This and Every New Year: God Is Our Salvation

My mother often likes to note that the decision to celebrate Christmas in this time of year is really a celebration of the birthday of Mithras or Sol Invictus. Mom is in part right. There's no Biblical warrant for Joseph and a pregnant Mary riding a donkey through a December blizzard to Bethlehem or any other like clue as to the season. For one thing, the Earth's climate was driven by sunnier weather than usual during a period still called by climatologists, the Roman Maximum. And snow is rare enough in the Levant or the similar climate of coastal California, though it does happen as Los Angeles residents learned this year. Sorry, Miss Rosetti, your snow likely was not real but merely a metaphor for our world frozen in sin.

If I had to guess, the Roman census in Judea and Galilee probably was conveniently scheduled between major Jewish holidays and pilgrim feasts and avoided a season of major agricultural activity. So February or early March looks more promising if Hanukkah really was a pilgrim feast. But the Bible does not say, so it really doesn't matter.

What does matter is when we choose to celebrate it. And disagreeing with my mother, I suspect Christmas is celebrated on December 25 to place Jesus' circumcision on the eighth day from this event: 1 January, the beginning of the Roman civil year. In Rome, this day would be filled with omen-casting and inauguration of magistrates in rituals varying from the reasonably ordinary to the very, very strange. (HBO's Rome shows one ritual meant to give a sacrosanct character to a tribune. It's quite bloody.)

The Church originally celebrated 1 January as the Feast of the Circumcision, the first opportunity in Jesus' life to fulfill outward submission to the Law, and in which Joseph redeemed Jesus as his firstborn with a small sum given to charity or the local priests, depending on the exact custom. This act commemorated the redemption of the firstborn Israelites from the Angel of Death in Egypt as the circumcision recalled the circumcision of Israel from Egypt signified by the plagues. But it's all rather funny, because Joseph and Mary know that this child is God's son. That the Son of God is being incorporated into Israel. That Joseph is redeeming God from God on God's behalf. That in the submission of this child to the rituals of the Law, messianic prophecy is coming towards fulfillment and the reason of the Law ("the way of your statutes") is breaking down.

And since this day requires an unusual "redemption," they name the child Yeshua, a common enough name, held first in lore by the most obedient child of the Generation of the Wilderness, who took the mantle of Moses after his death and smote Canaan with the sword, purifying the land from the abominations of the nations. The child'
s parents might have hoped that this child, too, might be Israel's liberation from Roman oppression. But instead this child's name was not Yeshua Yisroel but Yeshua Tebel, God saves the entire world, Jew and Gentile alike. God saves. God redeems. And on New Year's Day, it signifies to us that God redeems all time, all struggle, all challenge, all change, and all things old we would like to bring with us into the new.

Today, I was reading a columnist who noted that the Roman Catholics, like the Episcopalians, no longer call 1 January the Feast of the Circumcision. The Episcopalians call it the Feast of the Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, which retains some of the original significance of the day. The Roman Catholics now call it the Solemnity of Mary. Charity forbids further comment.

A blessed Christmas and New Year from all of us at the Monastery, knowing that the only certainty of a new year is the continuing gift of God's salvation.