Sunday Before Nativity 2008
In the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen.
Putting together a sermon on this particular reading from the Gospel was something of a challenge. The end part of this reading is pretty easy: "Now the birth of Jesus Christ was in this way...", the part which details the events of the Theotokos' being found with child, Joseph's vision, the birth in Bethlehem. But the first part is harder... it is a list of names. And yet, what a list of names it is... the line of the ancestors of the human body and soul of Jesus Christ, God the Son, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity.
We can draw several things from this recounting of names, especially when we consider that this is not the only list of the ancestors of Christ. St. Luke gives another list in his Gospel, and it is a different list. Both are the lineages of Joseph, a descendant of King David, but this one which we heard today reckons his line through David’s son Solomon while the one in Luke gives it through his son Nathan. This one states that Jacob was the father of Joseph, but Luke says that Joseph’s father was Heli.
The first thing we can draw from this is the answer to a question which I’m sure has occurred to many: These lists are the ancestors of Joseph, but Joseph had nothing to do with the generation of Christ. The Theotokos conceived Him without Joseph’s seed, yet the Bible and Tradition of the Church affirm that Christ is the Messiah of the line of David, Who will sit on the throne of David and rule in the age to come.
St, Theophylact of Ochrid in Bulgaria gives us the answer to this question, and this answer has to do with the fact that in the Judaism of that time Jewishness and Jewish family identity was reckoned through the father. The saint writes, “And yet, by giving the genealogy of Joseph, Matthew gave her [the Theotokos’] genealogy as well. For it was the law that a woman was not to be taken as wife by a man who was of a different tribe and who was not of her father’s lineage. (Numbers 36:8-9) This being the law, it is obvious that Joseph’s genealogy includes that of the Theotokos, for she was of the same tribe and lineage. If she were not, she could not have been betrothed to him.”
The Fathers make an important point also concerning the fact that the two lists give different fathers for Joseph: as stated before, Jacob is Joseph’s father in this Gospel, Heli in Luke, a situation raising a peculiar question. In his commentary on the genealogy in St. Luke’s Gospel, St, Theophylact writes: “In answer to this question, we say that Jacob and Heli were brothers of the same mother, but each had a different father. When Heli died childless, Jacob took Heli’s wife and begat a son from her. Thus it is said that Joseph was the son of Jacob by nature, but the son of Heli by law. Jacob begat Joseph physically and in actuality, and is therefore Joseph’s physical father, while Heli is the father of Joseph only according to the law. For the law commanded that if a man die childless, his wife should be joined to his brother, and the child that thus was born would be considered the child of the dead man, even though by nature he was the
child of the man who was living. Matthew records Joseph’s physical father, while Luke records his father according to the law, that is, Heli, so that together the Evangelists might show that the Lord was born for this very reason, to sanctify both
physical nature and the law.”
Now, what does it mean for us, that the incarnation of the Son of God has sanctified physical nature?
One of the things that it means for us is the refutation of a common idea that most people have and just haven’t thought about too closely. When most Christians think and speak about the afterlife and eternity, they say things like, “When we’re all in heaven...” But heaven is not our destination; it is only a way station. Our Symbol of Faith talks about heaven, but in relation to God, not humanity. Metropoitan Maximos of Pittsburg writes, “The resurrection of the dead is a miracle which will happen at the second coming of the Lord. According to the Creed, ‘I await the resurrection of the dead.’ This resurrection will be a new creation. However, our physical bodies as we know them now will be restored, in a spiritualized existence like that of the Lord after His Resurrection.” (*The Dogmatic Tradition of the Orthodox Church*)
Every Sunday in Matins we read one of eleven Gospel passages which recount the post-resurrection appearances of Christ. These are called the Eothina Gospels, and the sixth one in particular - from Luke - has very telling information for what we know about Christ’s post-Resurrection Body. We know that He could be touched by physical, material beings: when He appeared to His Apostles, “They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost. He said to them, ‘Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.’ And when He had said this, He showed them His hands and feet.” (Luke 24:37-40)
Here Christ is in His resurrected and glorified Body, the Apostles in unresurrected and unglorified bodies. In other words, in the bodies which we all share here and now. But the two could touch, could make contact with each other... even as each one of us does every time we partake of Christ’s Body and Blood in the Eucharist. These things show us something profound, that there is a real continuity and connection between physical nature, our bodies, our world, which is preserved through their transfiguration from the fallen to the unfallen state. We know that in His glorified Body Christ could eat: continuing in the same Gospel, Luke writes: “And while they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement, He asked them, ‘Do you have anything here to eat?’ They gave Him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it in their presence.” (vv. 41-43) With one other exception, humans don’t get much more physical than when they are
eating, and this very physical and material act of eating Christ did even with His resurrected and spiritulized Body.
Spiritualized does *not* mean non-physical!
If we indeed look to Christ’s raised Body as the example, the New Earth will be the very same matter, our bodies the very same bodies, that we have and know now, though perfected and sanctified as we do not know them now. We were created physical, material beings in a very physical place - the state of the Garden of Eden - and everything that humans and Eden were meant but failed to be will be realized in the New Earth.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found the thought of spending eternity as disembodied spirits - or even, perish the thought, becoming angels - to be not only insipid but downright depressing. But when we realize that on account of God’s taking on flesh and matter, which we will celebrate in a few days’ time, the New Earth will be the very matter and creation that we know now, though purified and sanctified as we do not know it now, when we consider that every good and positive thing we know and experience now with and in and through our bodies and the material world we will continue to experience in the state of perfection, in communion with God and with each other, what a blessed and empowering expectation that is, that our persons, bodies and souls, may be saved and deified. Amen.
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