Isaiah 7:10-16 Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18
Romans 1:1-7 Matthew 1:18-25
How certain were the early followers of the Risen Christ of his interior presence within them by an experience the Holy Spirit? And how did they communicate the substantiality of this experience?
We forever use the scientific method as a metaphor of substantiality. Believing our eyes, touch, taste, ears, and smelling is what we regard to be most empirically real. Empirical verification becomes the practical way to say that something is really real. As such, it then becomes used as a metaphor for declaring the realness of non-empirical events such as the experience of love, peace, hope, justice, and spirit.
Are love, peace, hope, justice, and spirit really real? Is the experience of beauty really real?
It is like the absent lover who receives a passionate letter from his beloved and confesses that the words of the letter made it seemed as though you were actually here with me.
Those who experienced the closeness of the Risen Christ used the narratives of the birth of Jesus as narrative of substantiation of the reality of such a spiritual birth.
Spirituality is an mysterious experience and it lends itself to aesthetics and feeling expressions of the heart. But how important are these mysterious experiences of Spirit, love, hope, and beauty? Well, they have an equal if not more important value than what we experience with our physical senses.
The physical senses record "that things happen;" our interior processing center includes the complex art of coming to meaning about what has happened. And when good things happen which can be shared, such things create communities, and these communities come to have group identity because of shared meanings.
The New Testament writings are writings about the shared meanings of people who have come into having an identity with the Risen Christ. These writings employed multiple rhetorical strategies to teach and promulgate the meanings of the Risen Christ.
In the earliest writings, the letters of St. Paul, we find that he was one who never had empirical experience of the historical Jesus. What he did have was an incredible interior event which turned his life around. Even though he did not have an empirical experience of Jesus, he believed that his spiritual experience was a substantial experience which had empirical and clearly noticeable effects in his new behaviors.
The spiritual events, the inner events happened within people of the early churches and they had outward and visible effects. The events were known by their effects even when the events cannot be seen or exactly replicated like a scientific experience.
What language did Paul use about his experience of the Risen Christ? He confessed Jesus to be the messiah, and the one who was proclaimed as Unique Son of God. Paul's writings included teaching about what the mystical experience of identity Christ meant for him and others who shared it in community. Such community living was not always perfect. So Paul wrote exhortations, disciplinary words, and advice on how the Christ-communities should live together. His writings also included a construction of the Risen Christ experience in continuity with his own Jewish tradition as was recorded in the various Hebrew Scriptures. Since the experience of the Risen Christ happened to Jews and Gentiles, there was a teaching need to give an orientation of the moorings of Christ within the Jewish traditions. These traditions were completely unfamiliar to the Gentiles.
The New Testament writings do not come with the full knowledge of the context of the first readers for these writings and we have to do some speculating from internal evidence of the writings and from historical records to try to get of sense of the writing purposes.
In the Gospel records about the origins of the meaning of the Risen Christ and the relationship to the Jesus of history, we have four canonical varieties: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. We assume that the contexts of their writing and reception were to specific communities at specific times and that each Gospel had writing purposes with rhetorical strategies to communicate the meaning of the experience of the Risen Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.
I would loosely characterize the Gospels as Early, Middle, and late phases in New Testament writings. The Early phase being represented by the Gospel of Mark in which Jesus is adopted as God beloved Son in presenting a heavenly and spiritual voice declaring it. In the Christian practice of baptisms, each baptized spiritually hears a voice declaring one as God's beloved Child.
John is the late phase Gospel and in it the origin of Christ on earth is expressed in a very philosophical from: The Word from the beginning was made Flesh. Word made Flesh is the Christmas story in John. Word is made flesh again in the spiritual reality of Christ within each believer.
Matthew and Luke are the middle phase of New Testament, later than Paul's writings but earlier than John's. They include two infancy narratives with similarities and differences. Scholars tell us that these infancy stories were rather late in being added to the texts. The metaphorical teaching purposes of these texts for the communities of Matthew and Luke was this: The spiritual birth of the Risen Christ is substantial and the substantiality is artistically presented in the extra-empirical fantasia of the infancies narratives.
The infancy narratives are a way of emphasizing that the experience of the birth of the Risen Christ is tinged with fantastic marvelous mystery and therefore the language of the fantastic is used to characterize the spiritual event of the birth of the Risen Christ into each person.
The infancy narratives are told in a fantasia mode so as to teach the mysterious substantiality of the experience of the birth of the Risen Christ. And this is the Gospel of the Christmas story. And for you and me, it means that spiritual birth within us has real Christly effects in our behavior and our transformations in goodness. Amen.
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