Advent 4 – THE VIRGIN CONCEPTION

St Stephens, Mt Waverley, 2008

Sermons/Luke/Virgin Birth

‘The angel said to Mary, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you: therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called the Son of God”’. Luke 1:35

There was nothing extraordinary about the birth of Jesus. His birth was normal and natural. What was extraordinary, according to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, was the manner of Jesus conception. He was conceived, as has been affirmed in our Creeds since the second century, ‘by the power of the Holy Spirit’, without the co-operation of a human father. In other words, we ought to speak of his ‘virginal conception’ and not, as many inaccurately do, of his ‘virgin birth’.

In recent years some Christians have questioned whether it is strictly essential to believe that the virginal conception actually happened in order to believe in the event of the incarnation. The Gospel writers were not concerned, they claim, with brute historical facts. Instead, the event of the incarnation is dressed up in myth and legend.

It is fascinating in this regard, to compare Muslim teaching to this recent trend in some Christian circles. The Koran accepts the virginal conception of Jesus as an historical event. Yet Muslims do not recognize Jesus as the incarnate Son of God. Their strict monotheistic faith – ‘there is no god but Allah’ – excludes believing Jesus to be anything more than a remarkable prophet.

Conversely, we have some Christians saying ‘yes’ to the incarnation but ‘no’ to any virginal conception.

What are we to make of this? Are we to accept the extraordinary, supernatural nature of Jesus’ conception? Are the Gospel’s symbolic legends which, at least at this point, are not to be understood literally? Are they metaphorical rather than metaphysical?

Those who reject the virginal conception as something that actually happened do so for a number of reasons. Let me briefly mention four of the main criticisms levelled against understanding these stories in a factual way:

First, the scarcity of biblical evidence.

Apart from the references to it in the nativity stories of Matthew and Luke, the nature of Jesus conception is not explicitly referred to again in the N.T. (John’s Gospel does make repeated statements that would seem to imply some kind of supernatural intervention – statements such as, that Jesus – ‘came from above’ or ‘came down from heaven’ or ‘was sent from the Father’.)

Nevertheless, it must be conceded that only Matthew and Luke mention the Virgin Conception explicitly and the rest of the New Testament is silent about it.

Arguing from silence however is notoriously unconvincing. One could equally say that Mark and John tell us nothing about the childhood of Jesus. We do not therefore conclude from this that Jesus never had one!

Second, the development of the OT Scriptures.

Some commentators think that the source of the virginal conception stories arose from reflection on the sacred texts that the Gospel writers inherited. From OT stories recounting extraordinary conceptions producing great persons from barren, infertile wombs, like Sarah the mother of Isaac or Rebekah the mother of Jacob and Esau or Hannah the mother of the boy Samuel – the story of the virginal conception was developed. This reflection produced a form of literary genre, so it is alleged, that has subsequently become known as midrash (a mixture of history and non-history by embroidering Old Testament stories of children born to parents of great old age).

Third, the borrowing of legends from the Greco-Roman world.

In the Greco-Roman world there were legends about the conception and birth of heroes such as Herakles, Romulus and Remus, Plato, Alexander the Great and Augustus Caesar.

These stories tell of sexual intercourse between a deity and a woman who is sometimes tricked into having relations or even raped by the god in question. They are stories which verge on being soft pornography and are quite unlike the Annunciation story in which Mary’s conscious agreement features prominently – ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word’.

4. Undergirding all these three objections, there is usually a fourth: the virginal conception is dismissed as being scientifically impossible.

One of the most articulate popularisers of this view is Bishop Jack Spong. He writes: ‘Christianity’s basic tenets have been made inoperative by the advance of secular knowledge. The Christmas story, a narrative in which stars are said to wander, virgins conceive, foetuses salute each other out of their respective mother’s womb, and angels sing to hillside shepherds is hardly the stuff of reality.

The moment the world discovered that women had an egg cell which contributed 50 per cent of the genetic code of every new-born life, all virgin birth stories died as literal biology. If Mary is Jesus’s mother, and the Holy Spirit the paternal agent, then Jesus would be a half-human, half-divine monster, hardly the claim the church intended.

Despite the claims of the literalisers, the virgin birth story was never anything but the stuff of mythology. The story of Jesus’ miraculous entry into this world is no longer believable.’

Spong’s remarks about the biology of women’s eggs;foetus’s and Jesus being a hybrid - half human, half divine monster totally misconstrue what the New Testament actually says. The Spirit is not presented in the NT as playing the role of the father.

Rather, the Spirit, as the Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, has insisted on pointing out, is equipping Mary to be the mother. The angel says that the Holy Spirit will rest upon Mary. This, as Mary’s revolutionary Magnificat brilliantly makes clear, is an advance sign that the new creation is dawning.

Mary will be called blessed by all generations because it is she who has borne the One who declared by his life and death the overturning of all conventional human values: our respect for the strong and the proud, the mighty and the rich. All come tumbling down and the weak and the meek and the lowly are God’s special concern.

The virginal conception is about the flooding of God’s good creation with God’s new life. In Mary, God’s new and healing embrace of the whole creation has begun to take effect. The new creation, where the old limitations are broken down and new possibilities open up, was always meant to begin, in Messianic expectation, with a newborn child. Certainly, the virginal conception does not imply any denigration of sexuality.

I turn now from these four ways of attacking the historical veracity of the virginal conception to mention just one positive reason why I personally accept with reverent respect what the Gospel’s of Matthew and Luke have to say about the ‘uniquely unique event’ of the virginal conception.

It has to do with the part played by eyewitnesses in the transmission of the Gospel material.

In the preface of his Gospel, Luke writes: ‘Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed’ (Luke 1:1-4).

The importance of the role of eyewitnesses has been vigorously reinforced in a book by the recently retired Professor of New Testament Studies at St Andrew’s University in Scotland, Richard Bauckham, entitled ‘Jesus and the Eyewitnesses’.

The jury is still out on the argument of this book but if it is correct, most ‘Introductions to the NT’ will need to be rewritten. This is not the place to go into the fascinating evidence that Professor Bauckham uncovers – things that the modern reader of the Gospels may not notice - like the various lists of the apostles and the order in which they are named; the names of people whom Jesus’ healed like Bartimaeus; or the women named at the cross and burial place. These names, Bauckham argues in a convincing way, indicate that the Gospel material is not the invention of anonymous communities, but material that goes back to eyewitnesses who were participants in the Gospel story.

I strongly suspect that this new research supports the ancient view, that Luke’s narrative, which tells of the annunciation to Mary and of her perplexity as to how she could become a mother when she was not yet married, is material that goes back to Mary herself , while Matthew’s telling of Joseph’s discovery of Mary’s pregnancy and of his perplexity is a complementary story that goes back to Joseph himself.

In short, Luke tells Mary’s story, while Matthew tells Josephs.

There is good reason to be cautious about thinking that we have in these birth narratives fanciful inventions or legendry accretions that have no historical veracity.

The virginal conception cannot be proved but to the person who does not rule out a priori the possibility of the miraculous, it seems entirely congruous that a supernatural person (who was simultaneously God and man) should enter as well as leave the world in a supernatural way.

In the end, it is our theological presuppositions and our understanding of God, that will determine how we approach these stories in Luke and Matthew.

I find myself in agreement with the highly respected Roman Catholic theologian, Gerald O’Collins when he writes:

‘Everyone negotiates this kind of argument (i.e., what is scientifically possible) in terms of their notion of God. Those who accept that God has created the world along with the natural laws which govern its working should have no trouble in also accepting that, for good reasons, God could and will in special cases override the normal working of these laws. … On the occasion of the incarnation, a once-and-for-all assuming of the human condition by the divine Word, God might be expected to do something unique in bringing it about. Those who stress the ‘natural’ impossibility of the virginal conception might well be asked to re-examine their picture of God’.

In conclusion let me apply two lessons that we can learn from Mary’s response in this story as it stands in the Gospels. It is a response that reveals both her frailty and her faith.

First, Mary’s frailty

‘Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?”

To think that Mary’s pregnancy would speak to her irrefutably of God coming into the world, is to read modern certainties back into the first century. Pregnancy was infinitely more mysterious and puzzling in the ancient world than it is to us today.

Bishop Spong is right when he points out that it was only in 1827, with the discovery of the ovum, that the key role of the woman in conception was acknowledged. Mary’s pregnancy was puzzling to her and all she could do was secretly ponder this knowledge in her heart, initially too frightened to tell anyone. In the medieval period, unexpected pregnancy conjured up the terror of impregnation by the devil!

Moreover, the whole of idea of incarnation, of God coming into the world, was anathema in the Jewish world to which Mary belonged. The Jewish faith was strictly monotheistic. God was understood as One and there were no runners up! This is not the kind of story any Jew would invent and believe.

And this is where the story impinges on us. We are sometimes, like Mary, confused and we struggle to understand. “How?”, “When?”, “Why?”. We share Mary’s frailty. But God’s call to salvation is an invitation to go beyond the boundaries of understanding, recognizing our human frailty and finitude.

‘O the depths of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!’ (Rom.11:33).

First, Mary’s frailty. Second, Mary’s faith

Mary’s response to the angelic announcement wins our immediate admiration. ‘Here am I the servant of the Lord: let it be with me according to your word’. The Gospels do imply that there was considerable struggle in Mary’s coming to this conviction. There was much pondering and probably, she did not finally comprehend the significance of the Virginal conception until tongues of fire came down upon her at Pentecost.

Her revolutionary Magnificat may have been written by others (the words appear to be modelled on Hannah’s Song in 1Samuel 2:1-10), but after Pentecost, they became her very own. Then she could see that the Virginal conception had been an enormous privilege for her: ‘the Mighty One has done great things for me’. (1:49).

The faith of Mary in submitting to the virgin conception stands out in contrast to the attitudes of some of the critics who deny it. The tendency of many today is to reject it because it does not fit in with their presuppositions.

Mary was so completely willing for God to fulfil his purpose, that she was willing to risk the stigma of being thought an adulteress herself and of bearing an illegitimate child. She surrendered her reputation to God’s will.

What matters is that we allow God to be God and to do things God’s way, even if with Mary, we thereby risk losing our good name.