The Circumcision of the Lord

     A few years ago, the Roman Catholic Church decided to change the name of today's feast, from that of the Circumcision (described in the gospel reading for the day) to the solemnity of Mary, Mother of God.

     I'm not saying anything here about Catholics commemorating a day devoted to that miracle of God's grace that allowed a simple woman of Palestine to bear in her womb the incarnate Son of God.  We can hardly do better than to meditate, ceaselessly, upon the mystery of the Incarnation, and all that it implies for our understanding not only of human nature and the Church but even of the physical universe we inhabit.  I do wish that we did not have to obscure the old feast and its role (a role played also by Mary, as it happens, who herself marks the culmination of Hebrew faith in the Messiah to come) in joining together in the person of Christ both the old and the new covenants.

     All the ancient writers saw a connection between circumcision and baptism, and if we were but indifferent anthropologists with a healthy respect for a culture far removed from our own, we might see it too.  Consider the first commandment given to man in Eden: "Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it."  It is not, "Till these fields" or "Build that temple" or "Burn that incense."  It is, simply, that we should live and bring more of ourselves into the light; the love of man and wife is thus allowed its sublime and holy role in creation.

     But after the fall, when God calls Abraham to make of him a great nation, and to use that nation as the means of bringing salvation to the world, He requires His worshipers to mark themselves as belonging to Him.  Thus the command that males should be circumcised: in the very organ of reproduction, of begetting, the Hebrew male is maimed, so to speak, as a sign that his own existence and the existence of all those who might be begotten from his loins are gifts from God, who alone is the Begetter.  All life comes from God, and so the act that begets new life must be considered especially holy; it is absurd to hold that God can command what we do with coats or gold or oxen, but that He must leave to our own discretion what we do with that conferred power to bring more incarnate souls into being.  Hence the laws in the Torah regarding sexual cleanliness -- laws that the inattentive and scornful consider so foolish.

     But circumcision is to baptism as the old law is to the new.  Circumcision is a ritual maiming, scored upon the body; baptism is a drowning, a death, a renewal of the soul.  Under the old law Jesus shed his first drops of blood for our redemption -- a foreshadowing of the blood he will shed in the new covenant upon the Cross.  Circumcision marks the flaw in man, a bloody flaw, that reaches to the heart of his being; and he is as helpless as a baby to do anything on his own about it.  The death marked by baptism, a baptism into Christ's death and resurrection, washes the blood away, and man is as helpless as a baby to do anything on his own about that, either.

Comments

[Bill R]

In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. -- Colossians 2:11-12 (ESV)

Not for nothing, I suppose, does this feast fall on New Year's Day, a new beginning for us all. Thanks, Tony, for the reminder.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>A few years ago, the Roman Catholic Church decided to change the name of today's feast, from that of the Circumcision (described in the gospel reading for the day) to the solemnity of Mary, Mother of God.<<<

Big mistake, of course, since the Synaxis of the Theotokos actually comes on the 26th of December, but they seem to have an aversion to cluttering up their calendar, or celebrating two things at the same time. Thus, today is both the Circumcision and the Feast of St. James, but we simply move the latter ahead one day and celebrate him on the 31st. That way, everything is kept in its proper order and nothing is slighted.

[Tom Austin]

>>> We can hardly do worse than to meditate, ceaselessly, upon the mystery of the Incarnation<<<
Did you mean, perhaps. "We could do much worse?"
Excellent post, and I don't mean to nit-pick...

[Tony Esolen]

Thanks, Tom! I'll make that change right away. Boy, there are a million ways the brain and eye can mess up, especially when you are fooling with double negatives.

[GL]

Actually, Tony, I was glad to see you make a typo. I make one or more in nearly every post I make. It makes me feel a little better that even you may make one on rare occasion. ;-)

Yet another great post. Thanks.

[James A. Altena]

Dr. Peter Toon has argued (rightly, I think) that the switch from "Circumcision" to "Holy Name" is part of a dliberate de-emphasis of the maleness of Jesus' Incarnation by modern liturgical revisionists.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Dr. Peter Toon has argued (rightly, I think) that the switch from "Circumcision" to "Holy Name" is part of a dliberate de-emphasis of the maleness of Jesus' Incarnation by modern liturgical revisionists.<<<

To which one might add a dash of crypto-marcionism, since it's also an attempt to remove Jesus from his Judaic background.

[Tony Esolen]

James,

I wouldn't be surprised -- and for many reasons that would be most unfortunate. One might celebrate the feast of the Holy Name anywhere, but the Circumcision occurred on the eighth day, period.

Let's see what's lost:

1. As I've said, the connection between Old and New Covenants, circumcision and baptism.

2. The call by the prophets, soon to be made most urgent by the call of the last and greatest prophet, John the Baptist, to circumcise the heart.

3. The arc from the first blood shed by the innocent Abel, to the first ritual bloodshed of circumcision (Abraham, Isaac), to the blood of Christ.

4. The first octave in the life of Christ, foreshadowing the octave between his entry into Jerusalem and the resurrection; in the first, he enters the world as a child and enters the Temple to fulfill the old law's prescriptions; in the second, he enters Jerusalem as a King and raises, builds up, the new Temple, his body.

[Michael Foley]

Dear Tony,

You might add as a fifth item the loss of the grounds for the celebration of the Holy Family, since circumcision is also what made a male child a full part of the family proper (it was only then that he received his name; cf. Lk. 1:52) as well as the family of Israel via the covenant (Gen. 17:11). Here again we see another mistake of the liturgical reformers: they moved the Feast of the Holy Family from the Sunday after Epiphany to the Sunday after Christmas, so that we are forced to celebrate the Holy Family before Christ's circumcision on the eighth day and thus before He is, legally speaking, part of the family.

Thanks for your excellent insights, by the way. And one final note: the traditional Roman calendar used to celebrate simultaneously three feasts on January 1: the Octave of Christmas, the Feast of the Mother of God, and the Feast of the Circumcision. The tradition had no trouble marking all three; it is only the Cartesian logic of the 1960s reformers that felt the need to separate or suppress in order to make the new calendar "clear and distinct."