Abstract
There is a delightful painting entitled ‘The Rest on the Flight into Egypt’ in the Scottish National Gallery collection. It’s a late 16th century oil by the Italian artist Giovanni Battista Paggi. I find it arresting on two counts, firstly because of its realistic nature. The Blessed Virgin Mary for once is not looking unnaturally composed after parturition but rather a little dishevelled and distracted. She has her sleeves rolled up and is rinsing clothes. As you do after childbirth, almost endlessly; indeed, washing seems to take over your life. And if you are a refugee, you do it with whatever water-source you are lucky enough to find; in this case, a dank looking river. Life on the run is not easy.
The river and its blessed washerwoman are in the background, and that is the second arresting feature of this composition. Joseph is to the fore. Joseph, who is generally allotted a mere bit-part in late Renaissance depictions of the Holy Family, is centre stage, the focus and the principal actor. In his arms he cradles his new-born son, tenderly, competently, solicitously, the bond between father and infant being emphasised by the unbroken circle their draped clothes form in the very centre of the painting. It’s an intimate image that compels attention.
The writer or writers of Third Isaiah use the self-same image to describe God’s relationship with the people of Israel. The litany of lament that follows our three verses is prefaced by a paean of praise for God’s acts of deliverance in the past, an account strewn with the words ‘mercy’, ‘love’, ‘pity’ and above all ‘presence’. This God is close; this God is compassionate and caring. This God identifies intimately with the people’s distress, treating them as family and trusting them implicitly. This God supports them in their struggles and carries them out of danger, just as parents rescue their children from mishap, swinging them up onto their shoulders and bearing them aloft through the world, securely, playfully, tenderly. This God ‘becomes the people’s saviour in all their distress’ (Isa. 63, 9).
Christmas-tide focusses our attention upon the development of that relationship of parental love; upon God’s intimate identification with us, God’s children. God sent neither ‘messenger nor angel’ but Son, self, ‘sharing our flesh and blood’ and our sufferings; became embodied as we are, incarnate; Emmanuel. This God identifies utterly with our anguish in order to transform it, ‘freeing those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death’ (Heb.2,15).This embodied God rescues us by complete self-giving, utter identification with human anguish and total sharing in the consequences of our sin.
This embodied God rescues us by means other than the kind of power and might we see Herod exercising - and all the Herods of the world since. In his fear and insecurity, this appointee of the Emperor, this puppet king, resorts to the corrupt tools of tyranny, massacring innocent infants in an effort to guarantee his own power and prestige. Fright turned to fury is always a dangerous driver of action, and here we see its consequences – or rather hear them in the wailing and lamentation of the bereaved. Hear it still today in the weeping of the dispossessed, the refugee and the innocent victims of humanity’s greedy grab for power and control; hear it in the cries of those whose plight is callously termed ‘collateral damage’.
This God eschews such means and deploys other methods instead. Methods that are much more vulnerable, far more fragile. This God entrusts Godself to us in infant flesh, and works through human agency. Works through people such as Joseph-the-dreamer and, like his namesake, interpreter-of-dreams. He has no imperial status or standing, yet staunchly listens to every whispered hint from God and answers obediently. Tyrants may huff and puff noisily, but the principal actor in this Gospel story, as in Paggi’s painting, is Joseph the meek, Joseph the mild, Joseph the oft-forgotten one.
The poet U. A. Fanthorpe includes in her Christmas anthology a most thoughtful meditation upon Joseph’s role in the nativity story. In ‘I am Joseph’, she depicts him musing upon how very marginal he is to this birth narrative: ‘I wanted an heir; discovered/ my wife’s son wasn’t mine. Mine was the likeness I hoped for/ when the first-born man-child came. But nothing of him was me. I couldn’t/ even choose his name’.
But she ends the poem with these words:
I am Joseph, who wanted
To teach my own boy how to live. My lesson for my foster son: Endure. Love. Give.
Endure. Love. Give. That is indeed the way this God operates. God endured while the children whom he believed ‘will not deal falsely’ (Isa. 63, 8) did just that. Loved all whom He met in His earthly ministry with compassion and humility, justice and truth; and loved them to the end. Loved and endured right through from the blood of birth to the bloody wounds of death; from the wood of the manger to the wood of the Cross. Gave Godself as Son and Saviour in atonement for our sins, our ‘merciful and faithful high priest’ (Heb. 2, 17).
Joseph the foster-parent cradles the Child in his arms and, in the circle of that embrace, tenderly murmurs words of God-given wisdom. ‘Endure. Love. Give’. Will we live this week in the insecurity of Herod’s hatred, engaging in power grabs, imagining slights, fuelling our hearts with fury? Or in the security of God’s vulnerable compassion, following in the way of the Incarnate Son, the image of the invisible God?
Reference Tool for Biblical Interpretation
W. Randolph Tate, Handbook for Biblical Interpretation: An Essential Guide to Methods, Terms, and Concepts. Second Edition. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2012. $39.99. pp. xiv + 528. ISBN: 978-0-8010-4862-3.
Tate’s Handbook for Biblical Interpretation (2nd ed.) provides a quick, go-to resource for a plethora of methods, terms, and concepts that are broadly related to biblical studies. The handbook is vey well laid out, including entries of varying sizes, followed by short bibliographic sections. The scope of the entires is extremely wide, including textual criticism, ideological criticism, post-colonial approaches, narrative and literary approaches, etc.—indeed, the scope is so wide that one wonders if numerous entries within it will be obsolete to any prospective user. Nevertheless, for students looking for a quick reference tool to easily facilitate reading technical essays and books in the field of biblical studies, this handbook will provide a very helpful starting place.
To give only one example of how the handbook may be used, if one were reading the work of Rudolph Bultmann and encountered his discussions on ‘apophthegms’, the handbook could prove quite useful for it provides a brief description of this accompanied with some modest discussion of the history of the idea. In this instance, an apophthegm is described as ‘an extremely terse, concise, and witty saying, similar to an
To the interested lay reader or student, this handbook provides helpful entries on foreign terms and technical concepts employed by scholars within the field of biblical studies. This handbook has much to offer even the biblical scholar who, although proficient in many areas, will need to turn to quick, lucid descriptions of key concepts and methods from tangential fields of study. In that sense, this handbook has already proven quite useful to the present reviewer.