Dear Friends
Myth and Metaphor
I am very aware that I use the word “challenge” far to often, and search regularly for another word, and finding none, return to it. It is the nature of the times we live in that if we wish to embrace God’s sovereignty in our lives and in our world, and wish to respond to God’s call to participate in proclaiming the reality of that sovereignty in the present moment (Mark 1:15), then challenge is a reality; and there are many challenges. The greater challenge is to live out our faith-reality daily, to allow the inherent nature of who we are as children of God to proclaim that the social constructs of our day (race, gender, sexual orientation, etc) are a lie, and that the truth is found in the goodness of Creation as proclaimed in Genesis, where we are reminded that we are created in God’s image, created for community, created to belong and to be loved. It is, however, difficult to manifest this truth in a religious climate that has forgotten that our Scriptures are largely narrative, collections of stories seeking to share the relational experience of Gods people with God over millennia; and that these Scriptures are not a treatise seeking to present a scientific theory of God that requires unquestioning obedience to often outdated social norms and prescriptions.
The essence of good narrative is myth and metaphor, something that our Scriptures are full to overflowing with. We often equate myth with fiction, but Biblical myth - while often not historically or scientifically factual from a 21st century perspective - seeks to explain or give value to the unknown, and uses metaphor to help provide understanding. An example is the assertion in 1 John 4:8b that “... God is love”: this is a metaphor that seeks to help us understand something of God’s nature, and is a powerful statement in and of itself. However, amazing as it is, it is a very limited description; God will always be more than any metaphor we may choose to use to describe God’s-self. To know that God is love is profoundly helpful, but the mystery - the unknown and unknowable - that is God is so much more than just love.
Eugene Kennedy, in his forward to Joseph Campbell’s book Thou art That, says, “When spiritual rights are demanded on the basis of religious metaphors as facts and geography instead of as symbols of the heart and spirit, a bitterly divided world arises with the inevitability of great tragedy.” We see this ongoing tragedy in the conflicts in Israel/Palestine; we’ve experienced it here in terms of the false theologies that backed the Apartheid system in South Africa; we’ve seen it in the rise of German Nationalism that led to the 2nd World War and the Holocaust; it is visible in today’s growing right-wing fascism in Europe and the USA.
As we move towards Christmas and the celebrations of Jesus’ birth, how do we understand the virgin birth? And how does our understanding open up fresh opportunities to face the pain and hopelessness of our time and context, and to celebrate the counter-intuitive values of hope, peace, and love in our struggling world? If we’re honest, most of us dismiss the virgin birth as either impossibility, improbability, or pure fiction; this despite the fact that we affirm this belief as we repeat the words of the Creed Sunday by Sunday. Contemporaries of the Gospel writers would have understood the proclamation of the virgin birth as a metaphor, because in the Graeco-Roman world a virgin birth always denoted divinity. Jesus’ conception happened as every human conception has ever happened, but the metaphor spoke to the hopes and aspirations of the 1st century Jewish community and the developing Christian Church of the living God finally offering a meaningful alternative to the oppressive and ruthless rule of Empire (Syrian, Greek, and now Roman). The fact that they, like us, confuse facts and geography with symbols of the heart and spirit, doesn’t negate the reality that Jesus’ birth - metaphorically virgin and spiritually Divine - became a powerful force for a transformed future both then and now.
As I write there is a great deal of unknown in our South African future, and I won’t depress you further by enumerating all that those brief words encapsulate: we are all aware. However, let me declare to you the Virgin Birth: we are remembered by the Divine, by the unknown and unknowable mystery that is God, and that this indescribable Sovereign of all Creation has made us in the image of Mystery, and imbued us with Divine Presence, reminding us that we belong and are loved.
Madeleine L’Engle, in her Christmas of 1973 poem The Risk of Birth, reflects on these challenges:
This is no time for a child to be born,
With the world betrayed by war and hate
And a comet slashing the sky to warn
That time runs out and the sun burns late.
That was no time for a child to be born,
In a land in the crushing grip of Rome;
Honour and truth were trampled by scorn -
Yet here did the Saviour make his home.
When is the time for love to be born?
The inn is full on the planet earth,
And by a comet the sky is torn -
Yet Love still takes the risk of Birth.
Advent and Christmas blessings
Mark
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