It
Makes No Sense, Except….
December
14, 2020
The Scripture
quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible,
copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council
of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
We are
approaching the fourth Sunday of Advent for this year, so I recently looked at
the Bible readings for that Sunday in the Revised Common Lectionary. The Lectionary’s
Gospel reading for the fourth Sunday in Advent, Year B, which we’re in, is Luke
1:26-38, the story known as the Annunciation. That story tells of the angel
Gabriel coming from God and appearing to a woman named Mary in the village of
Nazareth in Galilee. He recruits Mary into the sacred mission of bringing what
the story calls the Son of the Most High, i.e., Jesus, into the world. Mary is essentially
a nobody, a young Jewish woman, probably very young—I’ve seen some speculation
that she may have been fourteen years old—from a backwater town in a backwater
part of the Roman Empire. In the song she sings after she accepts Gabriel’s
offer that she become Jesus’ mother, known as the Magnificat, she acknowledges
her low station in life. She sings that God “has looked with favor on the lawlessness
of his servant.” Luke 1:48a. Yet she is the one God has chosen to bring the
Messiah into the world. Centuries later the Christian tradition would call her Theotokos,
the God-bearer. Artists have painted how they have imagined this scene for
centuries. The Annunciation is one of the foundational stories of the Christian
tradition.
It is a great
story of God choosing a good but perfectly ordinary young woman to perform the
sacred task of giving birth to Jesus and that young woman consenting to do it. Yet
it has something in it that doesn’t make a lick of sense. I don’t mean the part
where Mary agrees to become pregnant through the Holy Spirit rather than in the
usual way with her husband. I mean the part where Gabriel says to Mary “the
Lord God will give to him [Jesus] the throne of his ancestor David.” Luke 1:32.
There’s more than one thing wrong with this statement. First of all, Jesus is
not a biological descendant of David. In the purely biological sense David is
not Jesus’ ancestor. Yes, like Matthew Luke gives us a genealogy (though one
quite different from Matthew’s) in which Joseph, Mary’s husband, is a
descendant of David. Luke 3:23-38. Yet Luke’s genealogy begins with an
acknowledgement that Joseph is not actually Jesus’ father. It says, “Jesus was
about thirty years old when he began his work. He was the son (as it was
thought) of Joseph….” Luke 3:23. People thought Joseph was Jesus’ father, but Luke
knew better.[1] The
Holy Spirit was Jesus’ father not Joseph. So while Luke can contend that Joseph
was a descendant of David he really shouldn’t contend that Jesus was. Yet he
does just that when he calls David Jesus’ ancestor. We start to wonder what’s
going on here.
Then there’s the
bit about David’s throne. Gabriel tells Mary that God will give Jesus the
throne of his ancestor David. OK, but David has been dead for nearly one
thousand years by the time Jesus comes along. His throne hasn’t existed since
at least 586 BCE when the Babylonian Empire conquered Judah and Jerusalem and
put an end to the Davidic kingdom. How can you give someone something that hasn’t
existed for well over five hundred years? Pretty obviously you can’t. Saying
that God would makes no sense at all. Now we wonder even more what’s going on
here.
These things that
Gabriel says to Mary make no sense. That is, they make no sense if we insist on
understanding them merely as statements of facts. As facts these statements are
nonsense, but what if we were never supposed to take them as facts in the first
place? What if there were some other way of understanding them? Indeed there is
another way of understanding them, and it’s the way Luke surely meant for us to
understand them.
Gabriel’s
statements that tie Jesus to David aren’t facts, they are faith confessions of
Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. For Luke, for Christians before him, and for
Christians ever since Jesus was and is the Messiah. We may more often call him
the Christ, but Christ is simply a word that derives from the Greek that means
the same thing as Messiah, which derives from the Hebrew. Jesus’ world was
tense with Messianic anticipation. Would-be Messiah’s were popping up and
failing all the time. Most of the Jewish people and their religious leaders
thought that the Messiah, who they thought God had promised them, would be a human
king and that he would be a descendant of David.[2]
David would be one of his ancestors. Christians insisted that Jesus was the
Messiah, and that meant that he had to be a descendant of David. Because he
believed in Jesus’ conception by the Holy Spirit the best Luke could do was to
make Joseph a descendant of David, then to call David Jesus’ ancestor and say
that God would give him David’s throne.
Surely Luke saw
the factual inconsistency here, but just as surely Luke never meant for anyone
to read his words as mere facts. They aren’t assertions of facts, they are
confessions of faith. They are a way to say in story that Jesus really is the
Messiah. He really is the Christ. When ancient authors had something profound
like that to say they were a whole lot more likely to assert them through story
than through a theological essay. People like me write theological essays. People
like Luke didn’t. They told stories. It didn’t matter much if what sounded like
facts in their stories weren’t accurate facts at all. What mattered was the
truth to which those apparent facts pointed. We are to take the claim that
David was Jesus’ ancestor and that God would give him David’s throne not as
mere facts but as signs that point to the much deeper truth that Jesus is indeed
the long-expected Messiah. Facts don’t matter here. The much deeper truth that Jesus
is the Messiah matters a lot.
In the ways the
story of the Annunciation uses what appear to us to be statements as fact not
as statements of fact but as confessions of faith this story a fine model for
how we are to understand all of scripture. We’ve all been conditioned to read
the Bible as giving us facts, but that’s the problem. There are facts in the
Bible, but the facts are never what really matters. What matters is always the
more profound truths to which the apparent facts that probably aren’t really
facts at all point. Did God create all creation in seven days? No. Is God
Creator of all that is, is God’s creation good, and are women and men created
in the image and likeness of God? Yes. Genesis 1 isn’t a factual account of
creation. It is a faith confession of God as Creator of all that is and of the
nature of creation and of human beings.
That’s how it is
with scripture. We make a big mistake when we reduce scripture to a mere record
of supposed facts. We need to learn not to worry about the facts. We needn’t
worry about whether they really are accurate facts or not. We need to learn to
read the Bible not as fact but as faith confession. We need to seek out what
the far more profound truth is to which things that appear to us to be facts
point. We need to look for truth far deeper than facts. That truth is there in
the Bible, and it can make a huge difference in your life. So stop worrying
about the facts. Look not for mere facts but for deep spiritual truth when you
read the Bible. It’s there, and it can change your life. Thanks be to God!
[1] We
don’t know who wrote the Gospel of Luke. When I call the author of that Gospel
Luke I do so only as a matter of convenience. I do not mean to suggest that
Luke the “beloved physician” wrote the Gospel. He didn’t.
[2]
The phrase “of the house of David” which you’ll see in the Bible means a
descendant of David.
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