early teens, Joseph not much older. The census ensures that Jesus will be Joseph’s legal son – that is, lawful as determined by the Romans. But this census, initiated bureaucratically so as to more efficiently organize and control the occupied people of the region, immediately acknowledges Jesus as registered, legitimate by law; his name is written down and included along with everyone else and as someone who exists. The writing of his name, however, does nothing to determine his own self-conception. Luke’s account here presents considerable challenges for the reader. Jesus has been adopted into two traditions, one according to a lineage extending back to King David, the other determined according to Roman law – inscribed, by some, but not contained, in fact eluding both simultaneously. Luke may not be conscious of his own narrative and how Jesus remains, despite old and new inscriptions, scriptural and bureaucratic, outside their definitions. When Jesus is described as “her first-born son,” being “first” cannot simply be related to Mary as a mother. He is indeed her first-born son; but, with much more significance and repeated often by Jesus himself when he calls himself “the son of man,” he is indeed first and unprecedented. Luke (and Matthew will experience the same difficulties) strains to represent Jesus as a unique and prototypical human being while also, at times and in constant oscillation, relating him back to a tradition that gives him precedence and legitimacy. In this case, the gospel of Luke (as writing, as a document) at least partly recognizes itself, though not without hesitation, as opposed to the Roman census ←40 | 41→that has defined him according to Roman law and to the scriptures who have anticipated him in the history of Judaism. One of the consequences of the gospels is the determination to alter existing social conditions and to re-define familial relations; in each case, laws will be ignored and, in part, superseded. Even if Luke has only an unclear intimation of his undertaking, he must in some sense be conscious of his writing to be independent of two other scriptural forms, both of them legal and reflecting laws – the laws of Jewish scripture, the laws of Caesar and the Roman government.
Paul defines Jesus as “the firstborn within a large family,” (Rom. 8:29) in effect creating an extended family, first of brothers and sisters, who themselves will engender others in a community of like-minded individuals, sharing in the spirit, not the binds of “blood.” Jesus is also described as “the firstborn of every creature,” (Col. 1:15) a first-born, however, who was “before all things,” (Col. 1:17) – making him, as in John, prior to creation. The writer of the letter to the Colossians has one more comment to make; and it will be especially important in thinking of Jesus as both prior to creation and then, identifying with the whole of humanity, generates himself in two simultaneous ways, prior to creation and being “the firstborn from the dead” (Col. 1:18). Jesus creates himself from the totality of everyone who has been. “From the dead,” though one could just as easily conceive of him emerging in birth from everyone who has lived in the world, so that the self-designation as “the son of man” and the resurrection are inseparable and absolutely related. The meaning of the resurrection will neither be reducible to an event or to the accomplishment of an executed individual; all attempts to contain the resurrection in time fails to recognize its relation to the son of man who is born from the power of the pre-creation logos, the totality of everyone who has ever lived and are now internalized into one being, and the resurrection that revives everyone, in himself, so as to make possible a second act of creation and one to reveal the task of being a new humanity. By being the first-born, Jesus is also described as “the second man,” (1 Cor. 15:47), so in these figures and throughout the Pauline corpus (which does not mention the virgin birth) he is depicted as the first individual who will recover humanity from a prior conception and history; in so doing, the “second man” will be made from the relationship of a pre-creation Jesus and the totality of everyone who has ever lived.
When Luke next places his birth “in a manger,” (Luke 2:7) and, moreover, soon to be acknowledged by simple shepherds, Jesus can no longer be referred to with monarchical language, nor can his meaning be restricted to a particular nationalism he earlier referred to as being “saved from our enemies” (1:71) and “rescued from the hands of our enemies.” (1:74) All eschatological expectations ←41 | 42→will have to be re-thought on the basis of Jesus’ birth. In fact, but this is one more of the many anomalies in the gospel of Luke, when the angel appears to the shepherds he says that the news he brings is “good news of great joy for all the people” (2:10). “All people” could not have been readily understood; everyone lived according to specific identities, attitudes, and beliefs. Universality may be proclaimed; no one, however, could understand its meaning, group identities were too rigid and interests too narrow. They will first have to overcome the imposed limits of their social world to begin to reconceive a future humanity. His death will begin the universal process of a human unity – a task, most obviously, revealed in his life and now moving towards its still distant and inconceivable fulfillment.
It is difficult to imagine a young couple (and most especially an expectant mother) being turned away by an in-keeper without inquiring whether other lodgings were possible; hospitality was an important virtue, especially when considering a pregnant mother-to-be. Mary was no doubt apprehensive, more so when her labor pains began; it is again difficult to see her alone, with no one but Joseph to help her. It is much more likely Mary was attended to by a village mid-wife, along with other women who would have been present to help with the birth, the cutting of the umbilical cord, washing the body of the newly born as well as taking care of Mary, comforting her perhaps with medicinal herbs. Whatever the actual events surrounding Mary’s parturition, Luke creates a narrative that ignores the realities of childbirth – as do classical scenes of the crèche with Mary fully clothed and standing beside Jesus. Denying the full humanity of the scene has been unfortunate if understandable. Being born in a manger, though reflective of his humility and as distant as possible from a royal house, has the added meaning of being homeless – a state in no way indicative of deprivation or destitution; on the contrary, to be without home at the moment of his birth means, for everyone, that Jesus will live so as to re-fashion the idea of a home in a family and a particular people. To be born in a manger, surrounded by animals, is antithetical to the pretension of a royal birth, in the “house” if David, in a palace, and being nothing more than an inheritance. Jesus could not be born in a residence. He had to be homeless (as “the son of man” will proclaim to be necessary) out in the world and without comfort or safety, estranged, out of place. Despite Luke’s genealogy, Jesus’ birth in a manger amongst domesticated animals and watched over by shepherds makes him completely opposed to being in any way related to the house of David and its royal line. Luke allows the reader to think the difference between a manger (a feeding-trough for animals) and a royal palace. The full humanity of Jesus must continually be affirmed; and he can only be a revelation when he begins in a birth-place better suited for animals, ←42 | 43→a sense of creation to its foundations, amidst the natural world and in the triadic relationship of animal, human being, and God. The body of Jesus is in close proximity to the human and animal world; his body re-affirms the majesty of the natural world as well as the body of his mother Mary who now claims for herself a designation reserved for Eve, Chavah, “the mother of all living.”
In Luke 2:21, we are told that “he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.” The name is also a calling. Jesus the man will call himself into the world out of necessity. The name Jesus, also translated, or its significance explained, is by no means self-evident in meaning or consequence. The name is first uttered by an angel, a hermeneutic being, in other words, who translates the language of God and makes it comprehensible for human beings to understand. To “save” the people (not simply his people) from their hamartia has the sense of recollecting what all people have, until now, missed. Jesus comes into the world so as to call humanity back to a beginning they have relinquished and missed; the symmetry between Jesus’ life and God’s act(s) of creation leads to a new future. The sense of hamartia as what has been missed involves recollecting what, until now, has been made ineffectual (powerless) by the actuality of the world – that is, its finite reality; and this is the reason Jesus will be murdered with extreme violence and, shortly after his birth, persecuted by a king, Herod, who can only understand anything at all from the limited perspective of his social place – the place he has been assigned, by a royal birth and Roman appointment, to hold with tenacity and dread for as long
