A sermon preached at Geraldton Anglican Cathedral 14th March 2021
No aspect of Christian belief has been more furiously attacked than Jesus’ birth of the virgin Mary. The movement known as “the Enlightenment” set out to break away from the authority of the Roman Catholic Church In Europe. The scientific movement gave birth to a philosophy which insisted that everything in the universe operated according to physical laws, which could not be broken. Miracles were impossible, and prayer was stupid because it couldn’t change anything.
Great efforts were made to rewrite the Jesus-story and get rid of offensive elements, especially anything miraculous. The softest target was the story of Jesus’ birth in Matthew and Luke.
I don’t need to tell you that if you chop the miraculous away from Jesus, little is left. Why did people follow him? Why did they bother to execute him? And why did his movement spread with such power? If it was his teachings which were so powerful, why did his followers not say so? Why did they dress him up as a miracle worker? Even Josephus, a first century historian, spoke of him as a doer of marvelous deeds, and a modern historian—no Christian—says he must have been a sorcerer, or something like that, because the story doesn’t make sense otherwise.
The infancy stories were easy targets because the earliest preachers focused on Jesus’ death and resurrection, and made no mention of Jesus’ birth. Mark’s Gospel doesn’t mention of it; nor does John. It was easy then to suggest that the Christmas story was a later legend.
Let us, then, agree on one thing: the gospel—by which I mean the announcement which calls us to faith in Christ—says nothing about Jesus’ birth. It declares that Jesus is the Messiah—the promised King of the Jews—that he came from God, lived amongst us, died for our sins, was raised to life by God, and exalted to the place of ultimate authority in the universe, from which he will return at the end of the age to rule on earth forever. We become Christians when we respond positively to that message and surrender our lives to Jesus as our Lord. There is nothing about his mother or his birth.
But it begs a question: if Jesus came from God, how did he come? I mean, when Jesus says that the Father sent him, as he often does, how did the Father send him? The New Testament is clear that he was fully human, and the ancestor of King David, so you might think he could have been conceived in the normal way of things. When Mary was informed she would be the mother of Messiah, her first thought would have been who would be the father. There was nothing in the tradition that said the promised Messiah would be born in a supernatural way. Some theologians have grabbed hold of this. “Look,” they say. “The virgin birth is not a necessary truth: it doesn’t affect Jesus’ ability to be our saviour.” So they and the church leaders who followed them joined the bandwagon of deniers. But actually, we don’t know if it would affect our salvation, so we should be careful. It may.
The early Christians were certainly interested in the question where Jesus came from. His opponents were well aware there was something strange about his birth, and threw it at him that he was illegitimate. “We were not born of fornication,” they said. “Are we not right in saying you are a Samaritan?” The question of how he was born was a live issue, even in his lifetime. Both Matthew and Luke give the same answer, and there is no reason for doubting it was the uniform understanding of the first Christians: Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary.
Matthew says that when Mary was found to be pregnant, her husband-to-be decided to terminate their relationship quietly—he could have disgraced her. An angel then told him the true state of affairs in a dream. When I read Matthew’s account, I am struck by its simplicity. Apart from the conception itself, there is nothing supernatural in the story, only three dreams. You would think, if Matthew was making things up, he might have said more. Luke too, tells a simple story. Simple or not, these stories have entered into the imagination and soul of the Christian world, so as well as agreeing with the Creed, I rise, as it were, to defend the story of Christmas.
But before I come to that, I should say what we do not believe, because it is true that the story of Jesus’ birth has been embellished, and some quite unchristian ideas have been attracted to it. To begin with, we do not believe Mary remained a virgin all her life. Matthew says plainly that Mary and Joseph had no sexual relations “until” after Jesus’ birth, implying that their marriage afterwards was normal. All the Gospels mention Jesus’ siblings, and there is nothing that suggests they were anything else than his natural brothers and sisters. So, it is right to speak of the virgin birth, as well as the virginal conception, but incorrect to celebrate the perpetual virginity of Mary, or to think that Mary was sinless when Jesus was born (the “immaculate conception.”) The Mary that meets us in the Gospels is a sinner like us, saved like us by the sin-bearing death of her saviour-son. The woman with the crown of twelve stars who we meet in the Book of Revelation—the queen of heaven—is not Mary, but the Church of God, of which Mary is part, and, with us, destined to be the bride of Christ and share his rule of the universe.
Matthew and Luke agree that Jesus’ adopted father was called Joseph, that Mary and Joseph were spoken to by angelic messengers, that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and that the family later moved to Nazareth in Galilee. Matthew alone tells of the visit of the Magi, and Herod’s attempt to destroy any possible claimant to his throne. Luke relates Gabriel’s announcement to Mary, and the angelic army breaking the news of Jesus’ birth to the shepherds. I cannot see anything contradictory in the two accounts, though they are very different and clearly independent of each other. That someone wanting to create an impressive story about the world’s future king would have him rejected at an overnight stop, and placed in an animal’s feed trough, beggars belief.
If you accept that Scripture is the Word of God, as Christians have since the beginning, you will treasure the Christmas story. If you are doubtful, you will have to make your own judgement on whether you consider Matthew and Luke to be honest men, and not making Jesus up. It is significant that there is no rival story. They both wrote when there were still people who remembered Jesus. You would think that if they were inventing a tale, there might have been a reaction.
When the faculty at George Whitefield College sat down to consider a new correspondence course on the life of Jesus, I was of the opinion we should limit ourselves to the ministry years of Jesus. Others disagreed and pointed out that for Africans a person’s ancestry and birth were very important—also for Muslims. Christians and Muslims share much in common, including belief in Jesus’ virgin birth.
About the time we were discussing the content of our course we had an enquiry from Bishop Deo in the Congo about studying at the College. He visited with his wife, and told us this story. He was a Tanzanian Muslim and went to university in Saudi Arabia to study Islam. He returned to Africa as a Muslim missionary—an imam—whose mission was to convert Christians. But something worried him. Muhammad knew Jews and Christians and was familiar with the stories of the Old and New Testaments; in his own way he believed them. What worried Imam Deo was what the Qur’an says about Jesus. Firstly, Jesus was born of a virgin mother. It says nothing like that of Muhammad. Does that not suggest that Jesus is somehow superior to Muhammad? Also, the Qur’an says Jesus never died. Muslims believe he was taken straight to heaven, like Enoch. Does that not point to some greatness in Jesus over Muhammad? Third, according to the Qur’an, Jesus will come again on the clouds of heaven to judge the world. This is the belief of Muslims, but nothing like it is said of Muhammad. I don’t know what Deo made of Jesus’ identity as Christ, or what today’s Muslim’s think, but it too should ring a bell. The last thing Bishop Deo said that finally got him asking questions was the Qur’an’s teaching that Jesus is a spirit. “No one else in Qur’an or Bible is called a spirit; certainly not Muhammad.” So, Imam Deo approached a minister of the Anglican Church in Uganda and asked him to do Bible study with him. The minister was afraid it was a trick and refused, but it came to the ears of the Archbishop of Uganda, who ordered one of his ministers to study the Bible with him. Eventually Deo put his faith in Jesus and wanted to be baptized. You will know that it is a dangeer for a Muslim to be baptized. He told neither of his two wives, for fear they would try to stop him. He went to his bedroom, shaved off his imam’s beard, discarded his robes and emerged from the bedroom in a black suit to announce that they were going to the Archbishop’s house for his baptism. His Muslim wife refused to come and quickly divorced him. His Lutheran wife praised God that her prayers had been answered. So, it is not just Christians who believe Jesus was born of a virgin; the whole Muslim world does too. Personally, I believe it is part of the soft-underbelly of Islam—one of a number of puzzles that may one day lead them to a new inquiry about the person of Jesus.
Before we finish, let us think for a moment about the significance of Jesus miraculous birth! In the Gospel of John we read about the Word of God coming into the world.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.
At the creation of the world God spoke, and his Word brought the universe into being. John is thinking about this when he speaks of the Word which was in the beginning, but he is thinking much more. The Word of God “was” in the beginning. This little word “was” is charged with meaning. Later he will say that the Word “became” flesh. That word “became” means something happened that was new. But in the beginning the Word did not “become”, it “was”—it just was; it always was. That is why John can go on to say, “And the Word was God.”
Next, he appears to repeat himself. “He—that is, the Word—was in the beginning with God.” “With” here carries more meaning that our word “with”: it means “face to face with”. So, the Word is eternal, and the Word is God, but the Word is distinguished from God: he is face to face with God. God and the Word of God are in relationship with each other—eyeball to eyeball.
John goes on to say that the Word became flesh—a human being—full of kindness and truth.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
This is where we learn that the Word which was with God in all eternity is like a Son—is the eternal Son of God. This is huge, and we need to understand it. It is easy to think that Jesus became the Son of God when he was born of Mary. This is what Muhammad thought Christians meant when they said Jesus was the Son of God. Jews at that time would have thought we meant that Jesus was the promised King. Israel’s king is called the Son of God, and it was natural that some people would think Jesus became the Son of God when God appointed him as his king at his baptism. But John tells us that the one who became a man in the womb of the virgin Mary, the one who was declared king at his baptism, and, yes, the one whom God raised from the tomb on the first Easter Day was the eternal Son of God who always was, and who in the course of time created the world, and then came into the world as a man, to be its eternal king. That is what we mean when we talk about the incarnation of the Son of God.
John goes on to say:
No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.
Remember what I said last week about the sun. You will never see the sun as it is in itself. This means of course that you will never see everything that the sun is. But the sun makes itself known to us by its radiance. And the God who is invisible and unknowable in his fulness, has shown himself to us by his Son, and by his Son becoming a human being.
Now it is inevitable that those who first heard of this would want to know how this Word, this Son of the Father, came into the world—the world he had himself created. And the Holy Scriptures give us one and only one answer to that question. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit—God himself overshadowing the virgin Mary—and was born as a man, human in every way as we are yet without sin.
Jesus’ birth from Mary raises many questions, most of them unanswerable. What we can say is that it was appropriate and beautiful. Sin entered the world through a woman, though it was Adam who was held responsible for the fall of the human race. God promised at the outset that the disgrace and defeat would one day be reversed . . . by the seed of a woman. One of Eve’s descendants would one day crush the serpent’s head. Paul says that at the right time God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law. If we are wise we will treasure these truths, and not be shy to say we believe in the Son of God, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary.
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