If Jesus were born sometime in the wee hours of Christmas morning in South Korea, by the time everyone woke up with their New Year’s hangovers, he’d be two years-old. This is due to one of the three ways Koreans use to determine someone’s age. In one traditional method, you are born age one, and an additional year is added every New Year, regardless of your actual date of birth. Using this method, you are older than you think, though I doubt I can sell this to the Social Security Administration.
It can be quite confusing, and Korean culture has yet another traditional method, as well as sometimes determining age the way we do. They are working to adopt the single standard method used in much of the rest of the world, born zero years old and one year added on each birthday. Nothing wrong with tradition, even tradition that doesn’t fit our logic, but we live in an inter-connected world, with people and goods flowing across cultures and borders, and it sometimes helps to have shared standards. Just don’t ask an Englishman whether he wants a liter of ale…
That’s a pint, thanks, mate…
Of course, the historic Jesus likely wasn’t born at the crack of A.D., Anno Domini being Latin for Year of the Lord. In fact, scholars believe he was born several years earlier, somewhere around the spring of 4 B.C., before Christ not in Latin, or these days B.C.E., before the Common Era, recognizing as we do that there are folks in the world who do not consider the world to have changed with the birth of Jesus, though apparently we all must speak English. Our method of counting is the global standard only because European Christians were effective colonizers, efficient and brutal, the heirs to the violent and rapacious Roman Empire.
Jesus would be amazed to know that the entire world uses his traditional but wrong date of birth as a reference point. While many Christians view him as someone who fundamentally changed reality, someone who permanently altered the relationship between humankind and its Creator, it is pretty clear that Jesus understood himself as being in continuity with the Israelite religious tradition, the heirs to God’s covenant with Abraham through Jacob, also named Israel. Jesus was a religious reformer in the same way Martin Luther would be a reformer in the Christian tradition, and would have preferred that our reference point be the Day of the Lord, the divine re-ordering of earthly life along the lines of God’s will, which may or may not have happened already, depending on who you ask.
It is only after the Jewish War and the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., Common Era, that the Way of Jesus becomes a whole new thing constructed at the intersection of Israelite belief and the Hellenic culture of the eastern Roman Empire, while at the same time Rabbinic Judaism is being constructed, presumably by the successors to the Pharisees.
Humans are both cause and effect, constructors of meaning, and sometimes wrecking balls, and here we are a week away from the start of the year on the secular calendar and a month into the year based on the traditional Christian liturgical calendar, and yet A.D., the Anno Domini -slash- Common Era seemingly begins with the birth of a baby in Bethlehem, a refugee fleeing authoritarian violence in Matthew, unsheltered and displaced in Luke, and in every Christian understanding, the savior of the world.
Maybe the mistake here isn’t where we count from, our age or epoch, Gregorian calendar or Julian or the Anno Mundi of the Rabbinic tradition or the Anno Hegirae of Islam. Maybe the mistake is taking any of these systems, any of these markers, too seriously.
Maybe the Day of the Lord, didn’t happen or not happen. Maybe it is always happening.
There is something to be said for the idea that the Kingdom of God, whatever we choose to label it, is always breaking into the world. The Celts played at the thin spaces where the holy and mundane were close together. Maybe every space is thin, and it is only us that are too thick to notice.
Maybe God is not a noun, a thing, but is a verb, for Yahweh, rightly read, means “I AM BECOMING.”
And while Jesus, the man in history who seemed a walking thin space, was born and was executed on actual days, maybe Christ is not something that happened, but is something that is happening always. Maybe the authors of the Gospel traditionally attributed to John nailed it when they understood the Word of God to have always been, power and movement, in the beginning…
Maybe God’s love that spills out of the story of a pregnant unmarried teen, of angels and shepherds, of a kind fiance and an understanding innkeeper, of Persian astrologers and an evil king, of a baby, a manger full of miracle, maybe all that divine love is with us still, this night, and every night.
And while some can see only the dark, we can choose to follow a star, to turn towards Bethlehem, to believe that God is, indeed, with us.
For lo, a child is born this night, in Elmira and in Ukraine, in Palestine and in Zimbabwe, and that child will be God with us, living love. May we love her, protect him, and celebrate them, this night and always.
Amen.