RMJ's post today is a (Long) Meditation For The Fourth Week Of Advent. Here's just a little of it from his section on the Luke narrative.
We hasten Mary's pregnancy the better to heighten the narrative tension
and prove the world a cruel and harsh place, inimical to the savior; and
ignore our role in making the world that way. It doesn't happen that
Mary is forced to a stable to give birth while animals look on, and it
doesn't happen that she is in labor even as Joseph tries in vain to find
a place to stay. We invented that part to make their plight worse than
even Luke says it is, to overlook the power of the government in
forcing the family on this journey, to overlook a system that makes Mary
and Joseph poor ("Carpenter" meant one step up from beggar, not a
journeyman tradesman with a union card. Jesus' father is no better off
than the fishermen he will recruit later; he recruits them because he's
one of them, he grew up as poor as they live.). We want the story to be
a bit crueler so we can tell ourselves we'd have taken better care of
them if we'd been there; but we don't now. Brueghel and Auden
are our corrective. An anonymous poet is our corrective. Luke sets up
the obstacles to our comfort; over the centuries we've done our best to
flatten them out.
Joseph appears for the first time in this narrative, and he has no role
in it except "husband." His role here is social: to make Mary and
Jesus legitimate. Mary still takes center stage; where she is silent in
Matthew's telling, she is the actor in Luke's. More reversals, because
the angels never speak to Joseph, but they go out to the hills where
the shepherds are awake (!) and sing to them.
The thing about shepherds is, they aren't the pale and idyllic figures of later Romantic literature (some 1800 years later!). They are outlaws, bikers, people on the fringe of a society that has a very large and broad fringe (imagine a funnel with a point at the top for the Emperor, a very attenuated reach up to the Emperor, and a very, very broad base out of all proportion to the peak. It's a system of patronage, where wealth concentrates at the top and trickles down to the bottom, a bottom where the majority live, and where very little wealth trickles down. On the far edge of that bottom, you find the shepherds.). They stink, and they steal. You can't brand sheep, and if a few more come home with you than you left with, that's to your benefit. They live outside town, they aren't welcome among polite company, they have their own rules of behavior and they scare most people, the way working class workers do to this day. If such a thing were known then, they would be migrant immigrant labor. This is who the angels sing to; this is who comes to see Mary's baby. The people we want doing our lawns, building our buildings, cleaning our offices; but never, ever crossing our border. . .
You should read the whole thing, I've read it twice so far.
"You should read the whole thing, I've read it twice so far."
ReplyDeleteA classic case of somebody with way too much time on their hands.
Oh, Simps, for someone like you who spends his time gossiping at Eschaton, rehashing stuff he's been rehashing for literally over a half a century, 3 minute pop songs and TV shows, saying what he heard said or read in some superannuated magazine or newspaper, suggesting to the other geezers at the Baby Blue Blog that they drive up the largely imaginary numbers on the online posting of his rehashed garage band recordings, rereading his copied ad copy of pop music "criticism," for you to be accusing me of having too much time on my hands because in service to understanding a rather complicated piece of writing that was published by someone else yesterday by doing what you certainly do with your own ad copy, read it over and over for years of having too much time on their hands is remarkably silly. Even silly for you. This might be the weakest you've come up with. Has BG forgotten to give you your Geritol?
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