The supper, death and resurrection of the Lord are the nuclear events of our faith, and we take 50 days to solemnize them in our cycle of worship. Only the first Christian Pentecost rivals them. Yet every Mass all year long commemorates such staggering, stunning events. The narrations of them constitute the most ancient parts of the four accepted Gospels, which were written down piecemeal in final form only after most or all of the first century had passed. Oddly, the infancy narratives about Bethlehem came last of all.
What are these Gospels? One thing is certain: they are not histories or newspaper accounts of current events. To misuse them as such is to frustrate the purpose of the writers and their many collaborators, the eye witnesses and the ministers of the word, as Luke calls them. Their singular purpose was to bring to the listener or reader the faith of those writing the Gospel, or good news, “godspell” in old English. The writers knew they had to present credible testimony, so they did not intentionally include factual errors even if some crept in, such as whether Jesus gave his famous sermon on a mount (Matthew, the most Jewish of the evangelists, who wanted Jesus to be seen as the new Moses, who received the Law on Sinai) or on a plain (Luke, a gentile Christian who did not share Matthew’s Jewish concern). The final editors had no problem.
Many other, unaccepted gospels were written, most after the canonical four. Some had florid and pietistic features, such as the one that characterizes the child Jesus making mud pies and miraculously turning them into birds that flew away. Or else they had the child Jesus strike down dead playmates who annoyed him. Other apocryphal gospels were rejected because they introduced Gnosticism, an error of the early centuries which held that only an elect few were given the secret “gnosis,” Greek for knowledge of divine mysteries, while the uninitiated were left in the dark. These also-rans, which today can be found in any library, are sometimes used by folks like Dan Brown and his “The DaVinci Code.” They are the gospels of Thomas, of Philip, of James, of the Twelve Apostles, or of the Hebrews, and many more.
Only reluctantly did the four evangelists and their authorship committees write anything. Far better testimony was given by living people who could be questioned and interviewed. You can’t cross-examine a text. But as the people who personally knew Jesus died off, or else were martyred, and as Jesus did not return as soon as the early community expected, they decided to write authoritatively for whatever generations of believers would come. The Christian Scriptures are filled with references to what the first and second generation Christians expected about the parousia, or the second coming of Christ: it was supposed to be imminent. So why write anything if the world was about to end in triumph as Jesus returned in glory to reward those who stayed faithful during the Roman persecutions?
Only after the early Christians realized their schedules and calendars were at variance with the Lord’s did they see the need to write Scriptures for the benefit of the unborn. They realized that whatever they had seen and heard in their lifetimes was not meant to die with them. They had children and, too, a sense of the future, lucky for us. That is why the Scriptures are so important. They link us to the earliest church, the community invited by the Lord to accompany him on his mission. His mission was the preaching of the Kingdom. There is no other subject about which the Gospels quote Jesus as speaking about more than the Kingdom of God. Parables and even miracles were meant to be in service to this subject. It must have been important to him. So it must be to us, too. Like him, we tell a cynical world that God rules, not money, not political power, not the Roman or any other empire, as the early martyrs testified. In Greek, the word “martyr” originally means a witness who testifies, not someone who dies for a cause.
Do we resist this mission because we hesitate to mix religion and politics? Do we arbitrarily decide that our Christian faith is about spiritual things, which are supposed to be superior to secular things?
Do we pretend that the Jesus who was crucified as a public enemy by the Romans shied away from controversy? Perhaps now we understand why we hear popes and bishops teaching about such “non-religious” subjects as the ravishing of the environment, global warming, unjust wars, the economic strangling of impoverished nations, racism, sexism, abortion and many more controversies. In God’s Kingdom, the King sees these as unfair to his subjects, usually the poorest. He wants these stopped.
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