In this first of six episodes about the Nativity, Rev. Deborah Duguid-May and Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe explore the birth of Christ through the lens of class and material wealth.
Transcript
DDM [00:03] Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.
MET [00:09] And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.
DDM [00:11] This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years, and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010\. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.
MET [00:38] Luke, the Gospel of Luke, is sometimes called the Women’s Gospel, and I’m going to talk more about that in the future, but I note it now because the Gospel of Luke tells a slightly different story than the others. Luke wants you to know from the very beginning that Jesus is on the side of the outcasts and the marginalized. Matthew, not so much. And I’m going to be talking about Matthew and Luke because, believe it or not, those are the places where the birth stories, what we think of as the nativity stories, that’s where they take place.
MET [01:15] Mark doesn’t have a nativity story in the way that we think of it, which is kind of weird because a lot of people think Mark was the first or Q gospel document, and Matthew and Luke are kind of based on that. And the beginning of John is just kind of a fever dream. Well, read John. So it’s notable that Matthew and Luke’s version of the birth story differ so radically.
MET [01:47] This is where a little bit of comm theory comes in handy, and my undergrads may have groan, but my good friend Kenneth Burke actually has some important insights here. Now, I have talked about Kenneth Burke before, and I am sure you don’t remember, but I’m not going to give you a full rundown again because I don’t think it’s necessary that you get a complete treatment of methodology and theory, but I want to highlight a few things. Burke says that we are storytelling creatures. We live and speak in drama.
MET [02:20] Our lives are organized into stories because we organize them that way. So in a situation like this, it is very obvious that someone, supposedly two guys named Matthew and Luke, had a story to tell. What Burke posits is that you can tell something about somebody’s motivations by analyzing the way they tell a story. People might be telling basically the same story, but depending on what they highlight or de-emphasize, it tells you something about that storyteller’s goals and motivations.
MET [02:56] This isn’t rocket science, right? If I tell you the story of my day, and I talk a lot about how my classes went and what a great time I had teaching, and how great a conversation I had in my rhet theory class or whatever class, then you know that what I valued, at least for that day, is my work as a teacher. That was the best part of my day.
MET [03:17] If I don’t even mention class, however, and I told you about the research that I did and how that was going, and then I tell you about how great my projects are, then you know then I want you to appreciate me as an academic and researcher. If I tell you how great my meetings went and how well I was able to delegate something and make some tough decisions and how proud I am of my organizational skills, you know I want you to appreciate me as an administrator. Now, by the way, that last one will never happen. And of course, I am just as likely to tell you what a great day I had with my family, or how proud I am of my kid, or the amazing time I had with Carl.
MET [04:02] These are all possibility because I do, in fact, do more than work. If I habitually focus on one of these things repeatedly, then I’m telling you something about myself. If I am using these dramatic narratives to tell you something, it is generally what I think is valuable. So let’s consider Luke.
MET [04:21] What does Luke want you to know? Luke wants you to know that, yes, Jesus would be of the family of David, but for Luke, there’s not a lot of prestige that comes with that. Joseph had to take his fiancee, who was pregnant, back to the bustling burg of Bethlehem. I say that sarcastically.
MET [04:42] One of the things about the prophecies concerning Jesus’ beginnings is that he was supposed to come from very humble start. The Bible tells us that the Messiah would come from a few places. He would be from the city of David, he would be a Nazarene, and he would come out of Egypt. In a wild and twisty set of turns of events, Jesus manages all of this, but it is all because of his family’s poverty.
MET [05:09] Jesus moves around a lot because he is a poor kid in a family that finds itself on the wrong end of politics quite a bit. And then there’s the birth itself. They get to Bethlehem and they can’t find a room, so they end up basically in a cave with animals, and they have to put the baby in a feeding trough. Ladies and gentlemen, it smelled in there.
MET [05:31] And Silent Night must be the worst description of a nativity event ever. There was a newborn, barn animals, a terrified new mother and father, And they had what, straw to keep them comfortable? I guarantee you this was anything but silent. And then who showed up to genuflect?
MET [05:53] Shepherds. They had been out in the fields for who knows how long. They were dirty, unclean in the literal and religious sense, and they probably took up more space than was at all comfortable. They probably didn’t have gifts to bring.
MET [06:08] They were poor, outcast men. They didn’t have any way to comfort the new parents. They just showed up. Hey, the most terrifying thing ever just happened.
MET [06:18] An angel showed up and told us to come here. And then there was this huge noise that filled the sky. And so I guess we’re here now. Is your kid like going to save all humanity?
MET [06:26] How is that comforting? How is that something a new mother and father want to hear? But Luke is sending a message. This child signals a new way.
MET [06:38] The lowly will be exalted. The outcasts are welcome. The poor will be brought into God’s presence and the unholy places will be made holy. Luke’s gospel is in some ways a gospel of class revolution.
MET [06:54] The Jesus of Luke’s gospel begins to liberate the poor and the outcasts before he can even talk. Luke’s story of Jesus is one where the presence of God is found with those who society has pushed to the margins. Luke’s Jesus is a class warrior. Luke’s telling of the birth foreshadows Jesus’s ministry.
MET [07:19] Just as Jesus would spend his life attending to the poor and the unclean, at his birth, the poor and the unclean attend to him.
DDM [07:29] Mm, that’s powerful.
MET [07:30] Jesus’ birth is, according to Luke, unwashed and frightening. Angels spend a lot of time telling people not to be afraid in the Bible, right? Carl and I always laugh about angels showing up in the Bible because the first thing they say is, fear not, which makes us think angels must have been pretty terrifying. In a lot of ways, that is the story of Jesus’ life.
MET [07:55] He surrounds himself with those that society has pushed aside. Some because of what they did, like tax collectors, and some because of their conditions, like lepers and blind people. Regardless, he embraces those that his community would just as soon push to the margins. And because of that, he is frightening.
MET [08:18] He is a very scary figure to the religious hierarchy and to the state, because the more he welcomes the poor, the more he challenges the powerful.
DDM [08:29] Well, Elizabeth has pretty much given you a fabulous theology of Luke’s birth narratives. When I first read them, I phoned her and I said, so what do you want me to say? So I’m going to add a few things that might be interesting. First of all, we’ve got to remember that Luke is not one of the 12 disciples.
DDM [08:51] We often forget that. We say Matthew, Mark, Luke and John so frequently we assume they were all disciples. But in fact, Luke did not follow Jesus during Jesus’ lifetime. It’s thought that actually after Jesus’ death and resurrection, Luke was then converted through Paul’s ministry.
DDM [09:10] So what Luke does is he goes about after his conversion collecting these eyewitness accounts from early Christians to provide what he calls an orderly account from primary resources. So we can already see in this gospel that Luke is the scholar. This is someone whose mind wants clear order, he values primary research, he truly is the doctor scholar. But what is so interesting about Luke’s gospel is that he is also the voice of the outsider, because he wasn’t Jewish, he was a Gentile.
DDM [09:48] Luke was not a fisherman, but he was a wealthy doctor, and his audience, those he associated with, were primarily wealthy Gentiles. And so it is believed that Luke is writing this gospel to wealthy or socially elevated people, Gentiles, who were converting to Christianity outside of Palestine, to provide for them this verified account of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus. So the question then is, if Luke is wealthy, His friends and readers are wealthy. Why then does he go to such lengths to emphasize God’s identification with the poor?
DDM [10:33] And that is what I want to speak about for a little bit, because although Luke is writing with the voice of an outsider, he and his readers are not people who are living on the margins, but they’re privileged converts living in the Roman Empire. And Luke wants these Gentile converts to understand with no doubt, firstly, that God enters the world not in power or wealth, but through poor and marginal communities. So Luke is helping his readers understand, don’t look for divine power among the powerful, the wealthy, the upper class. but among the poor.
DDM [11:15] And so God comes to a poor family who we’re told can’t even afford the prescribed lamb at the temple and instead offers two common pigeons. The inn is full because it has no space for those who are poor. The Song of Mary, as we looked at in our episode on Mary, Luke includes as a revolutionary hymn. Mary’s not just praising God in general, but expressing a vision of social justice and divine reversal, where the existing class order is overturned.
DDM [11:48] The powerful will be brought down from their thrones, the rich sent away empty, but the hungry filled and the poor lifted up. As Elizabeth said, the shepherds were unclean, considered to be untrustworthy. And yet God reveals the truth of God’s birth, not to the elite, but to those considered untrustworthy and outcast. Luke is reminding again his readers that the kingdom of God is for those that we shun and exclude.
DDM [12:22] What is also interesting in Luke’s gospel is there’s no mention of the wise men, who are wealthy, powerful men, but instead Luke focuses entirely on ordinary people. And, as Elizabeth alluded to, Luke traces Jesus’ genealogy not back to King David, but to Adam, reminding the Gentile readers that Jesus is a savior not just for Jewish nationalists, but for all people. So what Luke is doing is saying to his readers, is this who you want to follow and give your life to? Because if you do, you will have to rethink your social values and your wealth.
DDM [13:07] Luke is saying, understand that salvation relates directly to how you both include those who are poor or marginal, but also how you work for their liberation. Salvation for Luke has very little to do with personal forgiveness or spiritual experience that simply becomes another way of self-growth, but rather about a God in Jesus who is overturning social hierarchies and bringing divine justice. And so through the gospel of Luke, it’s wealthy, powerful, privileged Gentiles who are being challenged that if they are to follow Jesus, they are going to have to live differently. Now Luke is not saying that God condemns them for their wealth and power, but that God does hold them directly responsible for what they do with their power and privilege.
DDM [14:00] To follow Jesus means that they will have to actively side with the poor and the marginalized. Now let’s be honest, this was so radical in those days, as in the Roman Empire, it was the cult of the warrior, the strong man. Power was celebrated. The elite were considered divinely favored, even called Lord.
DDM [14:22] And the poor were invisible, or just a nuisance. Luke confronts all of this reminding the new gentile converts that the first will be lost and the poor will be exalted and the king of salvation will be a man who is stripped naked and crucified by state power. Luke is directly challenging not just the gentile converts but the Roman imperial order itself saying that the church’s core is to practice not just generosity but justice. To form inclusive communities where those that are looked down on in the world will be the ones through whom God reveals God’s self.
DDM [15:02] The gospel of Luke, you might say, for those of us who are Gentile converts and come from one of the most wealthy and powerful nations in the world, this is our gospel. This is the message to us. And it’s as hard for us to hear this gospel as it was for the early converts, because Luke wants us to be a lot more like Mary and Jesus and less like Caesar of the empire.
MET [15:29] So this actually helps me transition right into what I wanted to say about Matthew. I talked about Luke, but Matthew has a different take, which, Matthew is a story of kings and intrigue. In Matthew, we also start with a genealogy. Matthew reminds us that Jesus comes from a long line of Jewish ancestry. Interestingly, there are a few people you wouldn’t expect, including a few women, even some of ill repute, but we will talk more about that in the future.
MET [16:09] This birth story is a lot more about Joseph. An angel appeared to Joseph to tell him how to deal with Mary. Matthew feels it is important for us to know that Mary was a virgin until Jesus was born. This is partly to tell us what a stand-up guy Joseph was, and very much to remind us about a prophecy.
MET [16:29] But there’s no mention of shepherds. The birth takes place in Bethlehem again, but the importance of that this time around is political. Herod is king in this area. Now we’ll talk about empire in a few weeks, but for now, let’s just talk about royalty.
MET [16:49] Matthew wants you to know that Jesus’s birth was kingly. Jesus’s nativity story is a royal story. When Jesus is born, magi come from the east and ask Herod where they can find the babe. Magi has been translated a number of ways.
MET [17:09] Wise men, astrologers, astronomers, but these were rich, kingly, smart men who followed the stars. It would not be weird to think of them as wizards from a court from a foreign land. And they traveled, probably with a caravan, to come see this baby. And I want you to think about that.
MET [17:28] These were not Jewish men. They just saw signs and said, hey, this kid is a big deal. Let’s find him. So they came, they asked the king where to find him, probably because they assumed that if such a significant birth happened, the king would know about it.
MET [17:45] And when they found the child, they gave the family incredibly expensive gifts. The kind of gifts you give someone royal. Matthew is telling you a story that is kind of the opposite of Luke’s, but he’s not telling you that Jesus won’t help the ostracized. He’s telling you that Jesus is not like us.
MET [18:06] He is the King of Kings. Jesus may come from a humble background, but those who are wise will recognize him as the royal figure he is. It also solidifies Christ’s story as a political one. Whereas Luke paints Christ as a character that will liberate the oppressed, Matthew establishes Christ as a figure that will operate in political realms and will be equal with kings and wise leaders throughout his life.
DDM [18:35] Absolutely. And I think what’s fascinating for me is why the difference. And I think it has to do with who your readers are. If Luke is primarily concerned with helping wealthy, powerful Gentiles understand how radical Jesus’ teaching and life is, and where God is to be found, and helping them deal with their own responsibility of power and privilege, Matthew instead is writing for the Jewish community, a community that has been
DDM [19:05] occupied by an outside military power, a community that is looked down on as uneducated, primitive. And so to them, Matthew reminds them of their own political legitimacy. Matthew reminds them that you have a royal line established by God. You’re not simply uneducated primitive people, but you are heirs of the royal line of David.
DDM [19:31] And so this is about a reminding the oppressed of who they are. That they have history that they cannot allow the oppressor to eradicate. And so Matthew clearly shows that this little child, although born in poverty under occupation, Matthew’s saying never forget he is royalty in the line of David. He is our Jewish legitimate king, even if Rome does not recognize this.
DDM [19:59] And so Matthew is reminding the oppressed Jewish community that even though you may find your royal line living in poverty, Royal power is not about status, but about divine purpose. In some ways, you might almost say, Elizabeth, that I think that Matthew is a monarchical account. You know, it reminds me growing up in our family with the story of our Scottish kings living in exile and poverty, but they always knew who they were. And people knew, even under the occupation from England, who their true king was.
DDM [20:36] And so in this gospel, we see this world of political power, the Magi, the three kings coming to worship. Again, this is reminding the Jewish people, Rome may not recognize your power and your own royal line of kings, but outside nations do. This is almost like the United Nations saying, we recognize you, Palestine, as a state, even if Israel won’t. It’s reminding the Jewish people that other people see them, see their legitimacy as a nation in their own right.
DDM [21:08] It reminds people under occupation that the oppressor’s view of them is simply that. But others can sometimes see them for who they are. And so again, Matthew is reminding the Jewish readers that no matter how powerful Herod may seem, this powerless child is in fact the true leader of their people. And then it’s interesting because it’s in Matthew we have this awful story of the genocide of the innocents, where Herod orders all the male children in Bethlehem under a certain age to be slaughtered.
DDM [21:48] Now Matthew is reminding the community that no matter how horrendous the violence, no matter how you may suffer under the occupiers or under your own political leadership like Herod that has sided with the occupiers because remember Herod himself was a Jewish person. It is reminding them that God is working always on the side of the oppressed. And so Matthew pulls no punches in showing and reminding his audience how the current powers are cruel, unjust, and truly barbaric. And that power that is rooted in fear and violence will always be illegitimate in the eyes of God.
DDM [22:30] And then in Matthew’s gospel, we see how royal and political legitimate leadership must go into exile, just as many of our nations have experienced. And so this true king begins his life in exile and displacement and under the threat already as a child of execution. But the birth narrative in Matthew is reminding the Jewish people that the Messiah will always return to his people. And so even though his own life is still under threat, this holy royal family returns to a small rural village, almost attempting to live under the radar.
DDM [23:08] We also see in Matthew this constant quoting of Old Testament prophecies, reminding them that none of this is by chance, that everything is divinely ordained. So Matthew’s gospel, like Luke’s, is a message of liberation, salvation from oppression and from occupation. It’s reminding them who they truly are, not in the eyes of Rome, but in the eyes of God. It’s reminding them of their history, their kings, and that God is working in them and through them.
DDM [23:40] And Matthew is reminding them that they are not passive victims. but are actually part of God’s divine kingdom that is rising from this new child, this line of King David. And so from both of our Gospels today, we are reminded that the message of God differs depending on who you are. What we need to know to find salvation or in contemporary language wholeness if we are privileged and have power differs from what we need to hear if we are under occupation and oppression.
DDM [24:15] The gospel is not a one-size-fits-all but it’s a specific word of freedom and liberation to a specific group or people. So the question that leaves us as readers is who are we? In what group do we find ourselves in? And what is the challenge we need to hear for us to find wholeness, integrity, and justice?
MET [24:41] All of this may seem like a different way to talk about the nativity narrative, but it’s actually a really important lens through which to view Christ’s ministry. Jesus came to be a savior for all people, certainly. But we are missing a big part of the gospel if we don’t acknowledge, as Deborah has pointed out many times before, that God has a special place in his heart for the poor. The stories in Matthew and Luke show us that Jesus is going to spend his life doing two things, humbling the rich and exalting the meek and impoverished.
MET [25:18] Because the Magi were kings or sorcerers or royal courtiers from a foreign land, And their whole role in this story was to bring gifts and praise a baby. The royal figures in the story were forced to work for it. They traveled untold distances and went through political back channels and paid who knows how much money just for the chances to see this baby. The rich have one job, and that is to be humble, to pay up and give gifts.
MET [25:53] The poor, however, have a different set of requirements. The poor will have glory revealed to them as the shepherds saw the angels. The poor don’t have to bring gifts. They can show up as they are.
MET [26:06] The poor only have to be there. The poor are there to bless and be blessed. Jesus doesn’t require them to give up their wealth. He’s just glad they are there.
MET [26:16] Now, I’d love to get all theoretical on you. I would be delighted to throw some Marxist theory at you and talk about class consciousness or hegemony or any number of other concepts that I think are applicable, but maybe a bit heady. But instead of that, I’m going to remind you of a story. There is a parable in Luke about a woman who has 10 coins and she loses one.
MET [26:42] So she lights the lamps and sweeps the whole house until she finds it. The meaning of this parable is that God will search for all of his lost children. But the reason this parable makes sense to Jesus’ listeners is because they all know what it means to lose a coin. Losing a coin was a big deal.
MET [27:02] For the woman in this parable, losing a coin meant losing 10% of her wealth. Losing a coin was a terrifying prospect. Yes, she had nine more, which was a lot. But the idea of losing a coin to a general Jewish audience under the boot of Rome was a sobering thought.
MET [27:21] Jesus’ audience knew the value of money. There’s a reason that tax collectors were so reviled. When these stories were shared later, after Jesus’ life, people would have noticed the disparity in the birth narratives, the lowly and the exalted. The Nativity story isn’t just a sweet story of shepherds and kings.
MET [27:46] It’s foreshadowing. Jesus is going to welcome the poor and demand much from the wealthy. But they are, in the end, all holy in his presence.
DDM [27:57] You know, what’s interesting, Elizabeth, is Mark and John, they do have a theological take on the birth narratives, not as obvious as the two we’ve dealt with today. But they will deal with two aspects, which is interesting, love and sacrifice.
MET [28:16] Thank you for listening to The Priest and The Prof. find us at our website, https://priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at https://priestandprof.org/donate/. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.
DDM [28:45] Music by Audionautix.com
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