It’s Christmas time again, which means the Peanuts Christmas will be airing soon. For many, Linus' recounting the Christmas story is the only time they will hear it. His rendition comes from the Gospel of Luke, which was written sometime between 70-80 AD by a person commissioned to put the story together on one scroll. Luke get’s the billing, but it probably wasn’t him – just a distant admirer of Paul’s missionary companion.
For critical thinkers, Luke’s story is difficult to swallow. A virgin teenager gets “with child” by God? That’s hard to believe. I think some people get so hung up on whether or not the virgin birth literally happened that they fail to see what the author (whom I will refer to as Luke for convenience’ sake) was really trying to communicate.
Luke was a masterful writer whose command of language makes his education obvious. He wasn’t simply writing a biography about Jesus, which many scholars thought was the case until the last few centuries. He had an agenda: to give Theophilus confidence in the Jesus who captured his faith. Luke cared about accuracy, but he also cared about shaping the story with themes that he felt represented Jesus and God well. Luke had his own theology – and it wasn’t always similar to that of Paul, or Matthew, or Peter, or James or the other Gospel writers. And, since Luke wrote after Mark, and after the fall of Jerusalem, his tone is different than Mark – shaped by the reality of a not-as-soon-as-we-thought eschaton.
Luke makes some big statements about Jesus in his first two chapters. He begins with the story of John’s incredible birth to very aged parents, Elizabeth and Zechariah. These two prayerful people certainly thought their hopes for a child were long gone. But they weren’t. An old woman gets pregnant by and old man, and carries to term. Even today some would call that miraculous! God certainly must have had a hand in it...
What could be more impressive than that? How about a betrothed teenage virgin who gets pregnant without the help of a man? That’s even more miraculous than John’s birth. And that was the point.
Let go of your ultra-literal tendencies for a moment and see what Luke is doing. He is using a tool called step parallelism where two characters have similar (parallel) stories, but one is a step greater than the other. It was a common storytelling technique back in the day. What is Luke really trying to tell us here above all else? Is he wanting us to focus in on Mary’s virginity? Would he want us to spend lots of time wondering how God got her pregnant? No! Luke simply wants us to see that John was great – everybody knew that – but that Jesus was even greater.
While Luke is crafting a story about Jesus, however, he is also telling us much about the God he believes in. This amazing person isn’t born to royalty, but to peasants. These were low-on-the-totem-pole folks. He was born in a stable alongside farm animals, cradled in a feeding troph. What could be more humble than that? And the first to hear the news? A bunch of graveyard-shift shepherds. Humble beginnings, indeed. What kind of God would start his star character off this way? A God who wants to make a statement about who God values: everyone, and especially the least in the world, because they probably need God’s favor the most. Interestingly, in Jesus’ genealogy, Luke takes Jesus’ family line back further than does Matthew – all the way back to Genesis’ Adam. Jesus is related to everyone, great and small alike.
Luke doesn’t just give us a picture of Jesus and God, though. He also plants some seeds for his readers regarding what good followers look like. Simeon had been praying fervently for years. God showed up to that man who prayed so much and told him he would see the Christ with his own eyes. Anna, a widow who devoted herself to praying at the Temple for decades, knew who she saw when her eyes met Jesus. Some famous people have been attributed for saying, “the harder I work the luckier I get.” I think the more people pray the more they hear God. Coupled with Zechariah, the dedicated father of John the Baptist, and the picture gets all the more clear: pray more to hear God more.
Of course, the picture-perfect example of discipleship here is Mary. She is given the news and humbly offers herself to God’s service, knowing that doing so will be incredibly challenging. The picture of a whole-hearted follower of Christ.
Did you notice, by the way, that Luke’s story begins in Jerusalem? Guess where the climax of the story is? John is killed by the region king, Herod. Jesus is sentenced to die a far more painful, more humiliating death by Pontius Pilate, the king overseeing all of Israel. Jesus was born bigger, and dies bigger.
As you move through the Christmas season this year, I pray that your wonder will be rekindled. May you move your gaze beyond the nativity scene and look at what Luke is trying to communicate. A God breaks into history in a special way through Jesus, born to the humblest of peasants in the most humble of places, to call the same to trust and love and serve in order that the world, somehow, might be saved. Will you heed such an inherent invitation?
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