Lectionary Commentaries for December 25, 2023
Christmas Day (III)

John’s audience would have been familiar with the first few words of the prologue, “In the beginning.” When they hear that phrase, they are immediately reminded of the book of Genesis, which narrates the creation story. The first chapter of Genesis intricately describes the beginning of creation when God turned chaos into an orderly form and brought the universe and all creatures into existence simply by uttering a word. The story articulates the creative power of the word and God’s engagement with the universe.

John’s point that the word became flesh should be read also in the backdrop of the Gnostic Christian traditions of John’s time that denigrated the suggestion of the divine taking the human form. From their perspective, because the flesh is inferior and possibly evil, the divine can never manifest itself in the form of flesh. Seen within this context, the story of the word becoming flesh forcefully counteracts the Gnostic worldview and ideas about flesh, and sanctifies the flesh.

John’s use of that phrase—“in the beginning”—in the prologue also reminds readers that God continues to act in history and engenders an anticipation of yet another divine intervention in human history, an intervention that will have immense significance for humanity. John reminds readers of the role of the word in the process of creation and of its life-giving power. The focus is no longer primarily on the process of creation or the creation itself, but on the journey of the word that brought the universe into existence. The word that created the universe now becomes the created and enters the universe.

As Gail O’Day and Susan Hylen helpfully observe, John is not yet using the word as a synonym for Jesus in the first two verses, but rather as a metaphor or a vehicle.¹ The word is “God’s self-expression” and later Jesus’ self-expression as well. The word is a metaphor about God because it reveals the nature and attributes of God. Word becoming flesh has a theological and christological dimension. It also has an ecclesial and communal dimension.

On a theological level, in calling attention to the timelessness of the divine, John highlights how God remains consistent in a world that seems unstable and chaotic. The word that John describes is eternal and undefined by the confines of time, but the eternal seeks to dwell among us in a specific period of time. The text reveals the word’s ability to transcend time and manifest itself in various forms and contexts. The word is both eternal and particular. It is universal but simultaneously particular. The seemingly abstract word takes a concrete form in a specific time in human history.

The word becomes flesh through Christ and helpfully disrupts the human state of affairs. Just as God intervened amid chaos at the beginning of the universe, God again disrupts the status quo of business as usual. John is setting the stage for an introduction about how God placed God’s body on the line for the sake of people. It is a theological and christological introduction that speaks to the many aspects of Jesus’ mission in subsequent chapters in the gospel.

On an ecclesial level, the word becoming flesh suggests that declarations of commitment to justice actually need to take concrete shape, dwell among the victims and put one’s body on the line. Words have creative and transformative power, but solidarity can only occur when words become flesh and take concrete form. John will later introduce the various characters who respond in different ways to this paradigm.

There is Judas Iscariot who eloquently declares his commitment to the poor when he says, “Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages” (12:5). The narrator quickly clarifies that Judas was a thief who was only interested in serving his own interests. Implicitly, the narrator contrasts Judas with Jesus, who had already demonstrated his commitment to the poor. John had already noted how Jesus contrasted a good shepherd with a thief (John 10). The thief comes to steal and destroy, but Jesus is the good shepherd who will lay down his life for the sheep (John 10).

Later in the gospel, when Thomas, one of Jesus’ disciples, insists on putting his fingers where nails were and putting his hand in his side, Jesus shows him the parts of his body that bore marks of his bodily suffering and death on the cross. In doing so, he proves that he is not simply a great teacher who speaks eloquently about commitment to justice and solidarity, but he also puts his own body on the line for the sake of others.

Words have power—transformative power—but solidarity can only occur when it takes its bodily form and identifies with people and dwells with them in their lived contexts. The text is about the power of words but also about how words are limited unless they take concrete shape. The introduction of John the Baptist as a witness illustrates this point well. John bore witness to the nature and mission of Jesus through his words, but ultimately he placed his body on the line. The Greek verb martureo, which is generally translated as “witness,” implies that witnessing to truth is a dangerous task and often exacts a bodily price such as John paid with his life.

On yet another level, John’s prologue calls attention to how one might choose to deploy the power of words. Words have an amazing ability to breathe life into people and can rejuvenate people and communities during critical moments. But if and when words are misused, they can cause significant harm. In these polarized times, John’s powerful introduction to Jesus calls us to be attentive to how we employ words and toward what end.

How will John’s readers respond to this insightful prologue that seems abstract on some level but is very down-to-earth? Will they simply theologize and articulate great words about solidarity with the powerless, or will they translate words into actualized witness? Will they use words that give life to others rather than those that cause harm?

Notes

1. Gal O’Day and Susan Hylen, John (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006), 26-27.

“Beauty” is a word in the English language that gets used a lot to talk about places, people, objects, circumstances, et cetera. But what exactly is beauty? Who defines it, and what is it good for?

This week’s text identifies something very specific as beautiful: a messenger’s feet. This raises an interesting question: But why? What leads the poet to conclude that one of the dirtiest parts of the human body—especially in the ancient world—is actually beautiful? The field of philosophy that deals with the topic of beauty is called “aesthetics.” So what kind of “aesthetic” does this text have? And how can our answers to these questions help us preach and teach this text more effectively?

Critically for our purposes, the poem isn’t actually concerned with the messenger’s visual features, despite the reference to his “feet.” The author quickly pivots away from the body of the messenger to the content of his message: “peace … good news … salvation … ‘Your God reigns.’” What makes the messenger’s feet “beautiful” is not a visual or physical attribute, but the promises and proclamations that the feet carry into the world—and in particular to exiled Jews.

In popular American parlance, beauty is often associated with things like youthfulness, physical appearance, and other idealistic expressions. These modern understandings of beauty have no place in Isaiah 52. This text’s understanding of beauty is much closer to what we find in the theological aesthetics of Martin Luther.

In 2017, an important book was published by Mark Mattes, theologian and Luther scholar at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa: Martin Luther’s Theology of Beauty.¹ A version of his argument also appeared in 2019 in Word & World.² In these works, Mattes draws attention to how Luther’s aesthetics both reflect emerging trends in his time and environment and also break from the scholarship he inherited. Luther’s view can be summarized in this way: The gospel is beautiful.³

To fill that picture out a little bit, Mattes offers an interpretation of Luther’s mature theology of beauty. For Martin Luther, beauty is “a feature of God’s faithfulness even to sinners and not some kind of Aristotelian golden mean of proper proportion. It is found in God’s self-donation and in human trust in God’s promise.”⁴ This quality of beauty is not a result of Jesus’ fulfillment of the divine law, but because of his grace toward the world. Mattes’ important claims about Luther provide us with insight into how one should interpret the 52^nd chapter of Isaiah—a book occasionally termed “the fifth gospel.”⁵

Isaiah 52 is a poem that announces the restoration of Jerusalem and the return of Jews from exile to the City of David. Its goal, like that of so many texts in Isaiah 40–55, is to inspire confidence that Yhwh will restore Jerusalem and her people. For Isaiah 52, what makes the messenger’s feet beautiful is the fact that he announces the coming reign of God (verse 7).

This is an important point, because the poem suggests that God’s favor was hidden for a season. The absence of that favorable rule was felt in military and cultural defeat, the forced deportation of Jews to Mesopotamia, the loss of sovereignty, and the destruction of the temple—the ritual space where Yhwh had promised to be present for Jews. These public defeats left a mark of shame and dismay. But according to Isaiah 52, a new day was on the verge of breaking, and its light would be every bit as public as the darkness that preceded it.

God’s acts of redemption will now be “in plain sight” (verse 8) for all to see. The messenger appears “upon the mountains,” “announces salvation,” and speaks directly to Zion herself. The very ruins of the city break forth into song and shout for joy, and the Lord shows his holy arm before an international audience (verse 10). The “beauty” of this message is the great reversal that God promises—rubble raises its voice in celebration, defeat cedes to restoration, and lament gives way to praise. This is Isaiah 52’s “joyful exchange.”

It’s also important to note what kind of help Yhwh offers. Isaiah 52 is not simply claiming to offer a vague religious feeling—an opiate to dull the sting of defeat. The ministry of presence is only part of the poem’s vision; the God of Isaiah 52 promises to change the facts on the ground. The king is returning to his city (verse 8), Jerusalem will be redeemed, and the nations of the earth will take note. Like in so many poems in Isaiah, salvation is cosmic in its scope.

Preachers and teachers will find in Isaiah 52 a thoughtful poem addressed to hurting souls. Key to understanding that poem is its concept of “beauty.” The text represents an opportunity to disrupt modern understandings of beauty and to point, instead, to a very different concept of beauty—one marked by divine generosity, the rebuilding of ruins, and human trust in divine promises.

Notes

1. Mark Mattes, Martin Luther’s Theology of Beauty: A Reappraisal (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2017).
2. Mark Mattes, “Luther and Beauty,” Word & World 39 (2019): 11–24.
3. Mattes, “Luther and Beauty,” 13, 16–22.
4. Mattes, “Luther and Beauty,” 20.
5. John F. A. Sawyer, The Fifth Gospel: Isaiah in the History of Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Psalm 98 invites hearers and readers into a new frame of reflection about the activity of God.¹

It breathes with the movement of the planet around the sun. It ties the movement of life to the power of song and music. The earth sings, the sea booms out a bass line, the rivers tap a rhythm, and creation is joined together in an orchestral arrangement that goes on around the clock and is generally imperceptible to human minds or unnoticed by those traveling from one obligation to another.

The passage of time is something that everyone experiences in a range of ways. In childhood I would stare at the elementary classroom clock and wonder why time moved so slowly. Now as an adult who is moving swiftly toward my twilight years, I wonder why time moves so swiftly. The year has barely begun and before I know it I am preparing the house for another winter. The experience of time and reflections about it are ubiquitous, yet the perception of the passage of time is something that varies with age, cultural context, economic status, and so on. Any number of factors can intersect the human experience of time’s passage.

Human perception is limited, yet it can be prompted to discern more than what appears to be possible. The movement of planets, solar systems, galaxies, electrons, microbes, and anything else not readily discernable through human senses are moving all the time, yet people don’t generally think about them.

The earth turns and revolves around the sun. The sun and planets spiral around the Milky Way galaxy. The movement is imperceptible if it weren’t for a few objects in the sky—sun and moon—or in the ocean’s tides. People and all creation experience the rising and falling of the sun as it sweeps across the sky. They see the moon rise and set at all hours of the day. But they don’t really feel the movement of the earth’s turning under the sun or the moon’s passage, nor do feel the revolution of our planet around the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Yet, everything is in constant motion. Everything is moving. One could also make a similar observation about the movement of electrons around individual proton and neutron cores in the atoms of everything. In the human body trillions of electrons are moving at any given time. In other words, move than “seven billion billion billion.”² The sun, planets, and stars follow their courses, but human beings cannot sense the movement. The expanse is too great for human senses to easily observe.

The earth teems with life and only a fraction of it is discernable to the human eye, ear, touch, taste, or olfactory nerves. According to Discovery Magazine the average human body is shared with roughly ninety trillion microbes.³ Microbes move in and over human bodies at every moment, but human beings cannot discern the paths they travel. They are too small for human senses to notice.

Perhaps the Psalmist is inviting people to not only sing a new song, but to sing a song infused by new perception. Reflect on what God has done and is doing in creating trillions of microbes, trillions of atoms, and trillions of suns, planets, moons, and galaxies that stretch out further than the human mind can discern or smaller than the eye can see. Maybe it is the act of reflecting on the mysteries of creation that can give rise to a capacity to begin to notice the atom singing, the mountain drumming, trees dancing, clouds clapping, and pulsars blowing horns?

Maybe the marvelous things of which the Psalmist wrote are that which human capacity cannot easily reach or craft or create. They exist somewhere beyond perception and yet bump against human abilities to see, touch, hear, smell, and taste them. In that expansive and microscopic space there is movement that brushes all things. In the movement there is an activity that the Psalmist claims is the activity of God.

Given that human perception is limited, yet also able to be stretched beyond its limits, the Psalmist invites people to consider the activity of God as a movement of salvation that is oriented toward putting all things right. It is an activity that is infused with not only the movement of God, but the very presence of God in the thickness of human experience and in the movement of all things. “The Lord has made God’s salvation known and revealed God’s righteousness to the nations” (New Interpreter’s Version Psalm 98:2).

Psalm 98 is an exhortation to discernment of God’s activity in the ordinary activities of every living thing. Even the things that may not be seen as living are exhorted to join the chorus of those already singing—seas resound, rivers clap hands, mountains sing before the Lord God. Their movements and solidity provide a framework on which the musical score is sung.

Psalm 98 can function as both an awakener to perception about the presence and activity of God and a reminder that God remembers in love, is faithful to Israel, provides salvation, and judges people with equity.

Psalm 98 is a timely Psalm for today. Many are convinced that God is absent, hidden, deceased, or never existed. This isn’t anything new for human experience. However, it is present. The Psalm interrupts that musing by offering another way to reflect on the present. The writer invokes human minds to break out of spaces where thinking is limited and life is regarded as something lived independent of other living things or of God. It seems that the writer was intent on pushing people to see the unseen that was right before their eyes. And once they could begin to make out the outlines and contours of the activity of God, then it was time to shout, burst into song, and make music. What else can really happen once one has discerned the previously un-discernable? It seems that the most reasonable choice is to open one’s mouth and let the songs usher forth from wells of joy.

Notes

1. Commentary first published on this site on Dec. 25, 2016.
2. Quora.com. “How many electrons are in the average human body?” Srijan Ghosh. https://www.quora.com/How-many-electrons-are-in-the-average-human-body-How-many-atoms-are-in-the-average-human-body-How-many-electrons-leave-the-body-at-death Accessed June 28, 2016.
3. Discovery Magazine. “Your Body is a Planet.” Josie Glausiusz. June 19, 2007. http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/your-body-is-a-planet Accessed June 28, 2016.

The majestically celebratory opening of Hebrews merits a cautious approach at Christmas. The author’s portrayal of Jesus as unique and superior comes at the expense of Jewish traditions and practices. Understanding this portrayal can help audiences celebrate Jesus in ways that liberate us from this singularity and make room for difference.

Context matters

Biblical scholars frequently use terms like “enigmatic” to describe Hebrews. It sits among the letters of the New Testament, between Paul’s letters (genuine and pseudonymous) and the various eponymous letters (often pseudonymous as well) often categorized as the “catholic epistles.” Unlike the writers of those letters, the author of Hebrews remains anonymous; they never name or introduce themself. It is impossible to say anything firm about the historical context of this letter based on the text itself.

Most notably, this means the letter’s audience is likewise unclear (and oft-debated among scholars). Later Christian theologians added the designation “to the Hebrews” well after the letter was written. The letter draws heavily from the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation of Jewish Scriptures) to make its arguments. Part of this argument—which we must consider more cautiously below—is that Jesus’ superiority renders God’s past covenant with Moses obsolete.

Traditionally, many commentators assumed the author and their audience were both Jewish, given their knowledge and use of these Scriptures. However, Pamela Eisenbaum points out that, in the first and second centuries C.E., Greek-speaking Jews and gentiles were familiar with these textual traditions. The author never refers to specific Jewish customs (such as Judaism’s relation to the Temple) that would have been characteristic of Jewish practice during this era. The author could have or could have not come from a Jewish background; their audience could have been exclusively Jewish or non-Jewish or included both.¹

Though English readers can see the poetic nature of the letter’s opening in 1:5–12, they do not get the full sense of the author’s sophisticated literary style. Their word choices are intentionally alliterative: the first four verses set the tone for the opening poetic and rhythmic flow. Throughout Hebrews, the author uses language that evokes. Though, like Paul and other letter writers, the author makes a theological argument, their persuasion could be described as more poetic and less pointed. That said, the poetry still makes theological points.

The poetry of 1:1–4 introduces one of the author’s major emphases: Jesus’ uniqueness and superiority as the Christ (christos, the Greek translation of the Hebrew messiah). The author describes Jesus as “having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs” (1:4). This language—alongside the frequent references to Jesus’ proximity to God throughout the letter (for example, “the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being,” 1:3)—contributes to scholars identifying Hebrews as having an especially “high” Christology compared to other early Christian texts.

The author’s language about Christ and God in this passage appears to be influenced by the Jewish scriptural tradition, including Psalms, Proverbs, and the Wisdom of Solomon. The theological power of this poetic presentation of Christ is undeniable, and Christians have long found these descriptions meaningful—especially when celebrating Jesus’ birth and incarnation.

This said, Hebrews—starting in 1:1–4—builds Jesus’ divine-like superiority upon a Jewish foundation in ways that presume that following Christ uniquely fulfills Jewish Scriptures. This uniqueness leaves no room for other Jewish interpretations, theologies, and practices. Eisenbaum therefore cautions, “Hebrews is the foundation of this idea that Christianity has ‘replaced’ Judaism.”²

The letter opens: “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son” (1:1–2a). The author emphasizes the contrast between the “old” way God spoke and the way God speaks to “us” in this recent period. Hebrews is also about identity formation.³ The emphasis on us draws a boundary around the author and audience as the proper recipients of God’s speech. The temporal contrast sets the stage for the author to laud Jesus’ superiority in the next several verses—“Jesus’ superiority over all else,” as Eisenbaum puts it.⁴

Especially in Christmas liturgies, Christian theology tends to perpetuate supersessionist readings of Jewish Scriptures when it assumes Jesus obviously perfects the tradition’s prophecies and covenants.

A less unique Christmas celebration

The opening of Hebrews sets up Jesus as unique and singular in ways that pave over Jewish traditions. In an article about Mark, Katherine Shaner writes, “Liberation is never effective if singularly credited and enforced; empire is. The singular Jesus then becomes emperor Jesus, even with the insistence that this Jesus is included.”⁵ A liberative approach to the opening of Hebrews calls for finding ways to celebrate Christ’s coming without making him uniquely special. Christ—and his birth—can be just as special and celebratory among many different traditions and leaders.

While celebrating the meaningfulness of Hebrews’ poetic language, it is possible to warn against the author’s superior approach. Doing so makes room to call attention to the ongoing ways Christian texts and traditions have become unique in the world. In the West, Christmas takes a unique status among religious holidays, shutting down much of the world so that many people can assume they can celebrate the holiday with their loved ones without interference. Many folks assume they will have time off at Christmas. They do not have to celebrate this special day while balancing the regular demands of life.

What might it mean to read Hebrews in ways that consider Jesus as something other than unique? How might this impact your Christmas homily or liturgy? Asking these questions challenges our usual celebrations, but it opens us to more liberative options. It makes room for difference, in our congregations and in the wider world.

Notes

1. Pamela Eisenbaum, “Hebrews,” in The Jewish Annotated New Testament, 2^nd ed., ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 460–462.
2. Eisenbaum, “Hebrews,” 462.
3. See Jennifer T. Kaalund, Reading Hebrews and 1 Peter with the African American Great Migration: Diaspora, Place and Identity (London: T&T Clark, 2020).
4. Eisenbaum, “Hebrews,” 461.
5. Katherine A. Shaner, “The Danger of Singular Saviors: Vulnerability, Political Power, and Jesus’s Disturbance in the Temple (Mark 11:15–19),” Journal of Biblical Literature 140 (2021): 160.