Conceived

Passage: Lord's Day 14

One of my favorite movies is The Princess Bride, featuring the astounding cast of Peter Falk, (a very young) Fred Savage, (then unknown) Cary Elwes, Robin Wright, Mandy Patinkin, Billy Crystal, and the late, great Andre the Giant. The film is a story within a story. A young boy is home sick, and his grandpa comes to entertain him for the day. He shows up with a book (“What’s that, Grandpa?” “When I was a boy, television was called ‘books’!”). Grandpa begins reading the story. But no sooner has he launched in than his precocious audience of one interjects. The narrative of the story, brought to life on screen, is regularly interrupted by the skeptical boy’s questions. At a certain point the Grandpa says, “Well, time for a break. You’re obviously more interested in answers than listening to the story.”

There are numerous points at which skeptics interrupt the Gospel story. They cut off the narrator saying, “That couldn’t have happened; Jesus couldn’t have said that; those events couldn’t possibly have happened in that sequence.” The interruptions start with the first chapter of three of the Gospels (Matthew, Luke and John), each of which make the claim that Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit of God, and born of a virgin woman. Critics of the Christian faith, and believers of a more rationalist bent, argue that this is a part of the story that’s simply unbelievable. The accounts of the divine conception and virgin birth must use metaphorical or symbolic language. The Gospel writers perhaps incorporated a mythic flourish to stress Jesus’ unique nature and divine calling. Anybody with half a brain knows that babies – even very special babies – aren’t born that way.

When you filter the facts of the Gospel through a skeptic's lens, you miss the story. It’s exceedingly difficult to draw the line regarding what’s plausible and what isn’t. Western post-Enlightenment readers balk at the apparent breaches of the laws of science that the Gospel writers report. Any student of Jewish religion and history might disbelieve the claims Jesus (a widely accepted rabbi in his day) is said to have made about himself and the Law of God. Those familiar with the gender politics of the 1st century middle east would consider the reports of Jesus’ dealings with women preposterous, or at least exaggerated. You could analyze the Gospels to death (people do, and will continue to do so until the Second Coming). If you accommodated the objections of every critical camp you’d have nothing left. It all, at best, strains credibility.

Instead, you could take the story as a whole. You could accept that the Gospel writers are reporting what they heard and saw and pieced together from other eyewitness accounts. You could allow, for the moment, that the whole story is miraculous. You could remember that this is, indeed, the point. The Gospel is the story of the Creator and Ruler of the Universe taking on human flesh. Choosing birth and infancy; choosing the same “growing up” process; choosing the same aches, pains and vulnerabilities we experience as the means by which he reestablished intimacy with us. It’s the story of him standing in and taking the punishment we deserve: utter alienation from God; physical and spiritual death. Him rising from the grave, and returning to heaven to be our human mediator there. The divine conception of Jesus is just one of the events in his story of our perfect redemption. At every turn we have to decide: Will I let the details turn me off, or will I allow the story to transform my life? The first detail of Jesus’ story is a detail so essential that the Gospel writers unapologetically present it with all the rest. If you’re going to live with any part of the story, you have to live with this part too.