Adult Ed - Luke Birth Narratives

tl;dr: From an Adult Education hour, some notes on the kingship language of the Luke birth narratives.

For the first week of Advent, I led our church's Adult Education hour with a look at the birth narratives in Luke. Below are an adapted version of my notes.

Credit

I'll start by noting that I am adapting most of this from a course with Pete Enns in the Bible for Normal People network called A Manger Misunderstanding. It's only available with the paid subscription called The Society of Normal People. The network's name comes from that it really tries to be accessible to anybody. Pete and the others in the Bible for Normal People are good at getting serious scholarship across in very friendly ways. That's my plug for them to acknowledge that that's where most of the content for today came from.

I basically listened through his presentation that was about an hour plus Q&A time and tried to shrink that into about half an hour, put it into my own voice a little more, added a little room for it to be more interactive, and added a couple of other tangents.

Comparing the Gospels

First, Pete points out some of the differences between the Gospels. Matthew and Luke are the two Gospels that have birth narratives in them.

Matthew primarily presents Jesus as the new Moses. There's the story of Herod massacring the innocent children, mirroring what Pharoah did around the birth of Moses. There's a story of escaping Egypt. That emphasis continues a lot throughout Matthew, commonly accepted as the most Jewish Gospel, where Jesus is largely presented as a new revelation or new law or new wisdom (as I heard Diana Butler Bass say recently, not just a wisdom teacher but wisdom itself) within the Jewish story. All the Gospel writers are Jewish, writing about a Jewish Jesus, but Matthew leans in the hardest with the parallels to other figures from Jewish history.

Luke on the other hand puts more emphasis on Jesus as the true Caesar. The birth narratives, and the Gospel as a whole, are a lot more concerned with how this Jesus movement interacts within the wider Roman Empire political moment. Jesus is a new king with a completely different kind of kingdom compared to Caesar. It is Luke that we are focusing on today, so we'll see a lot of this theme of kingship, which was teased nicely for me last week with some Christ the King Sunday comments.

Narrative 1: Gabriel's Announcement to Mary

Here's the first text, from Luke 1:30-35 (NRSVUE):

30 The angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. 31 And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. 33 He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end." 34 Mary said to the angel, "How can this be, since I am a virgin?" 35 The angel said to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.

I had someone else read it out loud once. Then I'm going to give you about a couple minutes to read it again and think about it. Sometimes we need to read slowly to really notice things, especially if you are familiar with the story. I want you to think about what phrases stand out to you. Maybe you've never noticed them before. Maybe you have heard a lot about them in the past. What do you think they mean? What do you think that Luke is trying to get across by including them? And I want to give enough time for my fellow introverts to really have a chance to think about it before you start sharing with the rest of the group, so after it was read out once, I waited a couple minutes of silence.

I then took any comments about what stood out to them. Interestingly, the answers were mostly not what Pete Enns drew attention to. Instead, the main theme that emerged was the one of fear, with Mary being told not to be afraid, and even the language of "overshadow" which is not the most friendly term to Mary's agency (at least in this English translation). Even though that is not what Pete was looking at, I did think it was an interesting complementary theme, because the instinct with all this king language is to assume a dominating powerful God. Luke goes on to subvert that assumption, but there's a good start by pointing out that the real God is not one who needs to be feared in that way.

Pete points out 6 phrases, with 2 slight variations on 3 themes:

• "Son of the Most High" and "Son of God." We've got one theme of the connection between Jesus and God.
• "Throne of his ancestor David" and "House of Jacob." We've got a connection to one of the patriarchs and the most famous king, anchored in the Jewish story.
• "Forever" and "no end." We've got the idea that this is a permanent promise.

For some of you, this might already be confusing, so I'm going to backtrack and give a really big overview of the history of Israel up to this point.

Most of the history of the Israelites in the Bible they are subject to some powerful Empire or another – Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, and now Rome.

There are really two exceptions to this. The big one is after Egypt, when they have returned to the land and have political sovereignty. This peaks with David and his son Solomon, then declines from there until they are right back until control of another Empire. David and Solomon is the golden era. This is what they are most nostalgic for. A lot of their prophetic literature is about restoring that kind of Golden Age when they had sovereignty, free of imperial oppression, with their own king again.

The other period they were free from imperial rule was a brief but more recent one. They successfully got free of the Greek Empire under the leadership of the Maccabees, but it didn't last long. Some of this period is in those books that are in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles but not in Protestant ones. When some of the prophetic literature of this time is saying that they will have a king of Israel again forever, I imagine that they are thinking of that recent glimpse of freedom that didn't last long.

That ties in the "forever" and the King David connections. What about the other one, the connection to God? Pete shows some parallels in other texts where kings are called things like "Son of God" and told that their reign will be forever. This text in Luke is echoing a lot of that language.

Of course, over Christian history, the language of "son of God" also came to mean that Jesus is a part of God, one of the three persons of the Trinity. There are other texts that make a stronger case for that, but that's not the main point here.

That kind of language here was simply something you would say to identify a king, and the rest of this text is very clearly aligning Jesus as a king a lot like David, a political leader over a free Israel, forever.

Narrative 2: Prophecy of Zechariah

The next story is the prophecy to Zechariah, from Luke 1:67-79:

67 Then his father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied: 68 "Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them. 69 He has raised up a mighty savior for us in the house of his child David, 70 as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, 71 that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us. 72 Thus he has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors and has remembered his holy covenant, 73 the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham, to grant us 74 that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve him without fear, 75 in holiness and righteousness in his presence all our days. 76 And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, 77 to give his people knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of their sins. 78 Because of the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, 79 to shine upon those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace."

I again had it read out loud once.

My questions for this one: First, what phrases are naming a problem? What phrases are naming a solution that God is going to do about it?

Here's how Pete summarized it:

• The problem: their enemies rule over them, including wielding the power of death against them.
• What God is going to do about it: looking favorably on them and remembering them to bring salvation, mercy, forgiveness, light, and peace.

Like "Son of God," a lot of the language here has come to mean different things over centuries of Christian history. A lot of these things that God is doing often gets used now as salvation from sin so we can all go to Heaven when we die. Like "Son of God," I'm not refuting all those ideas also being true and there are other texts that support them better. In this text, though, remember the other half that Pete is identifying: the problem here is that Israel has enemies. They are under Roman occupation. These solutions wouldn't help with that problem if we were only talking about what God is going to do after we've died. Zechariah's prophecy, as relayed by Luke, suggests that Jesus will free them from that occupation. Even the forgiveness of sins language in that context would be understand as a communal forgiveness, cleansing the community so that they are holy when God does send the promised king. Those ideas go together. It isn't some separate "and also you can go to Heaven."

So the point again: Jesus is the real king, but more than the first text, we start to see how this means there is a conflict with Rome. If Jesus is the king, Caesar is not. So far, this is becoming more threatening to Rome but it is still completely normal for Jewish writing.

Narrative 3: Angels and Shepherds

This is the text that is probably the most familiar to you, because it is often in Christmas pageants, and a lot of it are themes that we've already touched on. But here it is again, from Luke 2:8-15:

8 Now in that same region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. 9 Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10 But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid, for see, I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: 11 to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. 12 This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger." 13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, 14 "Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!" 15 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us."

There are a couple of interesting things here:

For one, there is ambiguity in "all the people" and "among those whom he favors." Who does that mean? Does that mean all the Jewish people, or the entire world, or Christians that don't exist yet, or some other subset of humanity? Pete suggests that it is intentionally ambiguous so that it would feel familiar to Jewish readers thinking that is obviously about them. But it is ambiguous enough that it also teases that over the course of the Gospel, as well as Acts written by Luke as well, we will see a lot more opening up that it is really means everybody. Luke is starting from Jewish expectations and Jewish prophetic language of kingship but pushing them in a more inclusive direction.

Another interesting phrase here is "Heavenly host" which is militaristic language, but then they proclaim peace. I think this leads into what Pete brings up next, the Priene Calendar Inscription:

Providence [a god], which has ordered all things and is deeply interested in our life, has set in most perfect order by giving us Augustus, whom she filled with virtue that he might benefit humankind, sending him as a SAVIOR both for us and for our descendants, that he might end war and arrange all things. He, Caesar, by his appearance (excelled even our anticipations), surpassing all previous benefactors, and not even leaving to posterity any hope of surpassing what he has done. The birthday of the god Augustus was the beginning of the good tidings for the world that came by reason of him which Asia resolved in Smyrna.

This is from not long before Jesus' birth, about 9 BCE. You might recognize some of this language from the other text that we just read. It has a lot of the same things to say, but it is about Caesar being a saviour sent by a god, who would bring peace and good tidings for the world, for all time. It doesn't say it in here, but the audience knows that how Caesar does that is through conquest, through bringing everything under the control of the Empire.

This text with the Shepherds then, is also building on the conflict between Jesus and Caesar. Rome says these things about Caesar, but Jewish people know that Caesar's definition of peace is oppression for them. On the other hand, Luke says it is actually true about Jesus. Luke is saying that Jesus is the true ruler of everything, not Caesar. In addition to the conflict with Caesar, we're starting to see here that it might apply to more than just Israel. Caesar didn't rule over just Israel; he ruled over the entire known world.

Narrative 4: Anna and Simeon

This one I ended up having to cut for time, but I'll still share my notes here. The text is from Luke 2:25-33, 36-38:

25 Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; this man was righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit rested on him. 26 It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Messiah. 27 Guided by the Spirit, Simeon came into the temple, and when the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him what was customary under the law, 28 Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying, 29 "Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word, 30 for my eyes have seen your salvation, 31 which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, 32 a light for revelation to the gentiles and for glory to your people Israel." 33 And the child's father and mother were amazed at what was being said about him. 36 There was also a prophet, Anna the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was of a great age, having lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, 37 then as a widow to the age of eighty-four. She never left the temple but worshiped there with fasting and prayer night and day. 38 At that moment she came and began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.

Some key things that Pete points out:

One is this language of "consolation of Israel." It is used previously in the Bible, like so many of the other phrases we've been looking. In this case, it means the end of the Babylonian Exile and the return to the land of Israel. That seems like a generic comforting phrase to us, but in that context it would bring to mind some of their other older texts written in a previous context of returning from an exile into Empire, and they are now reading it while under the control of another Empire.

Pete cites NT Wright here. Wright says that when Israel went into exile, they lost 3 major things: their land, their temple, and their king. When they came back, they got the land back, then they built a new temple, but a few hundred years later and they still have not gotten their king back. That's the messianic hope, to bring back the good old days of having a king again. They haven't really had the full consolation – the full return from Exile - until that king is in place.

The word "Messiah" is also used here. That simply means "anointed one." The Greek equivalent is Christ. It's not a unique term for Jesus, though. It was used for people who were anointed for many reasons, including most notably kings.

Then there is a bit in here that is like the "all people" ambiguity that was in the previous text. See that bit about the light for revelation to the Gentiles? That seems to be echoing Isaiah 49:6, which is talking about the return from Exile. Pete argues that in Isaiah this probably meant that there will be a light to find the missing Israelites who had dispersed into the other nations as part of the Exile, not saying the other nations were to be saved as well. Here, Luke's quoting it is still ambiguous enough that it could go either way. But Luke quotes it again later in Acts and there he explicitly uses it to mean that Gentiles are included in the salvation. But as of this point in the birth narrative, it seems like more intentional ambiguity, where Jewish readers would think it means one thing but then over the course of the story it expands into a much bigger thing.

Anna's prophecy is similar but with the language of redemption instead of consolation. That also invokes the language of coming back from Exile in some older texts. The Exile would finally come to a true end with a real king and Luke is arguing that Jesus is that true king, not Caesar.

Luke's Big Point

The big point here is that up to this point of Luke's telling, and remember this is just the introduction to the Gospel, all of this makes complete sense within a first century Jewish framework. There's a lot of invoking that Jesus is the true king, not Caesar. Jesus will finally free them from Exile, from imperial domination, by reestablishing sovereignty with their own king chosen by God. There are a couple little hints that a big twist is coming, with some of the language about all people and intentionally invoking language used for Caesar who ruled over the whole known world, not just the Jewish part of it. Otherwise, this is all expected for first century Judaism.

I want to go back to a different Hebrew Bible story. In 1 Samuel 8, it is the people who demand a king from God, via the prophet Samuel. God says, no, trust me, you really don't want a king. Kings will tax you heavily and make your children slaves to make themselves richer. It won't be good for you, and you'll end up crying out to God for liberation. The people say they want a king anyway, because they want to be like other nations who have kings that go out and fight battles against other nations. They want that imperial framework of somebody ruling over them and trying to expand territory by exploiting others. God gives in and they get their kings. Guess what? The way of kings and empires didn't work out well for them, and most of the rest of the Hebrew Bible is the people calling out for liberation from one of the other Empires that took over. But even then, a lot of that calling out for help was still in the language of wanting another king.

What I think is fascinating here when we get to the Jesus part of the story is that God essentially says "fine, here's your new king. All that prophetic language, all that hope about having somebody to free them from Roman occupation, I'm about to fulfill it... But I'm going to do it in a completely different way than you expect."

This is why you get some who are frustrated with Jesus in later stories, like Judas Iscariot giving up and betraying him, because Jesus is walking around talking about loving Roman enemies instead of starting the war to free Israel from them. They have a lot of expectations for this Messianic king who would save them, and for the most part in these birth narrative texts, Luke is leaning into those expectations. One member of our congregation is a novel writer, and she pointed out in our conversation that it's a common tactic to start a story by establishing something relatable to the audience. Once they've entered into the story, then you can start to push them in new directions.

But there are big twists coming in the story:

Jesus has no interest in the political Jerusalem throne. A couple chapters later in Luke 4, Luke even has Satan offering the thrones of the world to Jesus and Jesus rejects it. A lot of readers at that time would probably be confused, because we just had all this build up about how Jesus is supposed to be the King of Israel. Now Luke says that the way that the world does kingship is actually Satan and Jesus is doing something completely different. Right after that, Jesus says he is there to proclaim good news to the poor, freedom for prisoners, sight for the blind. That's not the stuff kings like Caesar and Herod do.

That big twist continues throughout the story. Jesus' version of kingship includes crucifixion. That's death at the hands of the evil Empire that he is supposed to be overthrowing. Luke has been telling us repeatedly in these birth narratives that Caesar is not the true king, that Jesus is. And then an agent of Caesar kills Jesus, in the most brutal and shameful way possible. By the normal ways of thinking about the world, that would definitely suggest that Caesar won this battle of kings; he's the one with all the armies and still alive. But then there's resurrection, which says that even though Caesar can wield death, God has the final word.

Luke intentionally builds up that Jesus is the promised king, the real Caesar. But then he completely flips what that means. Jesus' kingship is an upside-down kind of power, one that sacrifices for others and calls everyone, even enemies, into a way of love.

Should We Use the Language of King?

There was something said last week for Christ the King Sunday about how a lot of Mennonites don't like using the language of Jesus as king because the language of king implies a lot of that power ruling over and exploiting others that we reject specifically because Jesus shows us a better way of being. So, I'm going to open this up again to all of you: what do we do with all this king language in 2025 Canada, in a very different context? Do we try to avoid it completely? Do we fully embrace it? Something in between?

In a lot of contexts, I tend to agree that it might introduce more problems than it solves. If there isn't time to unpack the ways that Jesus completely subverts the idea of kingship the way that I just have, or that Luke does over the course of the Gospel, it is probably better to not use the language. You just end up with a lot of people making bad assumptions that Jesus is the kind of violent dominating ruler like so many human leaders past and present. Those kinds of assumptions based on the language used without any extra context is part of how you can get Christian nationalism. One thing I've started doing a lot more is replacing "the Kingdom of God" with "the Way of Jesus." It's simple and clear what it means, and the early church did use some similar language.

But my biggest counterpoint is the other side of that coin. That language is there, in the Bible a lot as well as in some hymns and other Christian works over the centuries. If we don't at least occasionally remind ourselves that this is a subversion of the idea of kingship, not an embracing of that idea, that's how we end up with things like Christian nationalism who can't see the conflict between those two words. I do think we need to be able to say, "no kings but Jesus," meaning that we reject the ways of violent dominating empire because we have accepted the way of Jesus instead. If you've completely rejected the language entirely, there's no opportunity to do that subversion, to draw attention to that contrast, and that is a contrast that we really need to be able to name one way or another.