Jan 1, 2016 0
The Two-Faced God
1-4-16
Happy new year. Out with the old, in with the new. Happy January. A time for new beginnings. For all those resolutions to be broken!
Many of our days and months have names that were inspired largely by ancient mythologies and pagan customs. Even Easter, for instance, was named for Isis (no, not that ISIS), the Egyptian mythological deity who married her brother Osiris, was also known as Ishtar, and perhaps inspired the word for East. Germanic tribes had a Spring festival (Oestern, a cognate of Easter) that looked eastward, to the sun and fertility.
So it is with what we call January. Its name is derived from the Roman god of beginnings and transitions – hence “presiding” over the end and beginning of the year. One of the few Roman gods not inherited and transmogrified from the Greeks, Janus became an important figure in the mythological pantheon. He lives in more than calendar pages; when I stay in Bologna, my favorite hotel is the Torre di Iano (Tower of Janus), an ancient villa originally dedicated to the god.
Does all this fit with Christianity? Deeper than we might think at first. January is an appropriate time to reminisce, “process,” and look forward. But so is every day of the year! OK, we all need “hooks,” reminders, disciplines. Does God sanction such activities? He does more: He encourages them.
Interestingly, Janus was always depicted as a two-faced god. On coins, in carvings and mosaics, he looked both forward and back. To play Bulfinch and parse the Roman myths, Janus specifically was the god of transitions. Here is where, as always, the God of the Bible is superior to any deities of the world’s mythologies or false phenomenologies. Our God should be, has been, will be in our relations and transitions. He is in our pasts and futures. In truth, He is our past, and our future.
But Christians, today, tend to think less and less of the past. In our contemporary and often post-Christian world, we take the past for granted… or decline to be convicted by its lessons. We might pray ourselves through troubled time; but – consistent with our consumerist culture? – look ahead. Like the right-half of Janus. Hope, confidence, optimism if we can summon it… we have become a people who look ahead.
But we would do well to think a little more than we do about the past. What brought us here? What are the details of our heritage? What have our forebears sacrificed for us? What lessons from the past present themselves to us?
These are important questions! For without understanding our past, our futures are gambles… aimless wanderings… games with no yard-markers, goalposts, or rules. The past is more than prologue: it is certain; the future is uncertain.
And the past is often painful. Parents will know – and all former children will remember – that lectures about a hot stove do little good, compared to the one time that the hot stove actually is touched! We must pay attention to what brought us here, to avoid Prof. Santayana’s aphorism that “those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat.”
There is specific lesson – I would call it, rather, a powerful reminder – from something related to the Christmas season recently commemorated. As we re-pack our ornaments and take last looks at pretty greeting cards, it is important to remember something that we might have overlooked amidst the Christmas music and colorful wrapping paper and cookies. The past often holds a lot of pain. Much distress. Hurts, and sometimes excruciating angst. Life, in other words.
But this is good for us to know. Among the “whole armor of God” you will not find rose-colored glasses. Life is real, life is earnest. Even Christmas was associated with much pain and distress. As we approach the Feast of the Epiphany, it is decidedly an observance of transitions… but not neutral, as those of Janus. It is literally the celebration of the Incarnation: not merely Christ being born, but His introduction to humankind.
Traditions assign the Epiphany to the visit of the Magi; to Jesus’s religious dedication; to the 12th night; even to His baptism. The point is – remembering Jesus as Messiah: God-with-us.
Do you remember that Jesus’s birth was not all angels and harps? It was, for this world He came to save, like painful birth pangs, as a mother in labor would experience. Do you know that one of the sweetest-sounding of ancient lullabies actually is one of the saddest of laments that could be sung?
Matthew, Chapter 2, and historical tradition tell of King Herod’s obsession with preventing a rival to his authority; and when he was convinced that biblical prophecy was close to fulfillment, he ordered the death of boys less than two years old throughout the land. It has become known as “The Slaughter of the Innocents.”
It was symbolic, of course, of the world-system’s vicious resistance to the very concept of a Messiah. The presence of Jesus is a rebuke to those feel no awareness of their sin and dependency, who elevate Self over Revealed Truth. Christ’s enemies are not trivial nor easily dismissed, no matter how surely to be conquered. It was so, then; and it continues to be so, today. The Slaughter of the Innocents – a part of the Christmas story as relevant as the shepherds and angels – reminds us that ugly forces in life tried to keep our Savior from us. And still do.
The most haunting of Christmas carols, to which I referred, is known as The Coventry Carol. It was written in the 1500s, and its plaintive melody is one of the great flowerings of polyphony over plainsong in Western music. “Lullay, thou little tiny child,” is not a lullaby, and does not refer to the baby Jesus.
The carol is a lament by a mother of one of the babies slaughtered by Herod’s soldiers:
Lully, lullay, Thou little tiny child, Bye, bye, lully, lullay.
Lullay, thou little tiny child, Bye, bye, lully, lullay.
O sisters too, how may we do, For to preserve this day
This poor youngling for whom we do sing Bye, bye, lully, lullay.
Herod, the king, in his raging, Charged he hath this day
His men of might, in his own sight, All young children to slay.
That woe is me, poor child for Thee! And ever mourn and sigh,
For thy parting neither say nor sing, Bye, bye, lully, lullay.
Utterly melancholic, as the harmonies are hauntingly beautiful. It is a fitting creation that must be part of our Christmastide observances, and Epiphany. Kings are still in their raging, but Jesus cannot be stopped by debates. He has never long been thwarted by bureaucratic rules. He was not even subject to death and the grave.
This January, look forward, yes; pray God’s blessing in your transitions; but remember the past. Hold to what it teaches. Be nurtured by the blessings it holds. And be thankful that our God is not, in the parlance of world, “two-faced,” but ever faithful.
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The Coventry Carol is so named because this song, in Old English first called “Thow Littel Tyne Childe,” had its origins in a “Mystery Play” of Norman France and performed at the Coventry cathedral in Britain. The play was called “The Mystery of the Shearmen and the Tailors,” based on the second chapter of Matthew. The anonymous lyrics are a mother’s lament for her doomed baby boy. All but this song from the mystery play are lost today. The earliest transcription extant is from 1534; the oldest example of its musical setting is from 1591. It still speaks to our hearts today. Performed here by Collegium Vocale Gent, conducted by Peter Dijkstra, in the
Begijnhofkerk at Sint-Truiden, Flanders.
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Click: Coventry Carol
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