Word: godly
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...them. The first angel's language, some note, was less biblical than ... imperial. Brown called it "a christology phrased in a language that echoes Roman imperial propaganda." Recent scholars have said it is a near parody of one of the Emperor's titles at the time: "Son of God, Lord, Savior of the World, and the One Who Has Brought Peace on Earth...
...left-leaning interpreters doubt it. They claim that as Luke's Nativity went on, it became more openly critical of the Roman system and supportive of the struggles of its poorer Palestinian subjects. Mary's Magnificat, for instance, reprises some of the more radical sentiments of the Hebrew Bible: "[God] hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree/ He hath filled the hungry with good things;/ and the rich he hath sent away empty...
Exegetes like Eden Theological Seminary's Patterson think the angel's birth announcement embodies the hope that Jesus' coming kingdom will turn political as well as religious worlds upside down. "Luke can't be saying anything other than 'You think you have a son of God in Augustus?'" he says. "'You think you have a savior in the Emperor? It's all foolishness. If you want to know the peace of God, not the Pax Romana, you have to look somewhere else.'" Since the '60s, such readings have inspired Christian social activists from civil rights preachers to Catholic liberation theologians...
...message than in celebrating it, less concerned about parsing Luke's sentiments than in singing them. The beauty of Christmas carols is that they can retrieve the drama that the eye may quickly skip over on the page. Luke's description of "a multitude of the heavenly host praising God" is certainly vivid. But does it truly express--the way, perhaps, the single word glory, extended in five-part harmony over four delirious musical measures in Angels We Have Heard on High can--the awesome irruption of heaven's fearful and beautiful phalanxes into our modest reality? As both Matthew...
...someone called Joseph a recipient of prophetic dreams would evoke an earlier dreamer of the same name: the Joseph whose sleeping visions of fat and lean cows in the Book of Genesis helped pull his people into Egypt and indirectly to their destiny at Mount Sinai as recipients of God's covenant laws. Matthew's Joseph too will soon move to Egypt, fleeing there to save the child who, according to Matthew, will both continue and replace God's compact with the faithful...