4th Advent: Luke Lection C

  This continues Ched’s year-long series of comments on Lukan gospel lections that lie at the intersection of the Year C Revised Common Lectionary and texts he explores in Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics. These short reflections are posted our BCM Facebook page most Wednesdays, and on our BCM blog. NB: You can pre-order the book from Fortress Press; use the promo code “HARP24” at checkout for 30% off!

Luke’s Nativity Story.  I call Luke 1–2 a prelude instead of a prologue because of how the Nativity drama is composed around three canticles: Mary’s “Magnificat” (1:46–55); Zechariah’s “Benedictus” (1:68–79); and Simeon’s “Nunc Dimittis” (2:29–32).  The long tradition of singing carols during Advent and Christmas is rooted singularly in Luke’s narrative. 
The prolegomenon to Jesus’s nativity is structured around stories of two women for whom conception is problematic. Elizabeth is too old, and Mary is unwed. The narrative of their surprising pregnancies unfolds in back-and-forth parallel:

The distinctly un-patriarchal gender dynamics in this sequence foreshadow the Magnificat’s vision of a world overturned.
The Zechariah and Elizabeth vignette is patterned after the Abram and Sarai tale (Gen 18:12–15), but in Luke it is the man (a priest no less!) who is upbraided by a heavenly messenger for incredulity at the promise of a child (Lk 1:13–20). Moreover, while Zechariah is struck mute, Elizabeth issues a spirit-filled proclamation (1:42–45)! Similarly, Joseph appears in just three brief cameos (1:27; 2:4, 16), while Luke’s lengthy drama centers Mary. The men are silent; the pregnant women find their voices. They also discover common cause as mothers of sons who, as Gabriel announces, will become prophets tasked with changing the course of the nation. The last word in Luke’s Christmas story also belongs to a woman: the prophet Anna (2:36–38). The Simeon/Anna dyad concludes a birth narrative that opened with Zechariah and Elizabeth. Like Zechariah, Simeon has an epiphany in the Temple; like Elizabeth, Anna is elderly. All four are portrayed as patiently waiting for divine intervention, listening for signs of change—a posture Luke commends to his audience.

At the midpoint of their parallel narrative, the old woman and the peasant girl, pregnant with prophets, greet each other—as do their fetuses! It is an enchanted moment, embodying what C. S. Song called a “theology of the womb.” This is underlined by Elizabeth’s triple blessing upon womanhood (1:42-45).

All three canticles are prophetic oracles, anticipating social upheaval and the liberation of an oppressed Israel. When Zechariah (1:79) and Simeon (2:29) sing of peace, it does not refer to the Pax Romana, under which Jewish Palestine suffered military occupation, but the subversive mission of a marginalized Messiah. The birth of this “Savior and Lord” (2:11) is accompanied by an angelic host chanting “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace” (2:14)—phrases that normally applied exclusively to Caesar Augustus in Luke’s world. No wonder Luke’s nativity story ends with Simeon’s reality check: this anti-imperial gospel will be opposed by many, and carry a cost (2:34–35).
This subversive tone is most evident in Mary’s Magnificat, a revolutionary song which ironically is still chanted at high Mass and sung in high society by professional choirs. The first part of her song is deeply intimate: She is astonished that she has been “seen” (1:48), being invisible as a peasant woman to all whose gaze fixed upon the Caesar, Herod, and high priests. Her state as a pregnant and unwed peasant girl “would have brought untold social stigma and ostracism in first-century Palestine,” writes Frank Dicken. Yet essential to Luke’s perspective is the conviction that history is transformed not at its center but at its margins.
The Magnificat’s second half sings about God’s extraordinary strength (1:51), ironic given who has been chosen as protagonist. Mary is recontextualizing one of the primal texts of the prophetic tradition: the Song of Hannah (1 Sam 2:1–10). Luke uses this old tradition to shape his whole nativity story. The prophet Samuel is born to a woman unable to get pregnant (1 Sam 1), and grows up to warn Israel against adopting a monarchic model (1 Sam 8)—as will John and Jesus. God’s power, ignored by the “proud,” is mysteriously lodged in poor women giving birth in the teeth of domination, echoing the conspiracy of midwives who nurtured life in defiance of Pharaoh’s war on Hebrew firstborn (Exod 1–2). The same notion is reiterated at the end of the first century CE, not long after Luke wrote, by political prisoner and apocalyptic seer John the Revelator. He envisions a woman struggling to protect life in the face of a Beast (a coded moniker for the lethal violence of empire; Rev 12).

At the conclusion of the Magnificat is this incendiary stanza about threefold divine action (1:52–55):

This remarkable string of indicative verbs, each in what Alan Streett calls “the elusive aorist tense,” simultaneously refers to past (remembering covenant), present (feeding the hungry), and future (bringing down plutocracy). He points out that the simple past tense would connote “God’s mighty acts in Israel’s history,” while the “prophetic perfect tense” would speak “imaginatively as if they have occurred already” for Mary and/or Luke’s audience. Streett then compares it, using the power of interpretive analogy, to the civil rights movement’s famous hymn “We Shall Overcome,” a song which assured both victims of white supremacy, and activists struggling to end it, that “universal freedom was on the horizon, but not yet achieved.”
This is both a social vision of justice for the poor that critiques the affluenza of the rich, and a political one, asserting that YHWH’s ancient covenant with Mary’s people will eclipse Roman occupation. And it is the first time “the rich” are named in Luke, introducing the central theme of Sabbath Economics redistribution that will thread throughout Luke’s story. Provisioning the poor and/or restoring the surpluses of the rich back to the Commonwealth will be tropes that characterize every object lesson narrated in Luke 12–19—especially the final one (13A).
The Magnificat establishes two other key thematic patterns: alerting us to Luke’s narrative strategy of prophetic memory and resurgence, and articulating Jesus’s mission statement. Frank Dicken contends that is as much a “programmatic passage” for the Gospel as is Jesus’s Nazareth sermon, anticipating the “Great Reversal…Luke’s vision of God working to overturn the social norms.” The geographic, sociopolitical, and somatic landscapes of this Prelude are all key to its meaning. The biographical literature of Roman antiquity, much like the “infotainment” media of our culture, focused exclusively on subjects and settings belonging to the rich and famous. In contrast, Luke features poor folk as the true protagonists of history, often in jarring juxtaposition to the elites of first-century Roman Palestine. Mary and Joseph are rural people displaced by the demands of Quirinius’s census, a tool for managing the colonial occupation (2:1–7).

Sylvia Keesmaat writes:

Joseph, who was from the house and lineage of David, was no longer in the town of his people, but rather Nazareth (2:4). Is it possible that he had joined the ranks of young men whose land had been taken by a wealthy landowner? Had he left his hometown in order to escape the scrutiny of the tax collectors? This was the exact scenario that the census was intended to address. Caesar was attempting to get a handle on all of those shifting people in the empire, recently displaced, and no longer paying into the tax base.

Underlining the Holy Family’s marginality in Luke’s narrative is the fact that, having completed the long trek on foot back to Bethlehem, they cannot even find lodging in Joseph’s hometown. This implies two possible things. Did Joseph’s kin reject him because of the scandal of Mary’s pregnancy under a cloud of illegitimacy (see the parenthetical comment in Luke’s genealogy, 3:23)? Or had these relatives also been displaced by the political and economic forces of empire? Whatever the reason, the couple must deliver their baby outside in a feed trough, surrounded by herdsmen, a class of outdoor workers marginalized due to their “unclean” contact with animals (2:8, 15–18).

The family’s low social status is further reflected in how their infant is presented in the sanctuary: they make a purity offering of two doves (2:24), the minimum requirement used by the poor. It is hardly surprising, then, that Jesus would later emphasize in his teaching the very thing he was denied at birth—hospitality—which he insists should be extended to all people, even one’s enemies (see 7:19; 23:42–43). Both poverty and the powerful faith of the holy family would have impacted Jesus’s formation as a child—especially if songs like the Magnificat were sung to him as lullabies!
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