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The Narratives of Life

Christmas Day : 25 December 2013

If you have children or grand children the chances are that you have attended a Christmas pageant sometime during December. The well-known plot line has several satisfactory major roles as well as plenty of walk on parts. I am sure your junior family members have added their particular liveliness and uniqueness to these classic roles.

But if you are of a curious and enquiring disposition you might have pulled down a Bible off the shelves when you got home from the Christmas pageant to check if what you have just seen matches up with the birth narratives in the gospels. What you would have found is that Mark and John do not have any account of how Jesus came into our world. Matthew and Luke have plenty to say on that subject, but they vary widely on the details of how Jesus came to be born, and of what followed immediately afterwards.

So there are two different accounts of how Jesus came to be born. The people who stage the Christmas pageants that our children take part in solve the problem by running the two stories together in ways that we seldom notice. But thoughtful adults are left pondering the question - which of these stories are true? Or to go deeper into the issue – is this true full stop? Can we believe that God infiltrated his way into the human story through the lives of Mary and Joseph and their Jewish contemporaries?

What sharpens up the issue for us is that we live in an era that has a particular view of what truth is. There are many who argue that rational, logical thinking is the best kind of thinking there is. It is at the heart of of all that science and technology has done to improve the lot of the human race. But the Bible requires an imaginative response from its readers – it draws on the metaphorical, literary resources of its hearers. This is a different kind of thinking, and in the one-dimensional view of truth I have just outlined it is an inferior kind, which thereby downgrades religions ability to make truth claims or to be taken seriously.

So here tonight we are left asking –Is this true? Is there enough veracity in the story I have just heard to stake my life on? Is faith in an incarnate God possible for me on the basis of what I have just heard?

There are three events described in the Bible that are crucial to faith in God. The first is the encounter between Moses and God on Mt Sinai out of which the people of God were formed on the basis of a contract agreement. The second is the arrival of Jesus in our world in a way that was outside the cycle of human generation. The third is the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, an event witnessed mostly by his immediate followers that pointed to a new destiny for the human race.

Given the nature of these events they would have posed formidable challenges for those who attempted to write about them. The events are being recalled at some considerable distance of time. They are outside the conventional range of human experience and language. They mean so much that the writer must struggle to do justice to them.

The Bible did not drop down out of heaven already composed by a divine editorial team. It is inspired by God but written by human beings. They are addressing the theological concerns of the communities they come from. They are people of their day with a knowledge base and a worldview particular to their time. Sometimes they make factual mistakes. Sometimes they are unaware that they have written an account that disagrees in detail with another Biblical author, whom they never met, and whose book they never read. Objective history writing with its methods of quote your sources and check your references, a discipline that only came into existence in 19th century Germany, was a limbo bar the Biblical authors did not have to pass under. But what they wrote is there for all time as the Word of God because it has a classical quality about it. They put down on paper the acts of God in a way that can never be bettered. Reading these Meta narratives we catch the drift of what God is up to with us.

I believe that each of those three events crucial to faith took place. There was an encounter between Moses and the pure presence of God on Mt Sinai. A significant exchange took place at that meeting out of which a disparate group of peoples took on a new identity. The details were very probably different to those described in the book Exodus, but that neither surprises me nor bothers me.

Similarly I believe that the resurrection appearances of Jesus took place. But given their extraordinary quality, and the widely differing psychologies of those who witnessed them, and the unexpected nature of them, I am not surprised that details differ, that recollections vary, and that the accounts have been shaped to fit the theological frameworks of their authors. Each of us explains recent events in our lives according to the themes that matter most to us now.

So also I believe that the birth of Jesus is about a something/someone Wholly Other coming from God, being born as one of us, more deeply and warmly human than we will ever be, who offers the human race a hope, and a relationship, and a message that it could not have dreamed up itself. In the incarnation of Jesus God does for us what we could not have done for ourselves. In fact that is what these three crucial events are all about. In each of them the relationship between the human race and God took a quantum leap forward.

Readings Luke’s account tonight I can recognise the hand of a master storyteller at work. What this event means he makes come alive for us through these wonder filled characters and atmospheres and incidents and plot lines. Those of us who live by words, who write for a living, know about the difficult choices that have to be made in shaping a story, whether it is a biography, a history, a film script or a novel. We emphasise some themes, we downplay others, we ignore or pass over streams of events, and we run together other occurrences that did not seem to have a pattern of belonging at the time. Selection is all in the business of writing. A long ponderous, prolix stream of factual chronological detail is guaranteed to send the reader to sleep. Writing is about fashioning works of imaginative power. The reader is hooked by inference, suggestion, ambience, metaphor, and analogy.

Luke has taken the facts as he knew them and written them up under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. He has created a story of great imaginative power. It is the engine that drives this celebration that has brought us here tonight.

Thinking about the birth narratives in this literary kind of a way I must nevertheless face up to some key questions about their historical factuality. Do I think it happened exactly like this? No! Does that bother me? No! Am I saying that then the faith of Christmas has been cooked up through a series of literary smoke and mirror tricks? No! Do I think something roughly similar took place? Yes! Do I think those events add up to the faith of the Church about how Jesus came to be in our world? Yes! Am I staking my life on that faith? Yes! Do I think that Luke has given us a work of imaginative faithfulness that carries us into the very heart of what the Christmas event means? Yes indeed!