Over the next month, I'll be offering thoughts on the Nativity set model, a large papercraft crèche that you can find and download here:
https://gumroad.com/l/ThkR
Advent Calendar Day 8: The Ox and Ass
The Ox and the Ass are staples of art and song, but if we
stick to the Biblical birth stories, we find them noticeably absent.
We could argue the chicken/egg thing with a lot of the
Nativity characters so far as whether their narrative presence was interpreted
symbolically, or if they were a part of the narrative BECAUSE they served a
symbolic purpose, but with these two barnstormers it’s clear: their presence is
entirely symbolic.
The ox and the ass (I know the cutout says “donkey”; that’s
a concession for any beleaguered Sunday School teachers who would otherwise
have to contend with the continual readings of rapscallious eight year-olds
eager for a language loophole) represent Jews and Gentiles, respectively. The Ox, a cloven-hoofed creature that chews
cud, is clean by the legal standards, a Jewish animal, good for eatin’ and
sacrificin’. The ass, with its equid
hoof, is not, and thus represents the Gentiles.
The push on the part of early Christians Peter and Paul to unexpectedly
promulgate Christianity outside the confines of Judaism was a HUGE deal for the
religion and for history (by permitting cultures to maintain their existing
cultural practices, the belief system became hyperdisseminatable).
So backdating that move symbolically to the time of Christ’s birth
allows for a later staple of the Christ narrative to find presence at its
beginning (there will be a couple of other examples of that exact same thing
with other characters)*.
In any case, this symbolic representation of these two
groups, worshipping baby Jesus in miniature, also gives us a very creative
interpretation of Isaiah 1:3. The Book
of Isaiah (part of the Old Testament/Tanakh) is viewed through a Christian lens
primarily as it relates to Messianic Christ via prophecy, but 1:3 (“The ox knows his owner, and the donkey his
master's crib, but Israel doesn't know me; my people don't comprehend")
isn’t prophetic in the least, it’s just a flowery gripe, UNLESS you assign
prophecy to it after the fact once the symbols (probably purloined from the
verse in the first place for art dating back as far as the 300s) are part of
the story. There’s a long tradition of
people of faith reinterpreting existing scripture to meet the spiritual needs
of their time and the changes that their world has necessitated, and the ox and
ass serve as a reminder not only of the embrace of cultural pluralism by the
early church but of how sacred texts are ever-evolving things, not in their
content but in how that content is perceived.
*In that tying-later-stuff-to-the-beginning
vein, I’m actually really bugged that there’s not a non-canonical infant gospel
in which baby Jesus spits a seed from whence grows the tree that will be used
to make the cross. Come on, Gnostics,
you really dropped the ball with that one.
Or maybe they didn’t. Does that
one exist? I hope so.
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