Already it’s the middle of Advent and the season when we often recall the annunciation to Mary. So much of what the angel Gabriel tells Mary harkens to other passages from the Bible. “Favored one” is the way the haggard priest, Eli, greets Hannah before she learns of her own miraculous child. “Overshadowed” is the manner in which the Old Testament describes God’s presence abiding with the Israelites as they wander through the wilderness, making Mary’s womb a new ark of the covenant, while Mary’s obedient resignation before an angel, “Let it be with me according to your word,” matches almost word for word what her boy, when he’s all grown up, will plead before a cup to the Father in Gethsemane.
Mary’s child, however, is something altogether different from the miraculous babies born to Sarai or Hannah. An unexpected, miraculous birth isn’t the same thing as a virgin birth. With Mary, it was as if the angelʼs message, Godʼs words alone, had flicked a light in the darkness of her womb. Life from nothing — that is the difference. Not from Joseph or anyone else. From nothing God creates life. Inside her. The same way God created the heavens and the earth, ex nihilo [from nothing]. The same way God created the sun and the sea and the stars. The same way God created Adam and Eve. From nothing. As though what she carried within her was creation itself. The start of a new beginning. To everything. A genesis and an ultimate reversal all in one.
Jesus’s birth by means of the Virgin Mary is one of the claims the creed dares us to profess, but what exactly did the ancient Church want us to believe about it? Are we to believe it as the biographical bits of his origin story? Or, are we, as fundamentalists have done in the modern era, meant to lean into the supernatural aspect of Christ’s birth? Is it, as it were, a statement of Jesus’s biological beginnings?
In a wonderful section of Church Dogmatics I.II, “The Miracle of Christmas,” Karl Barth reminds us that, from the time of exile in the Book of Isaiah to what the Church Fathers made of Isaiah’s prophecy coming true in Christ, the virgin birth has always been understood more as a theological — not a biological— assertion. In keeping with the very nature of Hebrew prophecy, Barth notes, the virgin birth is the judgment of God.
On Good Friday, God’s judgment manifests as grace. In Advent, God’s grace manifests as judgment.
The revelation of the grace of God, made flesh in Mary’s womb, is also the revelation of the judgment of God, made concrete in Joseph’s absence.
Joseph contributes nothing to the conception of Christ. Unlike Abraham or Elkanah, the husbands of Sarah and Hannah respectively, God excludes Joseph — and thus, all the rest of us— from the conception of new creation. That Joseph is rendered a passive bystander to the miracle of Christmas is God’s judgment upon the whole history of humankind. Because we’ve twisted the world into our image, the Maker of Heaven and Earth will not allow us even to pitch in and participate in the birthing of its redemption. All our comforting pieties about the freedom of the will crash against the manger in Bethlehem. “If Emmanuel is true,” Barth writes, “the miracle is done upon man. It is man who is the object of sovereign divine action in this event. God himself and God alone is Master and Lord. This cannot be stated strongly enough, exclusively enough, negatively enough against all synergism or even monism.”
The bumper stickers and Carrie Underwood songs have it more wrong than we know. We’re not even God’s co-pilot. That’s the judgment revealed in Joseph’s absence. That’s the judgment we confess when we profess, “born of the Virgin Mary.”
Today, the newspaper tells me that over a million children, abandoned by the White House, lie on the precipice of starvation in Afghanistan. This new week of Advent begins a week after yet another school shooting, a plague of gun violence perpetuated, surely, by our hardened hearts and our fealty to barren deities. And another famous and powerful man has been brought low by accusations of assault and impropriety. The virgin birth tells us that Almighty God looks at our ways in the world, says, “Thanks but no thanks,” and gently pushes Joseph to the side of the stage.
The clause “… born of the Virgin Mary” is less about the beginning of Jesus and more about the end of humanity. Having proved ourselves an unreliable covenant partner of God, we now can only receive the passive righteousness of one in whose creation we cannot boast. As Karl Barth writes,
In the virgin birth of Christ there is contained a judgment upon man. In other words, human nature possesses no capacity for becoming the human nature of Jesus Christ, the place of divine revelation. It cannot be the work-mate of God. If it actually becomes so, it is not because of any attributes which it possessed already and in itself, but because of what is done to it by the divine Word, and so not because of what it has to do or give, but because of what it has to suffer and receive — and at the hand of God.
The virginity of Mary in the birth of the Lord is the denial, not of man in the presence of God, but of any power, attribute or capacity in him for God. If he has this power — and Mary clearly has it — it means strictly and exclusively that he acquires it, that it is laid upon him. In this power of his for God he can as little understand himself as Mary in the story of the Annunciation could understand herself as the future mother of the Messiah. Only with her [“behold the hand-maid of the Lord”] can he understand himself as what, in a way inconceivable to himself, he has actually become in the sight of God and by His agency.
The meaning of this judgment, this negation, is not the difference between God as Creator and man as a creature. Man as a creature — if we try for a moment to speak of man in this abstract way — might have the capacity for God and even be able to understand himself in this capacity. In Paradise there would have been no need of the sign [of the virgin birth] to indicate that man was God’s fellow-worker. But the man whom revelation reaches, and who is reconciled to God in revelation and by it, is not man in Paradise. He has not ceased to be God’s creature. But he has lost his pure creatureliness, and with it the capacity for God, because as a creature and in the totality of his creatureliness he became disobedient to his Creator. To the roots of his being he lives in this disobedience.
It is with this disobedient creature that God has to do in His revelation. It is his nature, his flesh, that the Word assumes in being made flesh. And this human nature, the only one we know and the only one there actually is, has of itself no capacity for being adopted by God’s Word into unity with Himself, i.e., into personal unity with God. Upon this human nature a mystery must be wrought in order that this may be made possible. And this mystery must consist in its receiving the capacity for God which it does not possess. This mystery is signified by the virgin birth. [emphasis added]
As Barth taught in his homiletics class at the University of Gottingen, a course Barth offered out of his alarm that the school’s official teacher of preaching was also an early adopter of Nazism — another example of “Joseph” and his history — “Grace is always ‘despite’ and not ‘because of’ the human condition. God’s gracious action is never ‘consequently’ but always ‘nevertheless.’ It is life from the dead and the justification of the ungodly not the reward of the righteous.” This is as true at the annunciation as it is in the passion. The one-way love of God is simultaneously the judgment of God upon our ways in the world. The “miracle” of Christmas— at least, a miracle of Christmas, is that this judgment, rendered upon all of us in the person of Joseph, comes (nevertheless!) as a mercy. God might have looked at the world and said, “Thanks, but no thanks,” but he simultaneously embraced the world by coming to save it. Joseph, whom God has elected to exclude, will (nevertheless!) get to hold Mary’s child in his arms. Every bit as much as the shepherds, the sign is for him.
And, I wouldn’t be a preacher if I didn’t apply the pronoun. It’s for you too.
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[…] The That Is Every Bit as Miraculous as the What. — Jason Michelli, with help from Karl Barth, reflects on what Christmas truly celebrates: the miracle of grace made flesh in our midst. Also: the Virgin Birth as divine judgment. […]
[…] The That Is Every Bit as Miraculous as the What. — Jason Michelli, with help from Karl Barth, reflects on what Christmas truly celebrates: the miracle of grace made flesh in our midst. Also: the Virgin Birth as divine judgment. […]