, sort of. In the section of Isaiah the author of Matthew quotes, the person who fulfills this prophecy—Jesus, of course—shall be named Emmanuel, which means “God with us.” This name sums up the importance of the incarnation, in that those who believe Jesus is God on Earth read this information completely literally. Again, one doesn’t have to do so to still be moved by the idea that this birth reminds us of God’s love for humanity and that God is involved and interested in the lives of each of us. God is not simply “with us” when Jesus walked the streets of Jerusalem or Capernaum, but God is with us because of the relationship we have with the divine, represented by the life of Jesus.

The passage from I John makes this idea clear, as the repeated emphasis on love as the manifestation of God shows. That author reminds us that, when we love, we are acting as God acts, that we are embodying God in the same way that Jesus did, that we are exhibiting God to the world, that we are carrying God with us everywhere we go and to everyone we meet, that we are helping others to see God as we have seen him in the life of Jesus and the lives of our Christian communities. The author tells us that “those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” Jesus comes to bring love to all people, including those whom the first century Jewish leaders had forgotten, and we abide in love and in God when we practice that radical inclusivity that illustrates how God is with us.

Along the same lines, Jesus’s name means some version of “God saves” (the Hebrew verb root literally means “rescue” or “deliver,” but “saves” is how most scholars translate the meaning of the name). While the traditional reading of this passage is that God saves humanity from their sins through Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, there is more to this meaning than that. This focus on love and abiding in love by imitating Jesus shows us that God saves us from more than simply our original sinfulness. God saves us from our selfish behaviors that push us to ignore the poor or marginal; God saves us from a culture that tells we are nothing more than a consumer, put on this planet to purchase more and more until we die; God saves us from a political arena that benefits from dividing us from one another through the use of fear; God saves us from a life of alienation, as we can become one with others, not out of our own efforts, but through the love of God that defies all explanations, as does a story about a young woman giving birth to a baby boy who shows us that love.

Questions for Reflection or Discussion:

Where do we see “God with us” today, especially in acts of love and inclusivity?

What do we need saving from, and how does Jesus’s life help show us ways toward that salvation?