Advent Musings: A Long Genealogy, a Misunderstood Manger Scene, and a Few Good Books
by Stephen Fahrig, AC Librarian
Advent is a time of waiting. Readers of this blog have been waiting entirely too long for me to post something new, and for that I apologize. The season of Advent is one of my favorite times of the liturgical year, but unfortunately it is also one of the busiest. By way of compensation for my long absence from the blogging world, I am offering a triple dose of musings on the Advent season, including some good books for Advent and Christmas. The thoughts that follow are admittedly somewhat random, an attempt to highlight a couple of overlooked aspects of the birth stories in Matthew and Luke as well as some suggestions for seasonal spiritual reading. Enjoy!
A boring list of names?
As we begin the countdown to Christmas Day, our Church's liturgy takes a markedly different turn. During the first half of Advent, the readings and prayers for daily Mass drew much of their inspiration from the book of Isaiah and our expectation of Jesus' second coming at the end of time. The readings and prayers for December 17 through 24, on the other hand, focus on the events leading up to Jesus' first coming - his birth in Bethlehem 2000 years ago. Beginning today, daily Mass-goers will hear continuous readings from the infancy accounts in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. This series of readings was inaugurated at today's liturgy with a text that many Catholics - clergy and laity alike - often find awkward, cumbersome, and boring. The text in question is Matthew's genealogy of Jesus. You know, "Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac was the father of..." and so on and so forth. It is perhaps a sad commentary on the biblical literacy of the average Catholic today that this text often causes the eyes of worshippers to glaze over with boredom as the priest or deacon rattles off Matthew's long list of names. Sad, because this genealogy is literally packed with theological commentary, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. Matthew's original audience - mostly Jews, and steeped in the stories of their sacred Scriptures - would have been intimately familiar with the many patriarchs and kings that the evangelist ennumerates, not to mention the four women (Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba) who make unprecedented appearances in what would normally be a "For Men Only" genealogical record. A lot could be said about Matthew's reasons for starting his gospel in this fashion, but these few points must suffice: Jesus' link to the great figures of the Old Testament demonstrate that he is the fulfillment of Israel's deepest hopes and longings; the presence of venerable saints (Abraham, Ruth, Joseph and Mary) and notorious sinners (Rahab and Ahaz, to name but two) in Jesus' family tree show his solidarity with the entire human race, good and bad alike; and the fact that nearly all the people in the final third of Matthew's genealogy were obscure and unknown serves to reassure the majority of us (who will never be rich or famous) that we, too, have a role to play in the building up of God's kingdom. Not bad for a boring list of names, eh?
No hospitality in Bethlehem?
I think it is safe to say that most, if not all, of us have had our understanding of the Nativity story shaped by images of Mary and Joseph arriving in Bethlehem on a cold winter night, knocking on door after door, and being turned away by inhospitable innkeepers. Denied hospitality and rejected at every turn, the couple has recourse to a cattleshed or a cave, where the Savior of the world is born in great squalor. It's all in Luke's gospel, right? Not necessarily, according to biblical scholar Kenneth E. Bailey in a new book entitled Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes (IVP Academic, 2008). Dr. Bailey, who lived in the Middle East for sixty years, argues in this compelling work that the gospel stories about Jesus cannot be understood apart from the cultural world in which our Lord lived. Luke's account of Mary and Joseph's sojourn to Bethlehem is a case in point. Dr. Bailey points out that the traditional view that the holy family was denied hospitality is untenable for several reasons. First, hospitality was a fundamental cultural value in the ancient Near East. To have denied lodging to a man and his pregnant wife would have been unheard of. Moreover, both Luke and Matthew make clear in their infancy narratives that Joseph was a descendant of King David. No one of Davidic lineage would have been refused a place to stay in David's own city of Bethlehem. Surely he would have had more than one kinsman or friend in the town who would have opened his door to Joseph and his wife. "OK, fine," you might say at this point. "But Luke clearly states that 'there was no room for them in the inn.' Doesn't he?" Well, not exactly. What Luke says - in Greek - is that there was no room for them in the "kataluma", a word which does not refer to a commercial inn where travelers lodge but rather to a guest room in a more spacious village home. English Bibles have typically translated "kataluma" as "inn", giving rise to the traditional pictures of surly inkeepers slamming their doors in Mary and Joseph's faces. More likely, the "kataluma" in question was the spare room of someone's house, which was already occupied by other guests staying in Bethlehem. Mary would then have had to give birth to Jesus in the main room of the home, and lay her newborn child in a manger from which the family's livestock would normally have fed. It's a fascinating theory, giving a very different spin to the traditional Christmas imagery. I haven't made my way through Dr. Bailey's book in its entirety, but his chapters on the birth of Jesus make for a highly interesting read, highly original but very faithful to the inspired character of the biblical stories.
Good books for the season
Each Advent the Church encourages us to take some time out of our busy schedules and reflect on the momentous mystery that we will celebrate at Christmas: the threefold coming of Jesus into our world at his birth in Bethlehem two thousand years ago, his return in glory at the end of time, and his coming to us here and now through prayer and grace. One excellent means of reflecting on the first two “comings” of Christ and bringing about the third is to devote a few minutes each day to some good spiritual reading. Among the many fine seasonal resources for Advent and Christmas, the following books are especially worth checking out.
If you’re looking for a good source for daily meditations presented in small, easily digestible chunks, then you might consider A Child in Winter: Advent, Christmas and Epiphany with Caryll Houselander (Sheed and Ward, 2000). This neat little tome offers daily excerpts from the writings of Caryll Houselander, an English artist, writer, and convert to Catholicism who lived from 1901 to 1954. During her brief life Ms. Houselander contributed a wealth of thought-provoking and thoroughly orthodox writings to the corpus of Catholic literature, and this book draws upon that corpus to provide a short meditation for each day of Advent and Christmas, along with a brief Scripture passage and a prayer for the day. What it lacks in length it more than makes up for in profundity, and in many ways the book’s brevity is its greatest strength, offering busy readers and pray-ers small nuggets of inspiration to carry them through the hectic days of December.
For people who find Scripture to be the best way of entering into a deeper relationship with the Lord, Edward Sri's The Dawn of the Messiah: The Coming of Christ in Scripture is a sure bet. Dr. Sri offers an in-depth study of the infancy narratives of Luke and Matthew, unearthing the deep theological riches that are found in both accounts. Sri presents readers with the extensive Old Testament background that shaped the stories of Jesus' birth, and shows how the events that surrounded Christ's coming were carefully prepared over long centuries of Jewish messianic expectation. My only (small) gripe about Sri's book is that the author overlooks the significance of the four women in his treatment of Matthew's genealogy, an odd omission given both their importance to the story and Sri's otherwise thorough treatment of the accounts. That said, Dawn of the Messiah is a very well-written and interesting guide to the infancy stories. It would make a perfect accompaniment to the Church's liturgical reading of these narratives during the final days of Advent and the coming Christmas season.
Finally, for the theologically adventurous, there is John Saward’s Cradle of Redeeming Love: The Theology of the Christmas Mystery (Ignatius Press, 2002). In this work of great intellectual depth and spiritual profundity, Saward, a former Anglican priest who was received into the Catholic Church in 1979, undertakes a systematic exploration of the dogmatic underpinnings of the Church’s Christmas celebration. Drawing upon a plethora of sources – Scripture, the Church Fathers, medieval Scholastics, religious artwork, hymns, and liturgical texts – Fr. Saward weaves together a profound theological tapestry that illuminates the beauty and wonder of the eternal Son of God’s birth into our world of time and space. His aim in writing the book was to demonstrate that “the Christmas gospel, anticipating the paschal proclamation, contains everything Christendom needs, everything the individual Christian needs, for spiritual restoration.” Cradle of Redeeming Love meets this goal admirably. Each page offers readers a rich banquet of spiritual and doctrinal nourishment and shows how the mystery of Christ’s birth is an event of such significance that it should be meditated upon not only during the brief Christmas season each year but every day. Be warned: Saward’s writing is not light and fluffy, and this book is not one to be breezed through in a matter of hours. One could spend many hours simply ruminating on the insights contained within a page or two of this book – but it would be time well spent. Fr. Saward goes beyond the sentimentality of Christmas to present the “meat and potatoes” of the season’s theological meaning, giving Catholics some very satisfying holiday fare in the process.
