The Root of Jesse
A certain point was driven home to me by two sermons, the one this past Sunday and the one this Christmas Eve, preached by Fr Elie (Estephan) at Saint Mary’s Antiochian Church in Pawtucket. On Sunday the lectionary we read from concerned the genealogy of Christ as recounted in the Gospel of Saint Matthew – from Abraham to David, from David to the exile, and from the exile to Saint Joseph. And this evening the lectionary was from the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Galatians – a decidedly ‘Gentile’ community: ‘Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.’
Even without the sermons highlighting this wisdom of the Church, the juxtaposition of the lectionary readings made it clear: Orthodox Christianity emphasises both the particularity of the Incarnation in all of its human messiness – the belonging of Christ to a stubborn and stiff-necked people so often steeped in idolatry, even His sinful and depraved paternity being the descendant of David and Bathsheba – and the universality of His promise: that through Him all human beings are made, not only the children, but even the heirs of God. Through Him we are again made worthy to call upon the Most High, the Holy of Holies, the One who transcends even Goodness and Being and Intellect, as ‘ʼaba’; as, literally, ‘daddy’.
The necessary tension between particularity and universality is emphatically not an easy one for us moderns to live with, let alone fathom. In modern Western societies in particular, we are encroaching on the hard limits of a ‘flat-world’ faith in an infinitely expansive progression of human technological innovation, private-sector ingenuity, interconnexion, the radical democracy of a digitised world-marketplace: a faith that globalisation has already remade our world and will continue to remake our world for the better. A faith embodied in politicians like Clinton, Merkel and Macron; a faith which has literally ruled our societies and our entire way of thinking for the past thirty years. But this faith is starting to unravel. The inner fragility and falsity of this one-sided faith in this transformative power of human technological prowess has led many of us – too many of us, indeed – to seek shelter in the equally-fragile, equally-false, equally-one-sided elder ‘outer barbarisms’ of blood and soil, which find their echoes in the promises of Orban, Poroshenko and Trump. Finding the idols of the falsely-universal to be a dead end, we instinctively flee instead toward the idols of the falsely-particular. Worse: if we mistake these principles of particularity or of universality as the bedrock-foundations of reality, as we moderns who are so trapped inside the habits of abstract conceptualisation and life-inside-our-heads are wont to do, then we can be too easily-led into the ‘tedious game’ that Parmenides played with Aristotle in the eponymous Dialogue of Plato, and made thus to say that up is down, and black is white.
The Nativity of Christ is, rightly-considered, a wake-up call from these illusions. The Incarnation is as much a stumbling-block and a scandal to us in our time as it was to the Greeks and to the Jews of Christ’s own. That is why our American culture papers the enormity of the Incarnation over as best we can; if not with crude commercialism and consumer frenzy, then with bourgeois platitude and gift-card sentimentality. As I see it: in the West, the last people to truly take the Incarnation seriously were the Anglo-Catholic socialists who hearkened back to Lancelot Andrewes’s Incarnational theology, so uncomfortably-patriotic and Royalist to our democratic ears, and so uncomfortably-friendly to the lowly and weak and forgotten crucified peoples of the earth to the nationalists among us. It is a true tragœdy that the Anglo-Catholic synthesis itself proved too unstable to withstand the various yarking and dissipating forces of English modernity; but at least they began from a healthily-radical Patristic understanding of the Incarnation that would not boil down easily into a pat slogan.
Put another way. It is no accident that Saint Matthew, the most Jewish of the Gospel authors and the most emphatic about Christ’s particular calling as the Anointed One of the Jews, has Him be visited by three foreign (Persian) magi, threatened by a Jewish king, and then spirited off into hated Ægypt. It is also no accident that in the Nativity story of Saint Luke – addressed, one presumes, to a wealthy Greek patron (Theóphilos) – has Him visited by these low, crude, rustic Jewish shepherds. Even the inspired Evangelists themselves, human and biased as they are toward their particular audiences, will not let us forget the tension and dialectic at the heart of the reality of the Incarnation. Despite themselves, they do not entertain these illusions.
The truly attractive thing about Orthodox spirituality is that it forsakes neither the heights of the Way nor its depths. The Christ of Orthodox iconography was not born in an immaculately-kept, richly-carved bed on soft hay, but in a rough-hewn, pitch-black stone cave, in a hard, crude wooden box. (Let the reader understand.) The parents of Christ are shut out of all fit lodging and forced to live like outcasts among brute beasts; the place in which Christ is born is the very image of Sheol. And yet in this very icon, the light of the pure Divine presence in this tiny helpless flesh-and-blood child, pierces like a lance even to the darkest places; even to the hidden places of the heart; even to the very depths of Hell. This child, born this night in this dark cave, is the true Light. Here, as at the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ (which we are not allowed to forget even at the heights of Nativity joy), we are called to mind of our own imprisonment and deliverance, not imagined, but in the flesh.
I must beg your pardon, gentle readers; I made an unwitting reference to the classical Chinese novel, Water Margin 《水滸傳》, in the title of this post. The book is the fictionalised tale of a historical Anhui rebel, Song Jiang 宋江, and his crusade against the corrupt officials of the Song Dynasty, who was ultimately wrongfully-killed for his noble stand against exploitation and corruption in high places. Ironically, Song Jiang too embodies the dialectic of particularity and universality, the tension of loyalty to the Song dynasts and attention to the plight of the poor and forgotten. Song Jiang’s wrongful death has something martyrific about it. Even the Taiping rebels, misguided though they were, saw something of a commonality between Christ and the outlaws of the marsh.
Christ was not Himself a Zealot. But we cannot forget, even today, that He was born precisely in the margin: outside of respectable company, and even outside the protection of the Law which He came to perfect (as witnessed by Herod’s evil plotting). In being so born, He in reality fulfilled in Himself what for Song Jiang was simply a slogan: that all men truly are brothers (兄弟無數); we are all made children and heirs of God through this, His newborn Son. But it is not so in the superficial way promised to us by the Silicon Valley tycoons and World Bank œconomists; and it is not so in the emotivist way promised to us by the neo-nationalist apostles of a sæcular salvation of the West. Our brotherhood has been accomplished in Christ in a way transcending sæcular time, so as to comprehend both the intimacy of the particular and the expansiveness of the universal. Christ is born indeed.
Your Nativity, O Christ our God,
Has shone to the world the Light of wisdom!
For by it, those who worshipped the stars,
Were taught by a Star to adore You,
The Sun of Righteousness,
And to know You, the Orient from on High.
O Lord, glory to You!
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