A Child is Born, a Son is Given (Part 1)

A long time ago, in a remote country of the mighty Roman Empire, in an obscure village, among an outcast race of people, a child was born. In fact, he was born to a poor peasant girl and a carpenter who had no bed for him at first but a manger in a cattle stall. They named their infant son “Jesus.” After his birth in the town of Bethlehem, Jesus and his family fled their own country, which was then under the tyrannical rule of King Herod, and lived in Egypt for several years as refugees (Herod had been propped up on the throne of Palestine by the Roman Emperor, but he was not descended from the authentic lines of the kings of Israel – in reality, his claim to rule the Jewish people rested solely on brute force). After Herod died, Jesus and his family returned to their native land and dwelled in the region of Galilee, in a remote mountain village called Nazareth. The boy’s father died sometime after his son’s twelfth birthday. Those are the basic facts about the parentage and childhood of Jesus that are accessible to the historian, and that can be stated with some degree of confidence.

Meanwhile, the Mediterranean world prospered under Roman law, and the peace secured by the Roman legions. In fact, there were said to be signs in the heavens of the favor of the gods upon the empire. A conjunction of the paths of Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation of Pisces (a conjunction which happened three times in the year 7 BC) may have been interpreted at the time as a celestial celebration of the reign of the great Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus. Yet astrologers in Persia, well to the east, must have interpreted this rare meeting of stars in the night sky in a different light: for according to ancient lore, though Jupiter was the star of the world ruler, Saturn was held to be the star not of Rome but of Palestine, and the constellation of Pisces (the last of the signs of the zodiac) was the constellation representing the last age of the world. As one historian puts it: “When Jupiter meets Saturn in the constellation of the Fishes, that signifies: there will appear in Palestine in this year the ruler of the last days.” (Stauffer, Jesus and His Story, SCM, 1960 edition, p. 37). It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the gospel writer St. Matthew tells us that around that time “wise men” from the east arrived in the capital city of Palestine, asking “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East, and have come to worship him” (Mt 2:2).

In his book Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, Pope Benedict XVI commented on recent scholarship regarding the star and the coming of the wise men:

Naturally, attempts have been made to establish more precisely who they were. The Viennese astronomer Konrad Ferrari d’Occhieppo has shown that in the city of Babylon — which had once been a center of scientific astronomy but was already in decline by the time of Jesus — there was still “a small group of astronomers who were gradually dying out … Earthenware tablets, covered in cuneiform signs with astronomical calculations … are clear proof of this” (Dern Stern von Bethlehem, p.27). He goes on to say that the conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation of Pisces in the years 7-6 B.C. — now believed to be the actual time of Jesus’ birth — is something that the Babylonian astronomers could have calculated, and it may well have pointed them toward the land of Judea and to a newborn “king of the Jews.” (New York: Image Books, 20012, p. 94)

The extraordinary events taking place in the heavens, and the arrival of the wise men with their portents of a new-born king of the last age of the world inevitably led Herod to grow fearful for the security of his throne. Not only in the Gospel according to St. Matthew, but also in an ancient Jewish apocalyptic text written between 6 and 15 AD titled The Assumption of Moses, we find reports that Herod tried to remove the infant Messiah from the scene by slaughtering all the children two years old or younger in Bethlehem, the ancestral town of the royal house of David. In Matthew the report is clear and explicit (Mt 2:16-18), and it is given as the reason why the parents of Jesus fled with him from Bethlehem in the middle of the night and escaped to Egypt. But in The Assumption of Moses it takes the cryptic form of a prophecy (about things that actually had already happened), including a prophecy that an “insolent king” (Herod) would rule after the Hasmonean dynasty had ended, and, amongst other crimes, would execute judgment upon the Israelites just as the Egyptian ruler Pharaoh had done long ago (when Pharaoh tried to slaughter all the Israelite baby-boys, see Exodus 1:22). The Assumption of Moses puts it this way: “and he [Herod] will cut off their chief men with the sword and will destroy them in secret places, so that no one may know where their bodies are. He will slay the old and the young, and he will not spare. Then the fear of him will be bitter unto them in their land. And he will execute judgement on them as the Egyptians executed upon them” (Stauffer, Jesus and His Story, p. 38-39). Indeed, this kind of behavior fits with everything historians know about King Herod. New Testament scholar Scott Hahn writes: 

He was homicidal, insecure to the point of paranoia, and he had no compunction about killing people. … He murdered one of his wives and three of his sons. He slaughtered the Jerusalem priests whose scriptural interpretations made him anxious, and his other sporadic purges claimed victims by the hundreds. What are a few dead infants and toddlers to such a man? (Joy to the World. Image Books, 2014, p. 137-138)

After Herod’s death, with the danger past, Mary and Joseph returned with Jesus to their homeland. The evangelist St. Luke tells us: “And Jesus increased wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man” (Lk 2:52). This is almost all that historians know from a period of at least 20 years of his life. Yet we can exercise our historical imagination a little here. For all the evidence from his later life and teachings suggests a thoroughly peasant background. Jesus speaks of a woman baking bread, of a sower who went out to plant seed, of a man who built his house upon the rock, and of a shepherd looking for his lost sheep. His parables are alive with the wonder of the everyday and the commonplace. One anonymous Christian author composed the following prayer, which is an imaginative, but not implausible attempt to see Jesus in those hidden years:

Jesus, my Lord and Brother, in your youth you spent many years hidden in God. With silence and devotion you lived in the small town of Nazareth doing simple work as a carpenter, helping your mother Mary around the house, listening to the word of God in the synagogue, and wandering from time to time on the hillsides by the Sea of Galilee: to be alone with the God of Israel, to adore him, and to meditate on his Word. How many times you must have taken a deep breath, and with thanksgiving prayed, “Speak, Father, your Son is listening” — and all around you and within you was silence: the silence that enabled you to see all creation and all of humanity as beloved in the eyes of God.

Jesus Called God “Abba,” Father

When Jesus first appeared on the public scene he was 30-something years old. He came to the river to be baptized by the prophet John, a wild character who wore camel’s hair clothing, and lived in the desert on locusts and wild honey. John was clearly cut from the same cloth as some of the Old Testament prophets; he called the Israelites to give up their sinful ways, repent, and gain a fresh start by being baptized in the river Jordan. But instead of humbly confessing his sins, Jesus had a unique experience at his baptism. He felt the nearness of God his Father, and a special outpouring of the Holy Spirit like the gentle descent of a dove. And he heard a voice saying to him, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well-pleased” (Lk 3:21-22). In short, the Holy Spirit made clear and explicit what Jesus had already experienced in the depths of his heart all his life (Lk 2:49): that God alone was his true Father, and he alone was his Son. As a result, for his entire life and ministry, he would never refer to God as “our Father” in a way that included himself, but always either as “Abba, dear Father” and “My Father,” or “your Father [because you are followers of me].” 

Then Jesus went out into the desert to fast and pray, and to wrestle with what had been revealed to him. In the midst of struggle against demonic temptations, he must have begun to see, with ever greater clarity, what his Father was calling him to do.

Thus, the gospels imply that Jesus truly saw himself as “the Son of God.” But what can that mean? On the one hand, that phrase in the Psalms referred to the kings of Israel (e.g. Ps 2:6-9), and by prophetic foreshadowing, it might apply also to the Messiah, the true Son of David anointed by the Spirit, who would one day reign as king over all of the People of God. But according to the gospels Jesus rarely spoke of himself, or even alluded to himself in those terms, as if to do so could only lead to a profound misunderstanding of his identity and mission. 

Here is a mystery in the story of Jesus that the historian meets again and again. On the one hand, Jesus invited the people of Israel to come to know God as a loving Father. For them God had always been Adonai, the Lord (a title used in place of God’s ineffable name Yahweh from Ex 3:14); God was their Creator, Redeemer, Bridegroom, Husband, Shepherd, and above all their King. But now Jesus taught them to address God in prayer in a new way that only rarely occurs in the Hebrew Scriptures, namely, as their own Father: “Our Father, who art in heaven.” Fountain of life and source of all radiance, God the Father is the one who clothes the lilies of the field and feeds the birds of the air, Jesus said. He is the holy and infinite Father who calls all people into one family, so that they might live and pray together as children of one God. Jesus taught that God is a wise and compassionate Father who “knows what you need before you ask.” If an earthly father knows how to give good things to his children, Jesus said, “How much more will you heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him?” (Mt 7:11). He knows the inmost hearts of his sons and daughters, and judges them according to whether or not they do his righteous will, yet he seeks out his wayward children with an offer of forgiveness, just like the father of the prodigal son in Jesus’ parable. When his son was coming home, but still a long way off, that father “had compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.” (The phrase translated as “had compassion” here is the Greek phrase splagna eleos, which literally means “had mercy arising from his guts”!). This is the kind of Father-God that Jesus invited all who heard him to come to know and to experience personally.

And yet, at the same time, they could only do so through him, Jesus said, because that same Father was his own Father in a unique and unsurpassable way: “All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son but the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Mt 11:27; Lk 10:22; cf. Mt 24:36; Mk 12:6 and 13:32). Here lies a secret about his identity that in the synoptic gospels Jesus never publicly or explicitly reveals, though as we shall see, it permeates his words and deeds. In Matthew and Luke, however (and much later, in John), we are tipped off by the gospel writers right from the start about the nature of that secret. …

Next time: The Mystery of the Virginal Conception 

Robert Stackpole, STD

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