What Part of My Life is My Own?

     Like Jim Kushiner, these last few days I've been thinking about the meaning of the Feast of the Circumcision, which is what it was called in the Catholic Church when I was a boy; now it is the solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, though the Gospel reading is the same.  It's common wisdom that Luke wrote his Gospel to appeal specifically to the Gentiles, he being a Gentile himself accompanying Saint Paul on several of his missionary ventures.  I don't doubt that common wisdom, but only note that if that was Luke's purpose, he could hardly have done anything more likely to rouse a wry look than to mention the circumcision of Jesus.  Of course, it was well known everywhere in the Mediterranean world that Jews were circumcised (nor were they the only people who practiced it).  That naturally provided Gentiles with an excuse for gymnasium jokes at the Jews' expense.  So the Jewish boys in the days of the Seleucid kings, we're told in 1 Maccabees, made themselves little sheaths of sheepskin to hide their double nakedness when they were exercising.  But the Lord never has favored man's desire to be independent of Him by being Just Like Everybody Else, and raised up Judah the Hammer to free the Jews from their Greek overlords and their very modern program of cultural homogenization -- rendering the Jews subject to Roman overlords in the process, but that is another story.

     But I've been muddling about in my ABC's of Hebrew, and I've noticed something surprising.  In Greek, the words for "circumcised" and "uncircumcised" have to do, as in Latin and in Latin's English derivatives, with the operation itself.  That allows Saint Paul, in a moment of exasperation, to make things so clear that even the Galatians would understand: "All those fellows preaching circumcision -- they ought to have the whole thing cut off!"  But it isn't the case in Hebrew.

     The words are not coordinate.  The word for "uncircumcised" is 'arel, not a negative at all.  It means "possessing an 'orlah," or foreskin.  Indeed, the ancient stem 'or gave rise to a group of words having to do with what is in front, exposed, laid bare: 'arah, "to be naked," 'orwah, nakedness or one's shameful part (or as I've heard in Appalachia, one's "pride"), 'or, "skin".  So the use of the word 'orlah in Genesis 17, when the Lord makes the covenant with Abraham, reminds us of the lost nakedness of Adam and Eve in the garden, and of their shame after they had sinned, and of the nakedness of Noah after the flood, with Ham taking a sneering pleasure in the old man's shame.  One of the meanings of the act, then, seems to be that we are not to be brazen before the Lord.  It is not only that our members of generation, by which we participate in his creation of mankind, are to be consecrated to him.  It is our acknowledgment that we, like Adam, are sinners, who need to be divested of our naked pride if we are to belong to the people of God.

     We must be mulim, or circumcised; the word has nothing to do with the everyday verb for cutting (though it may be anciently related to words like malaq and malah, to nip and to scrape; I have no idea, and the dictionary suggests no relation at all).  That requirement for membership in God's people is so fundamental -- it is not simply a funny cultural ritual, like wearing an earring -- that it gives rise to the word for father-in-law, namely somebody who performs a circumcision: on the groom-to-be, that is.  It also explains why David and the other great warriors cut off the skins of their fallen enemies: one way or the other, those who rose up in battle against God and His people would "belong" to them.  How much more powerful it is, then, when Jeremiah cries out to the people of Judah to take away the foreskins of their hearts: a strange metaphor, that of the foreskinned heart.  It combines at once the notion of a shameful, self-exposing, swaggering, foolish arrogance, and exclusion from God's people, even enmity against them, an embarrassing state of affairs which only God can perceive.

     So then Jesus is circumcised -- who never needed to be ashamed.  He submits, who was equal to God.  He joins the people He made His own.  He prepares Himself for the fight, a battle against evil and death which will strip him and lay him exposed to the mockery of the world.  He suffered in the flesh, even as a child, because men would insist on keeping intact the pride of their hearts.  In his battle to come, he would circumcise the many thousands of his enemies -- our brother and our mighty man of war, circumcising our hearts and making of us one people.  What part, then, of my life or my will or my mind or my body is my own?  This Feast answers the question.  Not one square inch.