Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

It would be interesting to know when or by what means these writers came into possession of the stories of his birth. It is an extraordinary achievement on the part of the writers that they make the full revelation of his epochal meaning simultaneous with his rejection and death. To the extent that there was secrecy involved — yes, Jesus forbids even the fact of his healings to be revealed, though they clearly became widely known, and yes, he forbids the disciples to reveal who he is, as they finally begin to understand — still, it is hard not to hear rueful amusement in his reply, when John sends messengers to Jesus to find out whether he is the one who is to come, or they must wait for another. The blind see, the lame walk, good news is preached to the poor. Jesus seems to have been healing people in meaningful numbers. Yet he remained among them as a son of man in the usual sense, someone to be betrayed for a little money, denied by friends, abused by authorities, and killed with approval of a mob. This seems remarkable, objectively speaking. But it is consistent with his being merely a man. His “secrecy,” which he intends but which still seems largely the effect of the blindness of human eyes and hardness of human hearts, appears meant to cast off all the protections and immunities that might come with his claiming special status. Everyone abused and martyred since the world began should have been able to claim special status, of course, if there is anything to the idea that we are children of God. In his life the man Jesus shows us what we are, sacred and terrible.

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What did the ancient church take from these earliest teachings, those reflected by the hymn in Philippians? In his homilies on the letters of Paul to the Corinthians, expounding on Jesus’ saying “the Son of man came not to be served but to serve,” John Chrysostom says that if this service of love “were everywhere in abundance, how great benefits would ensue: how there were no need then of laws, or tribunals or punishments, or avenging, or any other such things since if all loved and were beloved, no man would injure another. Yea, murders, and strifes, and wars, and divisions, and rapines, and frauds, and all evils would be removed, and vice unknown even in name.” And “if this were duly observed, there would be neither slave nor free, neither ruler nor ruled, neither rich nor poor, neither small nor great.” There is a tendency, I think, to suppose that the earliest Christians were drawn primarily by this new cult’s seeming to offer a charm against death. That this idea is taken seriously is an effect of the ebbing away of Christian thought properly so called, together with the anthropologizing of religion. There is no doubt some justice in the fact that condescensions once projected onto distant cultures are now brought home to discredit the historic center of Western civilization. It is important to remember the beauty in the old dream of a world reconciled to God and itself, here through the figure of the selfless servant. Chrysostom had Christian Scriptures, of course, as Paul did not. But he would have been speaking to congregations more like Paul’s than any we can imagine, people who would have known the stigma of servitude and poverty, and the harshness and turbulence of ancient life. In their best moments such people were clearly worthy to shape the faith. It is moving to think how servants and slaves must have felt, hearing their lot and their labors proposed as the pattern of a sacred life, and as a force that could transform the world. It is moving as well that others, free, prosperous, even aristocratic, were drawn by such preaching.

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Certain expectations needed to be addressed if Jesus was to be understood as Messiah, this is to say, if he was to be understood as the fulfillment of God’s promises to his people. The Gospel writers’ claims for Jesus of Nazareth are based on or expressed in the faith that he did not proceed from any paternal line. This complicates the matter of conventional patrilineal genealogy, which would be assumed to trace the Messiah’s origins to David. They address the matter boldly, argumentatively, making no concessions, and in terms that are full of radical meaning. Matthew begins with “an account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” But what we find, if the word is given its conventional sense, is a genealogy of Joseph, who, as Matthew points out immediately and establishes at length, is not the father of Jesus. The genealogy might be read as a claim of royal descent which has passed into obscurity after the monarchy itself is destroyed, so that an ordinary carpenter might share the blood of kings. But again, except by a kind of ascribed status, no claim made through Joseph is presented as bearing on Jesus. This might mean that, though the argument by lineage for his being Messiah could be made if it were simply conceded that Joseph was indeed his father, the truth of Jesus’ origins, and therefore of his nature, is too essential to permit recourse to this very available expedient.

Matthew’s genealogy might be considered a history of Israel itself, as it bears the marks of divine Providence, in the equivalence in human generations of the time that passes between the great events signified by the names Abraham and David and by the deportation to Babylon and, after them, by Jesus. Understood in this way, it does not defend the claims made for Jesus, but instead asserts them. Rather than arguing for an unbroken ancestral line, the writer punctuates the series by drawing attention to its signal moments, including the exile, which would be extraneous if the point were to document ancestry, but which is very relevant indeed if the point is to present Jesus as the next defining act of God toward Israel. Matthew transforms the biblical convention of genealogy, making explicit what had before been implicit, that these names and generations were not primarily significant for fixing the identities and claims and obligations of those who found a place in them, but as preserving a record of God’s mindfulness of Israel over time, and of his acting toward them decisively through the lives of particular human beings. The otherwise rather surprising appearance in the list of Rahab and Tamar, both Canaanite women, of the Moabite Ruth, and of Bathsheba as “the wife of Uriah,” is consistent with this reading, since each of them had a crucial part in the history of Israel.

It should be taken as an important consequence of Matthew’s setting Jesus in this context that his humanity and his place in the history of Israel are both affirmed. At the same time, John the Baptist is quoted in Matthew as saying, “Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” Luke contains very similar language: “Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” In other words, so much for genealogy. If it is true no necessity makes it true that God acts in history in the ways recorded in these narratives of descent. This again addresses questions raised by the claim made by Jesus’ followers that he had no human father, that he did not in any ordinary sense have a place in the line that proceeded from David. In Jesus God brushed away this web of contingency.

Luke famously departs in another way from conventional genealogy, moving from Jesus in the near term back through the generations to Adam, whom he calls “son of God.” Like Matthew he traces the line of Joseph, though again like Matthew he is careful to stipulate that Joseph was only the putative father of Jesus, his father “as was thought.” Luke’s play on genealogy could be taken to dismiss altogether the practice of counting off the generations, except when the counting is exhaustive enough to acknowledge that all humankind are the children of Adam, therefore “made in the likeness of God,” as in the preface to the first list of human generations in Genesis 5:2. This is so primary an article of faith that no tracing back through time would be needed on one hand or sufficient on the other to establish it. Again, so much for genealogy.