Subversive Narratives of Advent

Posted on December 22, 2023 by Herb Montgomery

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Season 1, Episode 44: Luke 1.25-38. Lectionary B, Advent 4

Each week, we’ll be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and societal justice. Our hope is that our talking will be just talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week you’ll be inspired to also do more than just talking.

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Season 1, Episode 44: Luke 1.25-38. Lectionary B, Advent 4

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Subversive Narratives of Advent

Herb Montgomery | December 22, 2023

To listen to this week’s eSight as a podcast episode click here.

” The virgin birth narrative was an economic and political critique of Rome’s predation and extraction. It presented Jesus’ alternative social vision, the gospel of the kingdom rooted in the Golden rule, enemy love, nonviolence, resource-sharing, wealth redistribution as restoration and reparations, and more. It was a social vision where people committed to taking care of one another as the objects of God’s love and making sure each person had what they needed to thrive.”

Our reading this last weekend of Advent is found in the gospel of Luke. It is the story of the angel’s visit to Mary:

In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”

Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”

“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”

The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. For no word from God will ever fail.”

“I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her. (Luke 1:26-38)

This is the only version of the Jesus story in our sacred canon where Jesus’ mother Mary is explicitly characterized as a “virgin.” Some translations hint at this status in Matthew, but here in Luke it is explicit. To wrap our heads around this narrative element, we need to first back up and look at the social context in which this story was originally written, and consider the larger themes of the gospel Luke for that audience. In our treatment of Rome this week, I’m deeply indebted to the work of Walter Brueggemann, specifically his book Tenacious Solidarity. If you would like to learn more about Rome’s system than we have space for this week, let me heartily suggest chapter 2 of that work.

In Rome’s economic system, money was extracted from the commoners and funneled into the various strata of the wealthy elite. This created a society in Judea where there was no middle class. The people were reduced to peasants who kept getting squeezed to become poorer, while the rich, wealthy elite continued to become richer. As Walter Brueggemann explains, systems of economic extraction are unsustainable. You can’t continue to squeeze the poor indefinitely. At some point the system breaks and we know that this system broke violently in the late 60s C.E. in Judea.

What we are reading in Luke this week happens while that overtaxation and economic predation was still going strong. The ruling elites of Jesus’ society (Herod, the priesthood, the scribes, the elders—the Temple State) were becoming wealthier and wealthier the more they complied with Rome’s extraction system. Through taxes, loans, and rents, the people became debtors, and then as debtors they were reduced to peasants. They lost their land through their inability to repay debts they’d incurred just to survive, and they became dependent on a system that continued to take from them. It was a downward economic spiral in which many of the people were helpless.

This is the social, economic and political context in which the gospel of Luke was written. And this is why in Luke’s gospel we meet Zacchaeus, a tax collector. Tax collectors were an integral part of this exploitative system, and they become wealthy themselves as a result. Luke introduces a few tax collectors (e.g. Luke 3:12, 5:27–30, 7:29, 34, 15:1, 18:10–13), but the most infamous of them is Zacchaeus. When Zacchaeus encounters Jesus’ teachings, he chooses to reject the system that made him wealthy and embraces a path of restoration and reparations instead (see Luke 19:10).

In Luke’s gospel we learn what moved Zacchaeus to change. It was Jesus’ teaching of “the Kingdom” as contrasted with the Roman Empire. Though the language of Kingdom is complicated and challenges readers today, its original audience would have understood it as a contrast to Rome’s system of imperial predation.

After all, Jesus’ ministry in Luke begins with him calling for all debts to be cancelled in the year of Jubilee, the year of the Lord’s favor (see Luke 4:18-19). Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom called for debts to be cancelled and for the Torah practices of land being given back to its original owner, indentured slaves being set free, and debt cancellation. This debt was how the system kept the masses permanently dependent and the few elites as continual recipients of funneled wealth. Jesus’ solution was simply to cancel all the debts as the Torah had taught. His “kingdom” wasn’t about saying a special prayer so you could go to heaven when you died. It was a life-giving system in the here and now as an alternative to Rome’s system of economic extraction.

In Luke’s gospel, we also encounter what we call today Mary’s Magnificat:

He has brought down rulers from their thrones

but has lifted up the humble.

He has filled the hungry with good things

but has sent the rich away empty. (Luke 1:52-53)

The words of Simeon are similar:

“This child is destined to cause the falling (elite, rich rulers) and rising (poor and hungry) of many in Israel.” (Luke 2:34)

Repeatedly in Luke, Jesus calls his listeners to reject Rome’s predatory system and embrace the Kingdom instead (see Luke 12:13-31). Jesus says things to those benefitting from Rome’s system like, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” (Luke 12:15)

The word for greed here is pleonexia. Thayer defines this as the covetousness or the desire to have more specifically what others have. It is the insatiable desire for what belongs to another. This is exactly what was happening at that time. The wealthy elite were insatiable, extracting everything the masses had to enrich themselves. The Roman power brokers ran after such things too, but Jesus tells his listeners, “Seek first his kingdom, and all that you need will be given to you” (Luke 12:31). Today we here in the U.S. live in a debt economy with many experiencing only subsistence living. I wonder how Luke’s gospel would read if it was written for us?

Further in Luke’s gospel, Jesus critiques his society. In Luke 14, he gives the parable of the banquet illustrating a preferential option for those societally marginalized. In the parable of the manager who cooked the books when his unsustainable situation ran out, Jesus declares that you can’t serve both God and money (Luke 16:13). This saying makes perfect sense in its social context. Luke 16 also includes the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, which ends by calling the living to listen to the law’s debt forgiveness and the prophets’ critique of economic extraction.

This is the context in which we also need to understand Luke’s virgin birth. Jesus’ alternative vision for human society competed with the Roman system. And as difficult as it may be for post-Enlightenment minds to grapple with, if Jesus’ kingdom was to compete in that world, Jesus had to be put on the same standing as Caesar. Every Caesar around the time of Jesus (Julius, Augustus, Tiberius) was considered to be a son of God, or even divine themselves. In true Hellenistic fashion, they were each born of human mothers who had a one-night stand with one of Rome’s gods. Judaism’s culture at the time that Luke was written was a kind of purity culture. What better way for Jewish Jesus followers living under Rome to place Jesus on the same level of the Caesars, than for Jesus’ mother Mary to be a virgin who gave birth afer conceived miraculously and sexlessly by the Holy Spirit?

In our culture today, it is easy for us to fixate scientifically on the virgin birth story. But the narrative in Luke’s gospel is not a science presentation. Luke’s world was one where the supernatural was taken for granted. In that context, the virgin birth narrative was an economic and political critique of Rome’s predation and extraction. It presented Jesus’ alternative social vision, the gospel of the kingdom rooted in the Golden rule, enemy love, nonviolence, resource-sharing, wealth redistribution as restoration and reparations, and more. It was a social vision where people committed to taking care of one another as the objects of God’s love and making sure each person had what they needed to thrive.

This brings me to our context today. Today we live in an economic system with a wealth gap that’s growing exponentially. It’s a complex system where the little that people have is being extracted from them more and more and channeled into the pockets of those who already have more than they could ever possible use.

This Advent, what is Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom in Luke saying to each of us? How is it calling us to take up the work of making our world a safe, compassionate, just home for all? Each of us is part of one another. Each bears the image of the Divine. And each is the object of a Divine love that Jesus’ kingdom calls us to participate in for them, too.

HeartGroup Application

1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s eSight/Podcast episode with your HeartGroup.

2. As Advent wraps us and we move into Christmas, what beautiful things in our world do you see arriving at the present time? What social changes are you thankful for? What social changes presently taking place inspire you to keep working for change? Discuss with your group.

3. What can you do this week, big or small, to continue setting in motion the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone?

Thanks for checking in with us, today.

I want to say a special thank you to all of our supporters out there. And if you would like to join them in supporting Renewed Heart Ministries’ work you can do so by going to renewedheartministries.com and clicking donate.

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You can watch our new YouTube show called “Just Talking” each week. Todd Leonard and I take a moment to talk about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and societal justice. Our hope is that our talking will be just talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week you’ll be inspired to also do more than just talking.

If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out, you might like it. You can find JustTalking each week on YouTube at youtube.com/@herbandtoddjusttalking. Please Like, Subscribe, hit the Notification button, and leave us a comment.

And if you’d like to reach us here at Renewed Heart Ministries through email, you can reach us at info@renewedheartministries.com.

My new book, Finding Jesus: A story of a fundamentalist preacher who unexpectedly discovered the social, political, and economic teachings of the Gospels is now also available at renewedheartministries.com

Right where you are, keep living in love, choosing compassion, taking action, and working toward justice.

I love each of you dearly,

I’ll see you next week.

Matching Donations for the Rest of 2023!

As 2023 is coming to a close, we are deeply thankful for each of our supporters.

To express that gratitude we have a lot to share.

First, all donations during these last two months of the year will be matched, dollar for dollar, making your support of Renewed Heart Ministries go twice as far.

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No matter how you choose to donate to support Renewed Heart Ministries’ work this holiday season, thank you for partnering with us to further Jesus’ vision of a world filled with compassion, love, and people committed to taking care of one another. Together we are working toward a safer, more compassionate, and just world both for today and for eternity.

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Now Available at Renewed Heart Ministries!

Herb’s new book Finding Jesus: A story of a fundamentalist preacher who unexpectedly discovered the social, political, and economic teachings of the Gospels, is available at renewedheartministries.com.

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