Found in Translation

Isaiah 7:10-17; Matthew 1:18-25

December 22, 2013

“All translation is treason,” said 19^th-century Japanese scholar, Okakura Kakuzo, in The Book of Tea.

On the other hand, all we have is translation, for all language translates something beyond itself toward which it points, and, thus, mistranslation or misunderstanding is always possible in every moment, in every utterance.

I hope you are now confused.

Indeed, you should be confused because the entire story of Jesus is confusing and confounding from the very beginning. Look at the characters in the stories of Jesus’ birth. And, yes, I said “stories” – plural – because let’s be honest, Matthew and Luke do not tell the same story. Oh, and Mark and John don’t tell it at all. As to the characters: they are all confused. The magi, or “wisemen”? Following a star, they have got to be confused. Shepherds? “Sore afraid,” so the familiar King James translation tells us, and we know that fear breeds confusion. Mary? Luke focuses his telling of the tale on her, and she is most decidedly confused. Joseph? Definitely confused.

Take a step back from the characters in the stories to the words that we have. Written in a long-dead street language – Koine Greek – these stories themselves rest, in key parts, on translations into Greek from ancient Hebrew texts. In the case of our passage from Matthew this morning, some things are lost in translation. But, at the same time, some things are found.

We’ll begin with what’s lost. The first noun, in the English translation of our passage, is “birth.” In the Greek the word is genesis, and a variation on it is found in the opening verse of Matthew’s gospel where it is translated, properly, as genealogy. There is another Greek word, genessis, not used in Matthew, but more simply meaning birth. In other words, in our passage today, what we hear as a simple “birth story” might be more deeply understood as a story about how one generation – Mary and Joseph’s – gave rise to the next – that of Jesus.

Hearing that, we might also discern an invitation that concerns passing the story, the gospel, the good news on from one generation to the next, and thus hear beyond the story of the birth of a child into the story of a birth of a movement of spirit and grace in the world.

Matthew focuses his genesis story on Joseph, but again, something is lost and, perhaps, something found in the matter of translation.

Matthew calls Joseph a “righteous man,” and we might miss that if we read with only contemporary eyes, through which it might be difficult to see righteousness in abandoning a young woman. However, in first century Palestinian culture, the appropriate and expected reaction to Mary’s situation would be to stone her. Seen in that light, Joseph is, indeed full of faith and grace.

Matthew goes on to inform us that all this happens to fulfill the word of the prophet Isaiah. Here again, however, something is lost in translation. The text of Isaiah available to the author of Matthew was the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew. In the original, Isaiah’s words are more accurately translated as “young woman” than as “virgin,” as the Hebrew almah refers to a young woman of marriageable age.

What’s lost in translation, for us, is a simple Hallmark moment, a card or carol pointing to a moment out of time, but what’s found might just be a moment of deeper history: a story about the incredible faithfulness of two parents who defied their culture’s mores and expectations to raise a son who would come to be called Emmanuel – God with us.

What matters here is not the sex lives of Mary and Joseph, but, rather, the faith lives of Mary and Joseph. If “virgin birth” is important to you that’s fine, but if it’s a stumbling block let it go. More importantly, don’t let it be a point of division between people who are trying to follow the way of Jesus. It’s simply not fundamental to following Jesus in the world, to trusting that through the person of Jesus we are invited deep into the heart of God, and that through the good news revealed in Jesus we find that, indeed, God is with us.

After all, that is what the angel says to Joseph: through the birth of this child whom you shall call Immanuel, you will find that, truly, God is with you. This is the moment of the great story that elicits pure wonder from us: the wonder that God should choose to be with us – each of us, all of us. The good news revealed most decisively round the manger: God is with the whole of humanity – whether or not we perceive it or acknowledge. The world belongs to God: the earth and all its peoples.

Given that, the deeper question this text insists upon is this: what kind of God does Jesus reveal?

That’s what we find in translation, because that’s what Jesus does for us. Jesus translates the unspeakably other Yahweh into terms we can grasp: prince of peace, wonderful counselor, light of the world, bread of life.

Peace. Good counsel. Light. Bread. These we can understand. This is an everyday language we can speak. We know that a broken and violent world longs for peace. We understand that our own broken lives need good counsel. We can see clearly that in darkness we need light. We feel the common hunger for bread.

We often lose literal meanings in translation, but we can find the deeper trust, obedience, and faithfulness of Mary and Joseph. In finding that, we may discover also that the path they followed can lead us deeper into the heart of God.

That path opens to us again as we gather close by a manger to welcome again the one whose presence in our world will translate the hopes and fears of all the years into a common hymn of praise. Amen.