And he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had yet being uncircumcised, that he might be the father of all them that believe (Romans 4:11).
One of my favorite podcasts is called, “The Rest is History,” and an episode featured an expert on the Aztecs who among many topics also described the lost people’s religious life. Much of their religion was about as horrible as could be possible to imagine, but one god, Tlaloc, whose special area of influence was rainfall, stood out among the human carnage. This evil entity could only be appeased through the tears of children right before they were sacrificed. In fact, the more tears obtained, the better the year’s crops would be. Other hideous rituals could be mentioned, but what I found most fascinating was that none of their sacrifices were designed for the life to come because the Aztecs did not believe in life after death. Their whole creation myth centered around a young warrior giving up his own life to restart the Sun, so a sacrifice would be meaningless unless that which was sacrificed was gone forever into the “unlife.” The great advantage of this way of looking at life and death, as explained by the historian, was that it forced one to live life to its fullest, to cherish life rather than live for some life to come. What she didn’t mention was that it also meant a person would be willing to sacrifice anything to make this life even a little better for themselves, even a child’s blood and tears.
The Aztecs were an advanced and mature civilization whose art and culture and management of their empire is staggering to contemplate, and so I suppose it shouldn’t surprise us to see so many of our own society’s sensibilities in the Aztec’s cruel but reasonable rituals. From their myopic focus on this life over all else to the dark conclusion that the weak should suffer that the strong may live better, the underpinnings of either a failed Christian nation or post-Christian nation can’t help but fall into the cruel patterns of empires which so successfully ruled this fallen world. The haunting question for us: How many of these patterns lurk within us? How many of our beliefs and ideas owe more to the common, fallen logic of an Aztec priest, than to the hope we celebrate today?
And it is hope we celebrate today, for we who bow our heads in this space, overcome with the glory of our Lord, worship a God who asks not for our children’s blood, but instead became a child and bled for us. We should “fear and tremble” a bit in the presence of this king of alien strength, a strength which fears not a young maiden’s womb, nor the knife of the priest, nor the cross of the Romans. The God who would submit Himself to all of this suffering, so that love might become the abiding language of the universe, is unconquerable, and so we can not only perfectly trust in the completeness of His victory, but we may also honorably lay down the weapons we use to hurt ourselves and be embraced as family.
And what it took to make us a family, for us to become “children of promise,”’ was not for the law to be swept aside as some unruly tyrant would, for such an act would make sin and death and pain nothing more than a meaningless simulation, but those who have suffered already know the profound, concrete reality to be experienced there; no, God the Son bleeds on his 8th day of life to become part of the covenant people, to be a marked man in the war between good and evil. For every man who came before, going all the way back to Abraham, circumcision was “a seal of the righteousness of faith,” gifted by God to His chosen people, but on this day we celebrate, He who bore the mark of righteousness was none other than the one Jeremiah called, “THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.” Instead of failing to live up to the great gift bestowed upon them, this recipient of the covenant sign would perfectly fulfill the law and carry our humanity to the victory we do not deserve but are destined to be a part of. When we are born again, when the gift of faith and trust are placed in the Lord Our Righteousness, we become the sons and daughters of promise in perfect fulfillment of the law: His righteousness becomes our righteousness in the great exchange even now filling the mansions of the new heaven and new earth.
But how do we know if we are in the elect family of God? Is my salvation based upon my performance of the law, or the correct magical words said over me, or that time I said a prayer and really, really meant it? Or, has the God of life and death said, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion” (Romans 9:15; Exodus 33:19)? The first three methods are examples of the subjective, inward looking way men seek to forcefully transform their status before God. They are of the same category as the Aztec’s cruel rituals—the difference being, instead of torturing others, we torture ourselves rather than resting in the comforting sovereignty of the God who doesn’t ask our permission to create us nor our permission to recreate us through the Holy Spirit. It as St. Paul says in his letter to the Colossians: “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. And ye are complete in him, which is the head of all principality and power: In whom also ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ: Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead. And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses; Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross; And having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it.” (Colossians 2:8-15). We must endeavor not to be swayed by “philosophy and vain deceit” which would lead us away from the covenant continuity we see in Paul’s words. We see that Jesus, and our Holy Spirit created union in Him, is the connection between circumcision and baptism: the former being limited to Jewish boys and adult male converts, the latter being a symbolic enlargement of the new covenant which extends the rightful recipients of the “sign and seal” to all those whose hearts have been circumcised by Christ through the regeneration of the Holy Spirit—Jew and Gentile, Man and Woman, Adult and Child. The metaphors of being “born again” and “circumcised” all look to when a human is at his weakest: just being born and eight days old, and it is there that the Spirit makes us new and grafts us into the covenant people. We see that we are saved when Christ died on the Cross for our sins, saved when the Spirit regenerates our dead hearts, saved when we are buried with Christ in baptism, saved when we make our confession of faith, saved when we live a life following Christ, saved when death is personally defeated before us in our assured resurrection. This entire process is the work of Almighty God to which we humbly join our hearts and souls and minds in the same way the infant Jesus joined with Joseph and Mary during His circumcision. Was Jesus a mere puppet or automaton? God forbid. No, Jesus, in fully submitting to the salvific mission of the incarnation by taking on our full humanity, was simply showing us what utter trust in the promises of the Father looks like just as Joseph and Mary were showing that same trust in marking their precious, beautiful son for the war against evil. Each of us is marked to fight in that same war through the baptism that same God/Man’s blood now makes the “sign and seal” of our covenant righteousness.
For if we are baptized and show forth the fruit of a lively faith, we may confidently say that we have already been blessed with the seal through which the promises of God are marked on our hearts; we have been touched with the instrument of His sacramental grace, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, we have been united with the Christ who perfectly fulfilled the law: our only Mediator and Advocate who stands with us through all the fiery trials of this life. For the children of God are heirs of all not by the law, but by the promise made by the God who always keeps His promises. This act of redemption begins and ends with God, and so 8 days old to 80 years old, we welcome new image bearers into the covenant people of God because the Son of God began to make a place for them on this day when Mary and Joseph faithfully acted upon their faith in the promises of God. It is this real and blessed union with Christ to which we cling. Let us then rest in this perfect peace this day, let us rest in the divine union which makes righteousness ours forever.