Show Up in Your Life

The gospels of Matthew and Luke present two different stories of the birth of Jesus.

In Matthew, Herod was king of Judea. When magi—astrologers—arrived from Babylon claiming a king had been born among the Jews, Herod wasn’t exactly ecstatic. Warned in a dream not to return to Herod as they had been asked to do, the magi departed secretly. Herod then sent soldiers to slaughter all male infants up to the age of two in and around Bethlehem. Also tipped off by a dream, Joseph fled with Mary and the child to Egypt.

While Matthew has the family secretly fleeing across the Negev, Luke has them going to the temple for the traditional purification rituals forty days after the birth. Two well-known prophets utter words about the child’s future. Nothing is done in secret.

To heighten the public import of the birth of Jesus, angels appear to shepherds and instruct them to visit the babe. After their visit, the shepherds make “widely known” what they have experienced. In this gospel, no magi visit, no infants are slain, and there is no flight to Egypt. The family journey back to Nazareth, which according to Luke was their home.

Matthew and Luke relate mutually exclusive stories because they are intended not as biography but as proclamation. We are in a world of imagery, not history.

The imagery of the magi is drawn from the book of Daniel. The king of Babylon had a dream that none of his magi could interpret. But Daniel, a Jewish captive, was able to decipher its meaning. Matthew retells this story with a twist. Now it’s the Jewish priests and scribes who can’t read the signs of the times, whereas the Gentiles from Babylon can read them very well.

It’s important to bear in mind that, to Jews, Babylon was a hated land. It had been the location of their captivity 500 years earlier. To suggest that spiritual insight could come from such a source would be stunning to Matthew’s readers.

To intensify the effect of the message, Matthew next features Israel’s other traditionally hated enemy—Egypt. Here, too, Hebrews had been captives.

In the book of Genesis, a man named Jacob had twelve sons, one of whom was called Joseph. His father gave him a coat of many colors—a story that inspired Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical Joseph and His Technicolor Dream Coat. This Joseph dreamed dreams, which predicted that his father, mother, and brothers would someday bow down to him.

Joseph’s brothers were jealous of him, so they sold him to merchants, who took him to Egypt to become a slave. Once in Egypt, his ability to interpret dreams served him well. Before long he was in charge of Egypt’s affairs, second only to pharaoh himself. When a time of famine occurred, his dreams about his father, mother, and brothers were fulfilled as they came to Egypt to be nourished during the years of scarcity.

So in both Genesis and Matthew’s nativity story, we encounter two Josephs, both with fathers called Jacob, both of whom go to Egypt, and both of whom dream divinely inspired dreams.

The plot in Matthew’s storytelling thickens.

In time, the king of Egypt felt the Israelites were becoming too numerous. He saw them as a threat. So he decreed that all male babies should be killed at birth. One escaped, and he became Moses. He had a sister called Miriam, which is the Hebrew for Mary. Moses led the people out of Egypt and tried to take them into the land of Israel, but he failed to get all the way. His successor was Joshua, and Joshua succeeded in taking them into the country that became their homeland.

In Genesis and Exodus we have a Jacob, a Joseph, a Mary, and a Joshua, all of whom are in Egypt. And in Matthew we have a Jacob, a Joseph, a Mary . . . but what about a Joshua? Ah, is there no Joshua in Matthew’s story?

Not in the English translations we have. But Jesus is the Greek name for Joshua! So in fact we have a Jacob, a Joseph, a Mary, and a Joshua. But whereas the Egyptian king killed the Israelite babies in the Old Testament story, in Matthew it’s reversed. It’s the Jewish king who kills the little boys, and Egypt becomes the land of safety. So Herod and pharaoh have traded places, and the land of Israel and the land of Egypt have traded places. Gentiles sought to kill Israel’s progeny, but now they protect Jesus.

What’s Matthew’s point?

Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. Distrustful of Gentiles, Jewish Christians started to pull away from Gentiles who had become Christians. Matthew writes to Jewish Christians to counter this.

Matthew wants his readers to see that imagining themselves to have been specially chosen—that God had spoken to them and not to others—was mistaken. He wants them to realize that the “still, small voice” of the divine is audible to any who pay attention.

Matthew used an accepted literary device of that era—imagery intended to convey not facts but truth. But in time the story became literalized as if it had actually happened, and its message was lost.

By literalizing the nativity stories, Christendom missed their main point. We turned Jesus into an exclusive figure, instead of seeing him as the embodiment of the divine Presence of which all humans are the bearers. His experience of the Presence of God in his life is an experience open to each of us—even hated Babylonians and Egyptians.

Luke’s story also conveys a message. It’s encoded in the imagery of the shepherds, who visit the baby Jesus in the vicinity of Bethlehem, the city of David, Israel’s first bona fide king.

Kings were traditionally the firstborn son. But David was far from the first to be born in his family, and hence had no claim to a throne. He was a shepherd on the hillsides of Bethlehem. Yet it is the least likely to be chosen who becomes king.

So it is with Jesus. One who is “of no reputation,” as Saint Paul describes him in his New Testament letter to the Philippians, becomes the one who shows us that the kingdom of God can be experienced in the now, and not just in the future. He brings us salvation—a word that simply means to “make us whole”—by introducing us to awareness of the divine Presence at our center.

Luke is saying that God’s Presence arises in the least likely places, in the most ordinary lives. When we become open to an experience of this Presence, we “show up” in life—like David, and like Jesus. We become people whose lives are transformed, and who therefore have a transformative effect on the world around us.

The book The Presence Process, by Michael Brown, is all about how you can show up in your life through awakening to the Presence within you—and, by so doing, make a difference in the lives of others.