Readings:
Sermon:
Happy New year. I’m Doug Chaplin, the Discipleship and Lay Training officer.
We are eight days into the Christmas season, and in church terms that means not eight maids a-milking, but one pious family being obedient to the commands of the Torah. Joseph and Mary are portrayed in Luke’s gospel as carefully following the observances that mark them out as faithful Jews. On the eighth day they have Jesus circumcised, and ceremonially give him the name commanded by the archangel Gabriel: Jesus.
The title of this feast in the old prayer book – the circumcision of Christ – has disappeared from Common Worship, and the feast itself has disappeared from the modern Roman Catholic calendar. But the readings remain the same – after all, what else would you read eight days from the birth of Jesus but the only story we have of an eight-day old Christchild? Likewise, in another 32 days time, at Candlemas, we shall read the only story we have of a forty day year old Jesus, when his parents, according to Luke, go up from Bethlehem to Jerusalem and present him in the temple, again, scrupulously following the law of Moses.
Perhaps the contemporary world simply finds the idea of circumcision too gross and unappealing. Let’s focus not on the specific Jewishness and maleness of Jesus, but on his universal humanity – after all, we name babies of all genders in every culture. But in our modern Western culture there are even occasional suggestions of taking even the basic human right of freedom of religion away from Jews and Muslims, and preventing them from circumcising their baby boys.
It was different in the Middle Ages. Then Christians didn’t only celebrate both the circumcision together with the naming of Jesus, they went quite over the top about it. There were at least a dozen churches that claimed actually to have the holy foreskin, a miracle of multiplication whose improbability was noted even at the time by some of the more serious thinkers of the day. More importantly, our spiritual forebears read a profound significance into the circumcision: it was the first time that Jesus shed his blood. The whole of his life and death is of a piece. God takes real flesh and even in this moment of family joy and celebration sheds real blood.
The Christmas story is universal: Jesus is God becoming human, God the creator entering the life of God’s creation. But this feast of circumcision and naming reminds us very forcefully of the particular. God only becomes human by becoming this particular human, with the name Jesus, and in this particular time, place and context, Jewish through and through, inheriting the history of God’s journey with his people, being marked out with the sign of the covenant reserved for Jewish males, committed to the laws revealed in the Holy Torah. As St Paul puts it in our second reading “born of a woman, born under the law”.
It is true that the end point of the story of Jesus will open up a new world, offer a new understanding and experience of the Spirit, and, again as St Paul says “redeem those who were under the law, so that we – and he means we non-Jews also who were not under the law, might receive adoption as God’s children.” God becomes this specific human child, so that all humans might have the opportunity to become God’s children.
I remember once coming across an old Peanuts cartoon. Linus, being particularly fed up with Lucy, is shown shouting: “I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.” There is something in the model of God’s embracing of all humanity in this particular human being that offers us an example and a challenge. We may mutter in general terms, when we hear of wars and atrocities, of “man’s inhumanity to man”. We regularly hear or read comments that treat people as a class “migrants”, “the unemployed”, “refugees”, “the rich”, “politicians”, and so on.
But, however much people might have in common with others of their group, each of us is unique – unique in our gifts and strengths, unique in our sins and weaknesses. God saves not so much all in general, as each of us in our particularity, and God does so through the life of this one Jesus in all his own unique particularity. We can only share the love of that same God with all by sharing it with each person in their own particular uniqueness: them and us entirely equal in love and absolutely unique in the self God has made each to be, and is leading each of us to become.
If this feast offers a particular take on that old standby of a New Year’s resolution, let it be this: I will seek to see the unique you as God sees you, listen to you as God listens to you, and love you as God loves you, and pray that you will do the same for me. Then perhaps, we will be to each other the means by which the Lord blesses and keeps his people, as we learn to love humanity one person at a time.
Questions:
- Why do you think the modern church has so downplayed this story of Jesus’ circumcision?
- If you think about the idea that we can only love humanity by loving each individual person, how do you think you, your church or community, could do that differently this year?