God Gives a Feck

Luke 2.21-35

In Martin McDonagh’s recent film The Banshees of Inisherin, actor Brendan Gleeson plays Colm Doherty, an amateur musician in the clutches of a crippling melancholia and existential dread. Colm lives on a a sparsely populated island off the coast of Ireland, close enough to the mainland to hear gunshots traded during the early years of “The Troubles.” Gripped by despair over the fleetingness of time and the meaninglessness of life,  Doherty hopes his music somehow will justify his existence and insure that the future will remember him.

Thus Colm vows to waste no more of his precious time in the company of his kind-hearted but “dull” friend, Pádraig. Colm, literally, spites himself in order to cut off his former friend. Colm’s shocking ultimatum leads inadvertently to the death of Padraig’s last remaining companion, his pet donkey Jenny. While Colm shows no remorse over the cruel way he suddenly shunned his former pub mate, Colm does regret that his despondent tantrum killed Jenny the donkey.

Genuinely vexed, Colm confesses his transgression to a feckless priest who comes to the fictional island on Sundays in order to dispense the sacraments.

"How's the despair?" the priest asks Colm.

Colm replies it's been not so great lately.

”But you're not going to do anything about it, right?"

Colm replies that no, he's not going to do anything about it. 

But the reply hangs in the air.

Later Colm confesses to Jenny’s accidental killing.

Deaf to Colm’s spiritual desolation, the priest loses patience with Colm’s contrition and coldly dismisses him, blurting out the question:

“Do you really think God gives a feck about a miniature donkey?”

Colm looks over at his confessor.

And with sincere and absolute alarm on his face, Colm replies:

“Father, I’m terrified that he doesn’t.”

Do you actually think the Almighty cares about a single creature?

On the lips of the film’s indolent priest, the question shocks. In the mouth of anyone else, the question deserves a hearing.

According to the National Zoo, there are 20,000 miniature donkeys in this country alone. The National Wildlife Federation says scientists have identified 5,400 different species of mammals; meanwhile, the World Bank estimates the global population, as of 2021, at 7.837 billion. I cannot even do the math— that’s an awful lot of people for the Lord to number every hair on every head.

Sure, God is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-everywhere.

But all-caring?

All-involved?

It’s no wonder the possibility terrifies Colm. The priest’s position makes more sense. The only downside is that what could be said of Jenny could be said of you. You might be the single creature for whom God does not care.

Do you really think the Eternal One gives a feck about a single miniature donkey— there are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of them?

It’s a good question. It’s one of the most important questions. It’s a question, I believe, that gets at the heart of our scripture text from the Gospel of Luke.

According to the Lord’s command to Abraham in the Book of Genesis, Mary and Joseph have their baby circumcised on the eighth day after his birth. In so doing, the child becomes an official participant in the people of Israel and receives his name, Yeshua— the name first given to them by the angel Gabriel.

Thenceforth, the Holy Family travels nine miles from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, up to the temple to fulfill two obligations prescribed by the Torah. First, Mary and Joseph must redeem their firstborn son. Because every firstborn child and every firstborn creature belongs to God, they needed to be redeemed from God. Clean animals, such as sheep or goats, would be sacrificed. Unclean animals, like donkeys, would be redeemed by offering a clean animal in its stead. The redemption price for a firstborn son, according to Numbers 18.16, was fixed at five shekels. It’s one of the only prescribed offerings in the Torah that’s not scaled according to wealth or poverty.

After making Jesus a participant in the people of Israel by means of circumcision, Mary and Joseph venture to the temple in Jerusalem in order to make Jesus a participant in their family. They make an offering so that God’s child might become their child. The second obligation Mary and Joseph perform in Jerusalem is purification. Bearing a son meant that Mary— and anything Mary touched— was ritually unclean for seven days. To avoid defilement from his wife, Joseph needed to immerse himself daily in the temple’s miqveh. Having given birth to a son, the Torah also forbid Mary from handling “holy things” (for example, alms for the poor or a tithe to the temple) for a period of thirty-three days. At the end of this period, Mary could come to the temple with an animal offering. As set out in Leviticus 12, the sacrifice required of a poor woman was two doves.

So thirty-three days after his birth and twenty-five days after his redemption from the Lord, Mary and Joseph journey through the massive colonnaded courtyard that marked off the Court of the Gentiles and walk up to the animal vendor stalls set up alongside the towering outer wall of the temple. They purchase two doves, walk through the Court of the Gentiles, past the low wall through which only Jews were permitted, and up the steps to the inner courts of the temple.

Taking her two doves in one arm and her month-old baby in the other arm, Mary enters the Court of Women through a side door where a Levite waited to take Mary’s offering to a priest who waited for it in the Court of Priests. At some point, as they rove from the chaotic Court of the Gentiles to the busy vendor stalls to the crowded Court of the Jews and finally to the Court of Women, Mary and Joseph, their baby and doves in tow, bump into Simeon. Not only has the Holy Spirit led Simeon to this encounter, the Holy Spirit commandeers Simeon’s lips and the old man prophesies that in their baby God is making good on his promise of consolation first given through Isaiah. That Torah did not permit Simeon to enter the Court of Women meant that Mary encountered him just before her sacrifice; in other words, Mary entered the Court of Women and made her offering with Simeon’s words still ringing in her ears that somehow she carried in her arms not just two doves and more than an ordinary baby.

Circumcision is the sign of the covenant that the Lord makes to Abram, “I will be your God and you will be my people.” Circumcision is the sign of the “covenant in your flesh.” The rituals for the redemption of a first born child and the purification of its mother are acts of fidelity to that covenant. Luke tells you five times that Mary and Joseph did everything in obedience to the Torah. Meanwhile, according to Simeon, their child is the fulfillment of that covenant.

Everything in this passage is about the covenant.

Circumcision is the sign of the covenant. Redemption and purification are acts of obedience to the covenant. Jesus is God’s commitment to the covenant made flesh.

The postpartum particulars, the shekels and miqveh, doves and defilement,  may strike us as strange today. So much so, we miss entirely a far stranger feature of the Bible and fail to ask a most basic question.

What kind of odd God makes a covenant?

Almost twenty years ago a sociologist at the University of Notre Dame conducted the National Survey of Youth and Religion. It was the largest and most exhaustive assessment of the religious beliefs of teenagers in the U.S. The results of the survey revealed that the vast majority of Christian youth, especially white Mainline Protestants, were incredibly vague and inarticulate about their faith. Indeed the religion these youth practice is so unrecognizable from historic Christianity the authors of the survey gave it a new and distinct name. They called it Moral Therapeutic Deism.

The basic tenets of Moral Therapeutic Deism hold that:

1) a God exists who once ordered the world but now watches over life from a far remove.

2) God wants people to be nice.

3) The central goal of life is to be happy and feel good about oneself.

4) God is not involved in the world or in my life

5) Good people go to heaven when they die.

Contrary to the myth of teenagers rebelling from the religion of their parents, the researchers at Notre Dame discovered that most of the teenagers subscribe to Moral Therapeutic Deism exactly because that is what their parents believe about God.

God is a kind of Cosmic Butler. Unseen, uninvolved. Distant and dispassionate.

In other words, the God in whom most Americans believe is not a Covenant Maker. Needless to say, the pagan deities of the first century as much as the twenty-first would not, could not, make a covenant. God is omniscient and omnipotent, transcendent and sublime, self-contained and self-sufficient, ineffable and impassible. No God worthy of the title God would deign to enter into time and make a covenant, the pagans of antiquity believed.

A covenant is a promise.

To make a promise, the promise-maker must address an other.

But to so address an other means the promise-maker is interested and invested in the other’s existence. What makes the gods God is precisely the absence of any such personal concern. For Aristotle, God is the Unmoved Mover. God doesn’t send rain when you pray for rain; God established systems whereby secondary causes may or may not bring rain. For Plato, God is simply the One. For Nietzsche, there is such an infinite qualitative difference between Creator and creature that to suggest God loves Jenny is analogous to you claiming you cherish the ant crawling under the pew at your feet. For pagans, today and in antiquity, it’s blasphemy to imagine God speaking to Abraham or wrestling with Jacob or showing Moses his backside. Pagan religion, then and now, cannot abide communication between Creator and creature; therefore, there can be no covenant. Without communication, there is no promise.

What kind of odd God makes a covenant?

A covenant is a promise addressed to an other.

To make a promise to an other, the promise-maker must have an other.

But for God to have an other to whom he can address a promise, God must be a God who creates. By contrast, the Greeks believed creation was eternal, that it had always existed. A God who makes a covenant must be a God who instigates an other other than himself.

This is why Jews point to a tiny Hebrew word in the Genesis account of creation, tov.

“And God saw that it was tov.”

Not simply good.

Tov means “good for.”

Creation is good for covenant.

God creates for the purpose of making a covenant.

As the second Book of Esdras puts it unabashedly, “It was for us that you created the world.” Believers sometimes get up on the how or the when of creation without realizing that the why of creation is the entire reason scripture bothers to proclaim the story in the first place.

As Karl Barth writes, “Creation is the outer basis of the covenant and the covenant is the inner basis of creation.”

The whole reason for light and darkness, morning and evening, sky and stars and every creeping creature upon the earth is for God to deliver the consolation of Israel in Jesus Christ. Everything is made for the baby in Mary’s arms and for us to be in him.

What kind of odd God makes a covenant?

A covenant is a promise the binds the promise-maker to an other.

To make a promise to an other, the promise-maker must acquire a shared history with the other.

But for God to inaugurate a joint history with an other, God must accept no other future than with this other. A covenant is like a wedding vow.

The promise creates a shared history and a mutual future that would not have been apart from the promise.

Which means— pay attention— the promise makes God an actor in the history God authors.

This joint history and shared future is why the God of the covenant is simultaneously both the author of the history he makes with creatures and one (or more) of the dramatis personae of that history. A God who makes a covenant is not unlike Martin McDonagh, the writer and director of Banshees, showing up in scenes as one of the actors. As the theologian Robert Jenson summarizes, “Israel’s scriptures are rife with figures that are actors in the history determined by the Creator yet who turn out to be the same Creator God.” Think of the “Angel of the Lord” on Mount Moriah who stays Abraham’s hand from cutting Isaac’s throat. In the story, the Angel of the Lord turns out to be the Lord himself just as the pillar of fire that accompanies the Israelites in the wilderness is none other than the same God who met Moses in the Burning Bush, the same God who sits invisibly above the cherubim throne.

“God is in heaven and you are on earth,” Solomon waxes in the Book of Ecclesiastes. Not exactly.

In making a promise, God commits himself to being both the author of history and an actor with us within that history.

Trinity is nothing more than a shorthand way of narrating the fact that there is no other God but the God who acts within the very history he authors.

God acts as Father, God acts as Son, God acts as Holy Spirit.

The good news of great joy is that God is not abstract deity.

God is a participant in his own Providence.

The true God is not immune to time; but rather, God’s faithfulness to his promise is the how of God’s eternity.

As Robert Jenson says, “God is roomy.”

God has room to accommodate all your stories within his story, casting himself as a player in all your lives.

Take Luke’s conclusion to the nativity as a case in point.

As Mary and Joseph approach the Temple in Jerusalem, the Shekhinah of the Lord dwells invisibly in the holy of holies, yet, at the same time, there’s God the Holy Spirit taxiing Simeon to the exact spot where he will encounter Mary and Joseph with words the same Spirit will lay on his lips about the child in her arms. The baby in Mary’s arms also happens to be the eternal Son of God made flesh.

In making a promise, God commits himself to being both the author of history and an actor within that history.

Because now— because of the promise— God has as much stake in your future as you do.

Therefore, the story in Luke’s Gospel of Mary and Joseph and Simeon is no different than any of our stories.

Because God is a God who makes covenant, there is no distinction between the world of the Bible and our world.

God is invisibly enthroned above and beyond, the author of your story, yes.

But God is also with you, a cast member in your story, graciously—sometimes painfully— in ways seen and unseen, driving your story to the future God desires for us all.

A couple of days before Christmas, I got a request from a stranger named Bob to meet in my office. He had a large bequest he wanted to gift to the church before the end of the year, but he said he wanted to deliver it to me in person.

“If you’re really giving us that much money,” I said into the phone, “I’ll meet you in Kiev. Or, Cleveland even.”

He laughed. He thought I was joking. The next day I met Bob in my office. Sitting down and starting to tell me his story, I could see that he was already crying.

Bob told me how he was a part of the congregation here until about ten years ago. During his time at the church, Bob befriended an older widower named Ralph who came to worship with his daughter Helen.

Bob and his late wife had had three children. Two of them predeceased Ralph. All three of Ralph’s children had special needs. Helen, his only surviving child, had autism. At some point over the course of their friendship, Ralph, who had no other family or close friends, asked Bob if he would serve as the executive of his estate.

Bob accepted the role without realizing the obligation he would assume. When Ralph died, Bob became responsible for Helen.

“Her autism,” Bob explained to me, “Her autism was such that if she flushed the toilet in the middle of the night and the toilet ran for longer than twenty seconds, she thought it was busted and she’d call me.”

He doubled down to make his point, “In the middle of the night!”

And then he chuckled and wiped his eyes.

He took her to all her medical appointments and covered her errands.

“Eventually she needed more serious care,” Bob continued, “So I got her set up at a nursing facility, but she’d still call me to take care of anything she got it in her mind needed taking care of. I had no idea what I was saying yes to when I said yes, but I guess it was all part of a plan.”

When his story was finished, he held out his palms like he’d just handed something over to me and now they were empty.

He had handed something over to me.

“That’s a remarkable story,” I told him, “Thank you.”

“I don’t know that it’s all that remarkable,” he pushed back, embarrassed.

“No,” I said, “You just bore witness. You bore witness to a woman with special needs who would not have been cared for apart from a friendship made possible by the church.”

He chewed on that idea for a moment. Then he looked up at me and smiled.

“I guess the church being the Body of Christ isn’t a metaphor,” he said.

“No, it can’t be a metaphor,” I said.

“It can’t be a metaphor,” I didn’t add, “because God has made a covenant. God has no other choice now but to be an actor in the very Story he’s unspooling.”

The name that Mary and Joseph give to their child is Yeshua.

But the name of God is Trinity.

And at the end of the day that is our only answer to the question the feckless priest asks the despairing Colm, “Do you really think God gives a feck about a miniature donkey?”

Yes, God gives a feck.

We know so because the only true God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

In fact, God so gives a feck he’s promised to show up here, for you, even you, the consolation of Israel made flesh in creatures of word and wine and bread.