Sermon for the Octave Day of Christmas
“But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.”
I love this passage from St. Luke’s gospel. Not just at Christmas but as a maxim for the life of the Church, year in and year out. And how wonderful that it is heard, year in and year out, on New Year’s Day, at the ending of one civil year and the beginning of another! How perplexing though that what is kept and pondered in the heart of Mary is connected with what must seem to be a most arcane and disturbing event, the circumcision of Christ.
The rite is associated with what it means to be Jewish. In the context of the Gospel, it is intended to be understood in terms of Christ’s submission to the Law, the Torah, in its particular forms. An allegiance and loyalty to what is transcendent and utterly beyond the phenomenal world is signaled in the flesh, in what is simply most, well, there is no getting around it, most male. Intriguingly, in more modern times, until very recently, the medical profession, especially in North America, tried to provide medical reasons for the practice.
This misses the point historically and religiously from the standpoint of ancient Israel and contributes very little to the metaphorical transformation that circumcision undergoes via the New Testament, especially through Paul. The circumcision of the heart, he argues, is what is necessary for our true commitment to God, not simply some questionable surgical procedure, about which there continues to be debate within and without Judaism, a debate which is only heightened by the disturbing and hideous matter of female genital mutilation in Arabic countries closely associated with the aspects of African tribalism. There is simply no getting around these things in the contemporary culture. There is, instead, the need to think through them and beyond them but in a way that does complete justice to the foundational principles of Christianity and Judaism and Islam.
