2 Christmas A January 5, 2014
Jeremiah 31:7-14
Ps 84:1-8
Eph. 1:3-6,15-19a Matthew 2:1-12
Today is the last day of Christmas and
tomorrow is the Feast of the Epiphany.
And on the twelfth day, according to the song, your true love gave to
you twelve Lords a leapin’. If you’ve
ever watched the House of Lords in session on the telly, you would find that
hard to believe. It’s more like twelve
Lords a sleepin’.
What the lectionary
gives us on the twelfth day of Christmas and the Second Sunday after Christmas
is the story of the magi who came from the East to visit the Christ Child.
To understand
the literary function of the magi story, it might help us to understand something
about the Jesus Movement and the Christ communities of the first ten decades after
Jesus lived on this earth.
To give us a
sense of the situation, I would like for us to consider a culinary phenomenon
which also could be viewed as a metaphor for sociological process. I would call it the pizza effect. Though Italy gets credit for the name, flat
bread or open pie with spices and various sauces on top can be found almost
everywhere and in many places in antiquity.
Pizza probably derived as a food of the masses; it was a quick way to
bake flavored flat bread. It was vendor
portable and so could be hawked on the streets quite easily. It was so basic that one could put on it
whatever happened to be in the larder on the day. It was so basic and so good it traveled with
the nomadic communities wherever they went.
Pizza underwent a major paradigm switch because of those Americans;
tomatoes and tomato sauce and paste derived from the Americas and were taken
back to Europe and tomatoes have become so much a part of the pizza tradition
that it is hard for Americans to even think about pizza without tomato sauce,
even though pizza has lots of varieties without tomato sauce. Today, each American city brags about having
the best and most authentic pizza. And
Chicago hails deep dish pizza and New York retorts, “Fuhgeddaboudit. Pizza has
to be flat and skinny.” I don’t think
that there are any American pizza chains in Italy but there are some pizza
makers there who cater to American deviant pizza taste. It is rather presumptuous for Americans to
make authentic pizza claims in Italy.
The Jesus
Movement experienced its own dynamic something like the pizza effect. Jesus was a populist rabbi within the Judaic
tradition; an apocalyptic rabbi who had a sense that great changes were going
to come to his world.
He was not around for those changes. Jesus of Nazareth was not around after about
the mid-thirties. And the first New
Testament writings did not occur until the mid-fifties with the writings of the
man who was associated with perhaps the greatest paradigm shift in the history
of the Jesus Movement. St. Paul was
involved in this paradigm shift. It was
a shift that was more profound than the effect of tomato sauce in the history
of pizza. St. Paul, a rabbi, noticed
that Gentiles became infused with the Spirit of Christ and that they manifested
obvious moral and spiritual changes in their lives; and they did not even have
the benefit of circumcision and they did not keep the Jewish calendar nor did
they observe the dietary rules. They had
the evidence of spirituality without the identity markings of Judaism. So Paul had to rethink what the community of
Jesus Christ would be like in the cities of the Roman Empire where a variety of people
were brought into contact with each other comprising churches or sort of
egalitarian social clubs for fellowship within large cities. Could
Jews and Gentiles live together within a community of faith that derived from Jesus
of Nazareth? Could slaves and slave
owners actually be friends? Could men and
women have places to meet with social protection and dignity? What would Jewish followers of Jesus have to
give up or to tolerate to receive Gentiles into the community and live together? Would Jewish followers of Jesus have to
sacrifice too many of their religious practices to be able to tolerate living
in a community with non-Jewish members?
How can you cook kosher in a kitchen that has already had pork prepared in
it with all of the cooking utensils? It
is hard to purify a kitchen with “mixed” use.
St. Paul
represented the universalization of a Christocentric Judaism, a Christ-centered
Judaism, within the cities of the Roman Empire.
This Christocentric Judaism which involved accepting Gentile members was
political and social in nature; the social reality of the Roman world is that
it placed the nomadic populations in proximity with the local residence of the
cities. There was a need for a community;
a sort of “home away from home” kind of extended family to help mediate a
person’s existence within a city of the Roman Empire. The Christocentric or Christ-centered Judaism
of St. Paul was successful enough to comprise a variety of these home churches
to give people social identity centered around a devotion to Christ. It resulted in helping Jews and Gentiles to
live side by side in successful fellowship with one another and it was so
successful that this pluralistic community began to pass judgments upon
communities that wanted to remain separated..
The synagogues that wanted to retain their Jewish purity of practice
began by the year 80 or so to excommunicate followers of Christ.
We can
further note the “pizza” effect in the sociology of early Christianity. St. Paul’s writings were written before the
Gospel writings. That is not to say that authentic oral
traditions of the Gospel did not pre-exist the writings of Paul, but it meant
that the oral traditions of the Gospel were edited and written to take into
account the coming of the message of Jesus Christ to great success within the
Gentile communities. Just as tomato
sauce changed the pizza, Gentile acceptance of Christ changed the appearance
and the presentation of the Gospel writings.
How could the
Gospel writers who were Christ-centered Jews, account for the acceptance of
Christ by the Gentile community? Since
Gentile Christianity had become as common as tomato sauce on pizza, the Gospel
writers had to have origin stories to incorporate the validity of Gentile
Christianity. Where was the origin of Gentile
Christianity in Scriptures? Well it was there from the
beginning. It was there in the Torah and
it was in the other writings of the Hebrew Scriptures.
For St. Paul,
the Gentile people of faith were children of Abraham, the father of pre-Hebrew faith. With Christ, the non-Jewish line
of Abraham was let back into the lineage of authentic faith in God. The Temple was supposed to be a house of
prayer for all people. The Psalmist and
the prophet Isaiah wrote that kings of the earth would come and pay homage with
gifts for the promised one. So the magi came to receive kingly identity in Christian tradition. In telling of the universalization of a
Christ-centered Judaism, the story of the magi became an origin story about the
drawing of the Gentiles into the community of faith. The Gentiles traveled long and far from
their socio-ethnic background to come under the influence of the Jewish
populist rabbi Jesus. The Gentiles gave
their best and their all for the birth of the life of Christ into their
lives. They gave the gold of their life
earning; they gave the frankincense of their rising prayers to God and they brought
the medicinal myrrh as symbols of health and salvation.
So the magi
story was used by the Gospel writer to explain why the Christ-centered Judaism
had come to many people in the cities of the Roman Empire. They were magi; they were wise because in
their wisdom they would not compromise with those like Herod who wanted to
limit their faith and their worship to exclusive communities. The magi refused to participate with the extinction of the message of the Christ Child.
The Gospel, much like pizza has in our day, has become a universal phenomenon. It has morphed and habituated itself to many
new countries and situations. The magi
story tell us that there is something so good about the birth of Christ into
the world and into us that we are compelled to change our lives toward
excellence and share for the cause of this excellence the very best of lives.
So people,
enjoy your pizza today, of any variety but Christ is one greater than pizza and
who is offered to us again today under the species of Eucharistic bread and
wine. This perhaps is the greatest
culinary spirituality of all. Come today
and partake of the Christ; and bring your best gifts to Christ today. Amen.
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